Desperately seeking… a human solution from a universal credit robot
It was nine o’clock in the morning on the second day of Universal Credit running in my borough. After some confusion at the main desk I was directed to the room now designated as Universal Credit area. It was surreal: fresh paint, brand-coloured balloons, everyone buzzing and talking loudly- ruffling papers and walking round the office one desk at a time assuring each other. Basically these guys were on a high and if you have ever been to a job centre you will understand just how strange this might look. A member of staff behind me was saying to herself ‘ good jobs these, forever jobs- jobs you stay in forever’ she said it a couple of times as she gladly shuffled her papers and rearranged her hair- ready for the front lines. To pioneer the all new benefit that would see lives changed. I began to feel vaguely hopeful myself, and vowed to investigate just what made this change so great.
After a few weeks I began to have serious doubts, accompanied by fits of anger after trying to explain a human problem to a universal credit robot which kept hanging up on me. I decided that unfortunately this is not a good change, this is a ridiculous change and the overarching problem is the growing lack of human contact.
That of course is not to mention the lack of payment for 44 days, and then the monthly wait for money after that, the lack of support, the general assumption of your criminality, or the contract you have to re-sign weekly promising to meet the demands of the universal credit overlords for fear of losing the minuscule amount of money you are desperately trying to stay alive on for up to three years.
I don’t know how unique my situation is: I have been moving house often and staying with friends as I don’t have a job and therefore can’t afford to live anywhere. It is easier not to tell the job centre about this (advised by my work-coach) as they would move my base job centre each time possibly blocking my account each time. This meant that I spent £90 on travel getting to all the meetings at the Job Centre before I received my monthly £208.This also meant I haven’t been able to survive without loans from friends and eating sandwiches from bins.
But anyway, imagine that I did have a tenancy and could claim housing benefit, maybe even other benefits and so my monthly benefit income was larger and all tidily wrapped into one payment – which is the selling point. I am still faced with this strange problem of lack of human contact. Your assigned work-coach is not allowed to do anything with your account, if you are late you can’t speak to that person, if you have any problem you can’t speak to that person. Instead you call a robot and try to say the right combination of things so that they don’t hang up on you and you can get to the next stages and then hopefully to a human operator who then answers your questions.
The second degree of this digitisation is the job searches which all have to be logged online every day with a short description. If for some reason you can’t access a computer or internet that day to prove, in detail, your daily 6 hours of work searches -you guessed it, you will be sanctioned. Often people who are unemployed are depressed, sad, anxious. A recent study found unemployment causes 45,000 suicides worldwide. Daily frenzied typing into a nameless screen for fear of starvation and homelessness is not going to help is it? When I next saw my newly allied work coach I asked her about it – its awful, she said, the more they digitise the more people become just numbers, and to be honest it makes more people drop off which is what they want. Also, she said, I can’t use this new system! We all keep losing all our work records and we are also watched from afar – our information uploaded and looked over by Universal Credit bosses. Its very stressful, she added.
As I left the job centre I thought about how many people, like me, had had a brief moment of hope that the job centre would be helpful, supportive even, under the new system. And how on the contrary, it’s designed to be difficult, degrading and stressful.