That’s what I am, when it comes to being part of a large, and growing, number of people who are out of work. 6 months without work is not nice and the market is such that its now an employers market rather than an employees, so less jobs being advertised and more people chasing them. Gone are the days of “good” salaries for IT staff, now companies can offer thousands less than they would have been doing a year ago and people wont complain, they need the job.
So after 6 months the generous subsidies that you get for being unemployed stop and if you’ve got a partner working more than 20+ hours a week then you can forget means tested benefits. You can just forget it, it matters not how much they earn, if they do a decent number of hours you do not get a penny in help.
I find it rather annoying that if my wife had just been lazy and sat round and NOT looked for work then we’d be able to claim just about everything back off the state but because she did the right thing and got a job we don’t get a single penny. I heard of someone in the job centre who stated that he needed a £40K+ salary job to “make it worth him coming off benefits”. That just stinks really.
So I had my second 3 monthly review… you have to keep looking for a job or we’ll cut off your benefits. And what benefits would those be? Oh that would be the ones you don’t pay me any more because its more than 182 days since I first signed on as unemployed.
So why should I keep signing on?
Well it pays your NI contributions for a pension. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
The only other reason to do is to keep the figures up. Remember the unemployment figures ARE NOT how many people are unemployed. They are how many people are signing on. Stop signing on because you can’t be arsed walking for 70 minutes every 14 days to scribble your name on a bit of paper just for your NI contributions, and you are officially not “unemployed” even if you don’t have a job, and dear old Gordon and the rest of the motley crew of expense fiddling MPs can say “unemployment is falling” or at least “unemployment is not rising as fast as predicted”.
Maybe I should stand as an MP, I couldn’t be worse than the present bunch could I?