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Working for nothing - the new economy

Reports continue to flow out about how the unemployed are being made to work for next to nothing. Well not quite, at least they get to keep their meagre "Jobseekers allowance", though putting them into unpaid occupation means that they are then unable to "seek" a job.

It is not going to stop there. Soon people will be forced to PAY TO WORK work and will be expected to take out mortgages to get jobs.

Seriously, I cannot see how it is in the firm's interest to have people working for them and not reward them properly. Soltzhenytin, writing about the Gulag Archipelago in Soviet times, describes how the slave labour working in the diamond mines used to tread the best stones into the ground - a sort of low-level sabotage. It could cause chaos in a technical outfit like Maplins, which has signed up to the scheme, and where putting things on the wrong shelves could result in thousands of pounds worth of stock getting lost.

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