KUWG Diary 18-04 to 30-06

KUWG meets every Thursday 3pm - 5:30pm except Polling Day (7 May 2015). Venue: Kingsgate Community Centre, 107 Kingsgate Road, NW6 2JH. How to find us

KUWG members are a mainstay of THAG — The Housing Action Group. THAG meets every 2nd and 4th Thursday of the month. Venue: Kingsgate Community Centre, 107 Kingsgate Road, NW6 2JH. How to find us

Sat 18 April - Sun 3 May Disabled People Against Cuts - DPAC’s Revenge Tour: 

Monday 20 April: Deadline for UK voter registration https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote

Mon 20 April, 5:30pm-7:30pm: Hampstead & Kilburn Hustings, hosted by KUWG in association with Somali Cultural Centre and The Winch Youth Project at
UCL Academy School, Adelaide Road, NW3 3AQ. (Swiss Cottage tube, 31 and C11 buses.) Location map
Questions to be submitted in advance via Ubah Egal 

Tue 21 April 7pm - Hampstead & Kilburn Hustings: Camden Federation of Private Tenants - Swiss Cottage Library, 88 Avenue Road, NW3 3HA. Location map 

 

Tue 21 April 7pm - Hampstead & Kilburn Hustings: Camden Federation of Private Tenants - Swiss Cottage Library, 88 Avenue Road, NW3 3HA. Location map 

Wed 22 April 8pm - Hampstead & Kilburn Hustings: Ham & High hustings at JW3, Finchley Road, NW3 6ET. Location map

Thu 23 April, 12noon - DPAC visits Ester McVey at Job Centre, Market Road, Hoylake, actual address: Town Hall Chambers, 1 The Quadrant, CH47 2EE just off Market Street
A DPAC’s Revenge Tour event

Fri 24th Apr 2015 7:30pm to 9:30pm: GALHA LGBT Hustings for 2015 UK General Election, with candidates from biggest three parties only, apparently. Venue: Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Sq, WC1R 4RL. Location map. Information source: https://meetyournextmp.com/event/841-galha-lgbt-humanists

Sat 25^th April 2pm - DPAC visits Iain Duncan Smith, starts from Chingford train station then proceed to his Chingford Constituency.
 A DPAC’s Revenge Tour event

Saturday 25^th April - 2^nd May – Week of Action Against Workfare and Sanctions

Thu 30th April, All day, demo 9:30 to 10:30:Nicolson v Tottenham Magistrates and The London Borough of Haringey, Judicial review 10 am 30th April 2015, Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London WC2A 2LL, all day. The full story is on Taxpayers Against Poverty website.

There will be a demonstration outside the court from 9.30 – 10.30 – a full public gallery would be a great help. We wont know the court number until nearer the date.

1^st May, 10am-11am: KUWG at Kilburn Jcp, Cambridge Ave, NW6 5AH (map location)   as part of Week of Action against Workfare,and to allow people to get to mayday march which normally assembles noon.

1 May, 12:00pm: MAY DAY 2015 FRIDAY MAY 1ST Assemble Clerkenwell Green 12.00 Rally at Trafalgar Square from 14.20

Tue 5 May 2pm and 8:30pm: BBC Daily Politics 'Welfare Debate' involving Work & Pensions Spokesperson for the big 5 parties. See  http://kilburnunemployed.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/tuesday-may-5th-daily-politics.html for further details.
  

Thu 7 May: No KUWG weekly meeting as Kingsgate Community Centre will be in use as Polling Station for 2015 UK General Election in the Parliamentary constituency of Hampstead & Kilburn

30^th May Boycott Workfare National welfare action gathering, London Welsh Centre, Grays Inn Rd 10.30Aam to 5.30pm. Register your interest at : info@boycottworkfare.org

  20^th June 12. noon 'End Austerity Now' national demo at the Bank of England organised by the Peoples Assembly Against Austerity 30th June: Abolition of Independent Living Fund set to come in. Conservative plans are for already cuts-ridden councils to take over, creating ever-greater 'divide and rule' tensions in the name of 'protecting the most vulnerable': i.e. setting up breadcrumb battles as to who is the most vulnerable. What will KUWG do about the matter? Here — with more details of what ILF has helped the most severely disabled do already — is what Save ILF campaigner Mary Laver is already aiming to do for 9 April 2015 — the 61st birthday of Iain Duncan Smith whose DWP decided to scrap the ILF: Mary Laver's Birthday Bash for IDS, April 9th House of Commons to Chingford — DPAC.

KUWG join PCS picket North KenSanctions Slave Centre on Wednesday 15 Oct, 3pm to 4pm

By Swheatie of the KUWG

Civil Service should really mean just that.

This Wednesday the KUWG were to join any picket line that may exist at Kilburn Jobcentre on the national strike day of the Public & Commercial Service Union (PCS). PCS includes salaried jobcentre staff.

But in the meantime we received a request from someone associated or formerly associated with North KenSanctions Slave Centre [officially known as North Kensington JobCentre Plus]. And on our tour of duty there on Wednesday 8 October we had an overwhelming realisation that our presence is urgently required at that place to help bolster the quality of customer service delivery — we have decided to do our 'secondary picketing' there this week. So to we return to that place whatever we call it, near Ladbrok Grove Stn, in Kensal Road, W10 5BL.

Secondary picketing is a form of bridge building

(Bringing together social work practitioners, service users, academics and students toward rescuing social work from the clutches of managerialism and privatisation is the mission of Social Work Action Network. Similarly, KUWG wants to cooperate with jobcentre workers in rescuing jobcentres from the clutches of market driven 'welfare reform' — and to remind the civil servants involved what the customers really want and that they are there to serve the public rather than millionaires.)

'Secondary picketing' — i.e., picketing by people not of the trade union immediately involved in a strike — was perceived correctly by the Thatcher Government as being against the perceived mission of that Government and so of course they sought to abolish it. (Not that that mission was transparently stated with all the media manipulation involved and talk of 'the enemy within' after the defeat of an Argentinian military junta that had been financed and armed by successive UK and US Governments before going a little too far in its own military ambitions after it had 'disappeared thousands upon thousands of Argentinian citizens.)

Claimant status doesn't invalidate human rights

 Enough of the Modern History lesson. In much more recent history, jobcentre staff have been threatened and bribed to clamp down on the right of claimants. The contract between Monster Jobs and the Department for Work & Pensions under which the 'Universal Jobmatch' program was created states that the claimant has an inviolable right to their password privacy — echoing what is already in the Data Protection Act.

Password privacy yours by right

But under sanctions performance targets and a chain of bullying that DWP Secretary Iain Duncan Smith denies exist, jobcentre staff frequently demand that claimants tell jobcentre staff their password. ("Never believe anything till it has been officially and vehemently denied"?) Once the staff have access to the claimant/customer's password, electronic surveillance of the jobseeker is made much easier.

Yet at North KenSanctions Slave Centre, staff all too routinely tell claimants/customers that they will be sanctioned if they do not give over their 'Universal Jobmatch' password.

Is sanctioning 'customer service'?

The KUWG wants to remind all jobcentre staff that if they don't join with claimants in claimants' struggles, it will be all too easy for the privatisation of jobcentres into the clutches of companies like G4S and Serco to continue. Employment Minister Esther McVay has already shown a keenness for contracted staff on the Supervised Jobsearch Pilot scheme to be given license to sanction claimants. That was previously only something that staff directly employed by the DWP could do. But as she gives privately contracted staff 'employment officer' status, what next for the jobcentre staff in their struggle against privatisation?

 So where is the job security for jobcentre staff in 'only following orders' as Nazis did?

Whose side are North Kensington Jobcentre staff on — in an economic climate in which even the most diligent of JSA claimants, stripped of a real work environment's networking opportunities toward professional advancement, are more likely to be sanctioned than find another job within six months?

Sanctions mercenaries? No thanks!

Goodbye, former Disability Minister. You did more for this lifelong disabled person as a BBC Radio 2 Disc Jockey than as a politician

This current Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group Secretary once sang to the now former Disability Minister Esther McVey. But that was in the days when she was a BBC Radio  2 disc jockey presenting a Sunday morning show and asking as a phone-in item one post FA Cup Final Sunday in the early 1990s, what audience members got up to on Cup Final Saturday. I told her I had been busking in suport of British Red Cross and singing a Matt McGinn song, 'Why Did I Ever Become a Footba' Referee?', and she helped 'warm me up' further to singing a few verses and choruses before I was timed out by the news.
 
But that was before she left the BBC to become a Tory Party candidate in Merseyside, in line with her accent by about the time of the 1997 General Election. Over ten years later and into a new Government, when she became new Disability Minister, she could hardly have been worse than her predecessor, Maria Miller, who was the first of the Con-Dems' Disability Ministers.
 
And now, in the promotion of women through ministerial office (which is not the same as promoting women's equality), Esther McVey is now the Employment Minister, and she has been replaced as Disability Minister by Mike Penning.
 
What will he do for disabled people, and what will Esther McVey do for workers' and jobseekers' rights while zero hours contract culture has already began to hurt many people, young people are being consigned by benefit changes to what might effectively become slavery through an emerging career of debt and 'work for your benefits' regulations and balance of bargaining power — never very strong for people on out of work benefits — becomes truly shafted.

Blogpost by Swheatie