It's Not the Weight, It's the Attitude...

The News that the Government is to start a pilot scheme offering weight loss drugs to unemployed people to enable them to get back into work.

Sadly, I predict the scheme will be a failure. 

The reason is that there are plenty of skinny people on the dole and their lack of weight hasn't enabled them to get into work any better than an overweight counterpart. 

It's not the weight that is the issue, it's the attitude and the benefits system itself.

If you want to work, you'll go out and find work. Whatever it is. Not all of us can do physical jobs, but even the disabled can get a job in a call centre because of access rights legislation.

The other block to getting a job is the cost to work. When you are on benefits, everything is provided for you. Your rent is paid, you get dole money every fortnight and life is relatively easy, if a bit cash-poor. 

If you then get a job, you instantly lose the payment of rent. You have to re-apply with no guarantee that your rent will be paid. 

If you take a minimum wage job, you lose benefits and then have to pay tax. If the minimum wage is the absolute minimum the government says a person should be paid, why isn't it a tax-free salary? That would instantly boost the salary straight away. It just seems immoral to start clawing back tax from the most disadvantaged wage earners.

The whole system drops you like a stone. There is no support, no easing you into work. It's like jumping off a cliff emotionally and psychologically.

It's that transition that needs to be addressed, not the weight of the people. 

The cynical part of my brain does wonder if this is part of some conditioning process. You know, to make being overweight and unproductive a morally poor choice. Fat-shaming.

I can see a future if everything comes to pass like assisted suicide where the paths cross and if you are on the dole and consuming too much and getting fat, you'd be offered weight-loss drugs or else it's off to the boneyard with you. 

Of course if the option is take the drugs, be productive and work for peanuts against being rendered down for glue or Soylent Green, that may just motivate a proportion of the dole bums into working.

But there's always a hard core of institutionalised generations of unemployed....