A4E once again.

I was looking back across some of my older blogs, when I was more productive, and found this old post about A4E, Action for Employment, where I am once again on placement.

Seems to have attracted several times as many comments as any of my many other articles. Do go and read them, a nice compilation of hostility which A4E richly deserves.

Also, I've learned something, that the bitch queen of A4E, its millionaire founder who I've talked about on numerous occasions and who is something of a money grubbing media whore who makes a big fuss about inviting people to her massive country mansion and so on, she's not only been recruited by David Cameron to save the national economy, she's also head of the NSPCC's Full Stop campaign, the male-demonising advertising campaign which gets plastered all over the TV and the papers and makes things worse rather than better.

Moving on to now, A4E have been doing just as well from the Work Programme as from the old New Deal for Young 'Uns. My own position is actually as a client, or beneficiary or whatever modern bullshit term is being used, of Framework Housing Association, who are subcontractors of A4E. I happened to get a glimpse of their paperwork which showed that they got well over a hundred pounds for my first appointment and induction, and implying similar amounts for each weekly appointment. It is just badgering by the Framework staff, specially hired for this work, not from the Housing Association side. It just triples the work of signing on, nothing more or less. There was a three day a week course not long ago, which consisted mainly of watching Matt Alwright and The Fairy Jobmother. Particularly poor reality TV, an inherently poor genre.

One story was told by one of my fellow victims, which was quite interesting, he briefly worked at Curry's in the warehouse. Apprently everyone is searched at least four times a day to prevent theft. Another victim said he's been in there, not even on the floor of the warehouse, and was searched on the way out. The staff are often kept behind without pay to be searched individually with just a few security guards so they have to wait. One of the women there knows one of the security guards, and knows that they have made off with tens of thousands of pounds of stock, as have other members of staff. All the searching just encourages people to steal. Trust breeds trustworthiness.