Boycott Workfare at Tesco

Workfare is a government scheme that forces people on benefits to work long hours for big corporations in order to maintain the pittance they depend on so as not to starve or end up on the streets.

Its notoriety came to the fore when an advert appeared on the JobCentre Plus website offering a permanent night shift position for 'JSA+expenses'. Since then, there have been various campaigns and protests aimed at highlighting the scheme's exploitative nature.

On Friday, 24th February 2012 some of South Wales Anarchists headed to Tesco Extra on Western Avenue in Cardiff with placards, banners, guitars and bilingual flyers to protest against the company's involvement.

Earlier in the week, after an enormous amount of public pressure, Tesco made a watery compromise regarding their involvement with a scheme that can only be described as endorsing slave labour. Under 25s are working for as little as £1.78 per hour, while those over 25 receive £2.25 per hour. The Tesco Facebook page had been bombarded with complaints for days, so the company tweaked their involvement in what can only be deemed as a clever PR stunt.

The politics of snow

Whenever the weather adversely effects people the response of the authorities is generally along the lines “We don’t control the weather”. If for the purpose of this article we put aside the issue of climate change and take this statement at face value, even then we can see that this does not tell the full story.

If we take for example three major natural disasters over the last decade and in each case it was the response to these events or lack of response in reality that caused much of the destruction. Seen in the cases of the 2004 tsunami, the Haitian earthquake and particularly with Hurricane Katrina, a natural disaster which hit the world's superpower, the United States were shamed by their response, exacerbated by the much better response by the Cuban regime as the same hurricane hit Cuba first.

Obviously the recent snow in Wales and the rest of Britain has not in any way been of the same magnitude, yet there are similarities. Much of the disruption and risk to peoples safety could have easily been avoided. That is, of course, if the capitalist drive for short term profit is taken out of the equation.