Jobcentre staff ‘bitten and attacked with screwdrivers’, as 90% of security guards face ‘dangerous incidents’ at work

https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/uk/jobcentre-staff-bitten-and-attacked-with-screwdrivers/

by tylerthe-theatre

29 comments

  1. Bitten? By somebody looking for a job? Jesus wept, I’d be like, ‘here take mine, I’m out of here’.

  2. Robotics and A.I. is about to end menial labour as we know it and the government hasn’t decided how to deal with all the people are going to be displaced.

  4. I feel sorry for the victims. The attackers need locking up for a long time this isnt normal behaviour

  5. Don worry, folks! Idris Elba will be banning screwdrivers tomorrow!

  6. Someone kicked off over their crisis loan or received an unfair sanction I expect. Those sanctions were just cruel, weeks with no money over really petty stuff.

  7. 20 years ago a friend and I were on job seekers allowance and saw this sort of stuff most weeks. The place had 2, 3 security guards. Blokes would be sitting in there pissed up/high.  Right outside there was always a bunch of pissed up people scrapping. 

     We went at different times/days and would often call each other “quick get down to the job centre, it’s kicking off”.  This was in a small, not horrible town. God knows what it’s like now. 

    The staff were never even remotely helpful or nice but I guess it’s hard to stay engaged with a job where you get attacked daily. 

  8. It’s always going to be difficult to placate a twitchy (alcohol/drugs – maybe a mix of the two) dude or lady that’s just gagging for that payment but is being told there are certain gaping holes in whatever story he/she has.

    https://youtu.be/s96drQkfpPI?si=UcR_eWgsUbuyawe7

    It’s their equivalent of Jobcentre, obviously.

  9. I have my gripes with the Jobcentre and the way they treat people but the amount of comments here implying this is “deserved” is crazy.

    Attacking someone with a screwdriver is borderline attempted murder.

  10. Disgusting, any attackers’ benefits should be stopped for life.

  11. The dole used to be a bare room with some bolted down benches and a full scale barrier between you and the staff. They didn’t actually hand the cash over in the office by the time I first saw one but they used to.

  12. The DWP is for many, the face of the government, the true face of government

  13. Proving why they can’t get or hold down a job to be honest…

  14. I had a good experience with the job centre when I was claiming JSA. One member of staff in particular was very kind and caring. The main one I dealt with was slow and a little dim, but otherwise I had a perfectly reasonable experience. Most of the “customers” (as staff call them) I saw come in were also perfectly fine. I’m sure there are some bad actors for sure, but after all the horror stories I heard, I was pleasantly surprised. Would I fuck want to work there and deal with people who are trying to stab me, though.

  15. You either keep blaming the penniless and disabled for reacting violently to a terrible terrible system or start trying to actually fix the problem

  16. I walked past my local Jobcentre last summer and it was all kicking off there with two security guards escorting these guys outside. They really do have to put up with some crap. None of this surprises me unfortunately.

  17. I’ve had a mixture of how the staff are in JC. Some are friendly and actually treated you like a human down on your luck while others where like Little Hitler’s. Glad I don’t need to go back and deal with the JC and hope I never have to again.

  18. They take people to the very edge and then prod them further.

    I legally signed on for less than 2 months as a low-income earner. It took 6 weeks to process the claim, so I was forced to accept a loan to survive. At every step, they threatened to close my claim down and make me start again. I had NOTHING. I never got violent. I got depressed and spent a lot of time thinking about ending life.

    They want to talk about people’s reactions, but they don’t want to address the frustrations that they cause to elicit them.

  19. My mum used to work in the job centre early 2000s and she had a chair thrown at her. My mum is very patient and understanding and the guy did apologise the next day crying cause he had a bad day (no excuse but my mum understands) after that the chairs had to be bolted to the floor

  20. I’ve claimed JSA in the past and the experience was dreadful. No support to get a job and they treated you like shit.

    Fast forward a decade later and I still get a top-up of UC as we moved over from child tax credit. Due to some payslip error I was called into the JCP by mistake. I sat there waiting for my appointment when a gentleman came in to ask for advice on disability benefits for his wife who was in an accident. The gentleman was clearly distraught and was not doing good. After they dismissed him and sent him on his way, the worker who greets people and the security guard spent a good 10 minutes mocking him and questioning whether his wife was really disabled. I was furious, but bit my tongue as worried about reprisals.

    I work in the welfare side of the third sector so have worked with the DWP professionally for years, but also hear horror stories from people on a regular basis who have been subjected to poor and degrading treatment.

    Violence is never the answer, but maybe they should start treating people with a little more respect. An agency which should be about helping people has turned into this micro-police service that is filled with incompetent people on a power trip. Culturally it’s a cesspit and probably needs reorganised.

    Not to say there aren’t good eggs in there, there are, but they’re restrained by a toxic culture.

  21. I mean, treat people like animals and they start behaving like them.

  22. Been unemployed a couple of times. The centre staff have always been patient and calm with mw and if there’s been a mess of bureaucracy well, that’s come from above, not the people on the ground.

    What I did see were a lot of screaming, yelling, violent yobs who tried to lie, bully and threaten their way into getting what they wanted. So this is absolutely not a surprise to me.

  23. Simple solution, if you attack job centre staff, you are barred from claiming any benefits for 10 years

  24. I don’t typically post since my account name – But a Job centre work coach employee here (Rip my DM’s).

    I often find a connection between the customers I service quickly, since it were not all too long ago, I myself after trying to navigate the health system and placed on an NHS waiting list for close to 2 years after physical injury and being denied any form of extra health benefit such as LCW etc. was in the same or similar position as those just down on their luck.

    I, when I meet new people have no agenda, have no preconceived notions about their character or have any idea on what’s about to walk though that door and sit in my chair the other side of the desk. Ultimately, my job is a farce. Work coach’s in general do not do the job of the title they hold. Instead they arbitrate and gatekeep people’s benefits behind rules which are decided at their or their managers discretion.
    The actual role for a work coach can be done by a cash collection system for those who just want to turn up and collect. Those who are motivated to get a job, will get one anyway, ragedless of my input. Some may struggle and that’s where I try to help the most with some CV writing, cover letters or confidence boosting. But these are far and few in-between. Otherwise the money the government would save on salaries for every DWP employee would be immense and so costing would go down and funds could be reallocated making benefits not as expensive as they are if they got ride of us all.

    Why work for the government then? Because after 10 years of depressive episodes and feeling complete apathy and disconnect from the power centric government, and feeling the effects of complete lack of a social contract (work hard and be rewarded) I decided to do something about it. I haven’t convinced everyone of my journey or even my task ahead but I joined civil service and therefore DWP to change the system from within. Even if it’s not sweeping changes that last a lifetime and help out thousands, it could just be one or two people. But that’s enough for me to say I’ve been successful in my endeavours if someone’s life is genuinely better off after having met me and used my service.

    I’ve found during my time working for DWP the enemy most of you face aren’t generally the people who have came from private roles or have spent most of their career experience outside of government. It’s the career civil servants where most of you will feel complete hatred towards because they are delusional and don’t know what it’s like out there for the everyman. Some of my own observations have concluded that if a person becomes a civil servant from the age of 18-25 then they don’t tend to have enough understanding of the work life in private sector or homeless, or self employed etc. to be relevant to apply for a work coach role.

    I’d encourage all of you, if you are on benefits or seeking them, to get yourselves prepared to battle some battles which don’t make sense with people who seemingly don’t care about you or your existence. But every single person bar about 2 I know in my office (undisclosed location) are genuinely caring about their customer outcomes, sometimes however the rules just happen to come from some minister above them and they parrot the sentiment down the line to you and it feels like a personal attack. Please do not take it as one. I am not going to try and defend every action we do at DWP, some of it is inexcusable. But please keep this in mind and have no violent thoughts towards us. Thanks!

  25. They are pretty much all useless. Someone really struggling with finding a job can easily be pushed over the edge with these lot

  26. Once again redditors missing any nuance or implication of people’s situation through actions.

    Why might someone who cannot hold down a job be unstable? Perhaps it is the instability that means they cannot hold a job.

    It’s not like someone has a bad spot at work, and decided to go bite someone at the job centre, neither is it likely that the job centre staff are so awful they drive people to wanting to stab them.

  27. Job centres have a disproportionate amount of the following two groups:

    1. Absolutely feral unemployable people who cannot function in society (maybe tied to mental illness or drug use but not exclusively).

    2. Absolutely desperate people who are stuck in bureaucratic hell due to dosability/bad luck or both and snap after being told “no you don’t get money to eat for two weeks because we weren’t informed in advance you were suddenly hospitalized/ lost the letter you sent us telling us about a medical appt etc.

    Should people doing their jobs be attacked? No. But it’s not a surprise in these environments.

    I admit when I was on benefits I felt like punching my advisor when she kept trying to put me on useless courses (and I don’t mean courses i am uninterested in i mean basic literacy courses which would be superceded on a CV by the a grade in a level in English literature i already have. There was also the maths gcse (i already have an a in it and a b in a level in chemistry). She didn’t seem to comprehend how anyone with an education could need help (which was super condescending) she was also condescending about my foreign degree (from Japan not a country where you can pay for an easy ride i had to fly over and take an exam to get in. I wouldn’t expect her to understand all about japan’s rankings but she could have been polite and not assumed it had no value without asking). She also wouldn’t let me do courses i wanted to do (like coding courses) until I completed more basic courses like basic office skills(which was how to use word and excel on a reqlly basic level the excel course didbt even teach the sum formula the only positive was it was online and i whizzed through in like 10 minutes… i already knew how to use word and excel i had had office jobs before and anyone under 45 has been taught in school) and worked my way up as it was a rule (I have since learned it isn’t a rule). She tried to get me in trouble for not using their platform for job hunting (it was useless for me i cannot do physical jobs due to a disability and the jobs were all shelf stacking type jobs, care jobs or weirdly specialist stuff that required a pilots license or something else I didn’t have) you are supposed to be able to apply outside the platform if you can prove you are doing it and I could but oh…she really hated that.

    I never did, but I wanted to punch her several times and if I had heard someone bit her my first thought would have been she drove them over the edge. I got out of it by submitting a complaint and laying out my points clearly until whoever was in charge said “fair enough” and moved me.

    My second coach was clueless and super passive but at least she was pleasant on a personal level and happy to leave me to my own devices if I could tell her what I was doing so she could write it up. She would have still been useless had I needed advice though.

  28. This is the building in which corrupt government policy made to harm the most vulnerable, and years of austerity all come to a head.

    No shit it’s a dangerous place.

    “Don’t bite the hand that takes your food away.”

  29. I worked in one for 8 years. It was a mix of bad and good “customers” in the same way there’s a mix of bad and good “workers”.

    I was brought chocolate and cards dozens of times to say thank you for the help I’d given people.

    I also had someone leave me a note with my home address written on it saying they knew where I lived and were going to break in and r**e my kids because they hadn’t shown up in a month with no contact or reason and their money got stopped. They blamed me because I was the work coach.

    I spent every day trying to help people and yes some workers are shit and horrid, but some of us were just trying to help and still got abuse regardless.

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