UNEMPLOYMENT

After homepower closed down it was 16 months before I had a permanent full time job, during this time I did a few months temporary agency work but it still meant I had spent a year of my life unemployed by the time I turned 20. I collected about 77 pounds every 2 weeks in unemployment benefit.

Most people would associate the word unemployment with financial desperation and deprivation but in my case it wasn’t like that. A combination of 4 financial circumstances meant that I was actually quite comfortable which massively reduced the incentive to actually find a job.

1) I had always been seriously financially deprived anyway, from the age of 8 or 9 I had to have massive arguments with my parents to obtain the most pathetic amounts of pocket money. I spent large parts of my teenage years almost penniless and even at the age of 17 the only money I had (or at least had access to) was the 7 pounds a week from my paper round. By contrast the unemployment benefit I received in April 1996 was more than 5 times higher than what I earned in November 1994.

2) I now had access to my life savings, a bank account which was opened when I was born and was topped up over the years whenever I was given money for birthdays and christmas.  It was only a few hundred pounds and I never actually spent it but it’s very existence meant I knew I had 6 months money to fall back on should my unemployment benefit be stopped.

3) In the 9 months since leaving school I had only earned a proper wage for the 5 weeks I was at Leicester city. I was only on 40 pounds a week at career choice and less than 50 pounds a week at home power. Unemployment benefit was only a slight drop in weekly income. It’s worth noting that if homepower had been 5 miles away in Shepshed and I had paid bus fare every day I would have actually been worse off working than claiming unemployment benefit.

4) There had been a big change in my social life, every weekend for 6 months I had been going drinking over Loughborough. I had a great time but it was financially crippling. These nights out had come to an end about a month before I lost my job at homepower so while my income had gone down by 10-15 pounds a week my spendings had gone down by roughly 20-25 pounds a week.

In short the above combination of factors put me in the ludicrous situation where I had far more money being unemployed than at any previous point in my life. On top of that was the fact that I never asked for much anyway. Unlike most people I was never interested in owning a car for example. Merely being able to afford some reasonable clothes and to go down the pub each weekend meant I had a social life that I could have only dreamed about 2 years earlier and I was more than happy with that.  

The summer of 1996 was like the long school summer holidays except this time I was getting paid for it and I wasn’t going back to school. It’s was also one of the best times of my teenage years so obviously the incentive to find a job for the first few months just didn’t exist.

I have absolutely no regrets about the time I spent out of work because I know that it could have been loads worse. I could have gone university only to discover the course I had done was useless and ended up in the same situation. (see the earlier entry UNIVERSITY NO THANKS). If I had gone on career start I would have been working 40 hours a week for the same money with no guarantee of a job or qualification after it (see the earlier entry CAREER START NO THANKS).

Ultimately a lot of it came down to the way the benefit system worked. As already explained working 16 hours a week didn’t pay much more than not working at all. If the government were stupid enough to pay someone the same money to sit at home doing nothing as someone who worked 40 hours a week on youth training I could hardly be blamed for taking advantage. Most of all the benefits office never put any kind of pressure on me to actually find a job. I was asked a couple of questions now and again but that was about it.

A lot of my lax attitude at the time came from what happened at Homepower when they went bust and I was owed money in wages and traveling expenses which I never seen. So in a way living off benefit was my retaliation against the system.

After a few months however I knew it was time to start looking for a job..................