Bizarre plan for Universal Credit claimants to do litter picking

Clean Up Britain have come up with a new way to make claimants’ lives hell. The national campaign announced on Twitter that they think unemployed people on Universal Credit should be forced to clean up litter – or else lose their benefit.

Litter picking MD talks utter rubbish about Universal Credit claimants

In the video, Clean Up Britain managing director, John Read, stands in a fly-tipping site. He talks the same amount of shit as he’s stood in when he says:

people who are recieving Universal Credit should be required to do at least four hours litter picking every single month.

He clarifies in the video that he just means unemployed Universal Credit claimants.

This is bad enough, but within Clean Up Britain’s 10 point action plan comes the real kicker. They think anyone who refuses to pick up rubbish should lose their benefits.

This, of course, is a vague as fuck soundbite that doesn’t contain any nuance. So it ignores many factors.

The first being that this is already (or should be) a paid job. People are paid to be litter pickers by councils. But with council budgets stretched, this would give them an excuse to cut jobs and make people do it for free. It’s a very slim possibility, but if this happened, someone could lose their job as a litter picker, have to claim Universal Credit, and then be forced to do their old job for free.

Using unemployed people as slave labour

In the video, Read says that if all the job seekers in the city did this, this city could be transformed. The important context here is that the city he’s talking about is Birmingham.  The reason those streets are full of rubbish is that the bin collectors have been on strike for the past 11 months.  They’re striking against pay cuts and for better pay progression.

So to propose that people work for free to clean up Birmingham is not only an insult to unemployed people, but to striking workers too.

Finally, unemployed people shouldn’t be expected to work for fucking free. There’s the argument from many that they’re working for free, they’re working for their benefit. But that’s not the gotcha my right-wing Twitter trolls think it is. The whole point of unemployment benefits is to support people while they’re out of work, looking for gainful employment. This could be employment, but instead it will be used to punish poor people.

And that’s the biggest problem with this: many of the British public would see this as something unemployed people deserve. And the government, which is already using the media to turn the public against claimants, would run with it. This would be used as a threat and punishment to further shame people who can’t find work.

Punishing the wrong people

Missing from this is, of course, disabled people. Would those who struggle in cold temperatures, can’t do physical tasks or have neurodivergent and mental health issues be forced to make their conditions worse? There’d probably be some clause in about “severe disabilities”, but this would miss out many disabled people. Especially if the way they’re trying prove many conditions aren’t real is anything to go by.

Litter picking has long traditionally been a part of community service sentenced after someone has committed crimes. So this would put unemployed people in the same category as literal criminals. Which isn’t that much of a stretch considering the DWP already treats claimants worse than criminals.

There’s also the fact that once again, we are blaming the wrong people for the destruction of the country and making them suffer the consequences. As well as their bullshit plan, Clean Up Britain also tweeted some stats about the national debt

BRITAIN is a three-quarters bankrupt country (at least). We can’t afford to be spending £1 BILLION a year on cleaning up litter.
We owe £2.9 TRILLION
We pay £275 million a day just in interest repayments
EVERY person in Britain owes £42,000 as their share of the national debt

Whilst we do have a huge national debt, it’s completely untrue that we all owe the same amount. The rich undoubtedly owe much more than a minimum wage worker. When the average minimum wage worker earns around £23,000 a year, and CEOs are on around £97,000 a year, how is this possibly fair?

Nobody deserves to work for free

More than anything, this is showing what the rich really think of unemployed people. That they don’t deserve real opportunities, so they should be forced to clean up the trash like them.

At the end of the day, people on Universal Credit are already made to feel shit about themselves at a time when they’re at their most vulnerable. Nobody should be forced into unpaid work all because they’re struggling to survive. And nobody should be made to feel that this is all they’re worthy of.

Featured image via the Canary