ltr2nws

I am an autistic man, 29 years old and living on Jobseekers' Allowance and Disability Living Allowance. I am not only able, but also willing, to work, and have been trying endlessly to find work. However, it is no easy task, and I believe it could qualify as a job in its own right. What makes it worse, in my opinion, is the government's attitude towards the unemployed, and the 'one size fits all' policies that seem to fit nobody at all. Due to having passed the three month mark in my JSA claim, I was shifted onto the Work Programme. This meant that I was no longer being supported by a Disability Employment Advisor at the JobCentre. Mine was quite a good one, and although he had no specialist background which would have been helpful in terms of addressing my needs, he did try his best to work with me on identifying both my needs and suitable work. However, that support was removed upon being passed onto the Work Programme. As a short term goal, I had been focused on finding night work as a CCTV operator, knowing that this would mean limited interaction with others, night shifts and would require attention to detail, three factors that resonate well with both my needs and my unusual strengths. My DEA was working with me to try to acquire CCTV training and an SIA license, needed to work in security. However, this ended upon being passed to Work Programme. I have since enquired with the Work Programme placement, and they advised me that they could help acquire an SIA license and training, but for door supervision only, which for me would be perhaps the furthest thing from ideal. After all, where I have difficulty with social skills, is it not highly likely that I could perhaps cause more trouble than I would solve, when dealing with unhappy people who have been told to leave a building? In any case, the progress my DEA was making with me has been lost forever, with no replacement there. I have identified an organisation that I feel would be more suited to my needs in terms of a placement from the JobCentre; this I found under my own direction. It is called Prospects and is run by the National Autistics Society. Given that I am autistic and looking for work, it seems like an employment support organisation run by an autism charity would be ultimately the most logical place to look to for assistance. However, I find that the only way to land a place with Prospects is via referral from a DEA, which is of little use to me since I do not have any control over my status with the DWP, and therefore do not have the necessary power to return to my DEA's caseload, which I feel would be beneficial. That is assuming he would have the necessary resources and connections to make the necessary referral. Meanwhile I am stuck on the Work Programme, attending a place called CDG regularly (they are run by a company called Maximus). Though I cannot fault the efforts of my advisor at CDG, I do not feel that they are being much help to me in terms of finding work. I get the feeling that they are not interested in finding me work that I am best suited to, and would rather find me anything that will get me off the books and get them paid, which meanwhile might have adverse effects on my own wellbeing. That's assuming they'll ever even come up with something that meets even those loose criteria.

On the other side of the coin, I am faced with adversarial attitudes from the general public at large. Though I am not in contact with much of the public directly, I read stories in newspapers often about how people who are out of work are all lazy good-for-nothings, and I can only assume that this rhetoric is instilled in the minds of the general public, which would then quite obviously influence the voting majority if there were ever a referendum on matters that would affect me directly. I know for one thing that if the newspapers do indeed reflect public opinion on the status of benefit claimants, then I am certainly not going to find any help out of the situation I am in. After all, I am just a scrounger, and I am not worth the investment, whether in time or money, to be able to find suitable employment. I question this train of thought, offering my own opinion on this. Surely without assistance, people cannot in any way find ways to pull themselves out of difficult times. Also, I find it to be a massively polarised view on things. Surely, out of the millions of people struggling to find work at this time, there must be a huge pool of talents and skills that are going to waste. It seems to me to be a damaging thing to label each and every one of those people 'idle shirkers' when it seems not only plausible, but highly likely, that the plethora of ability in this subset of our society is merely under-utilised and over-categorised. For example, I am one of a sizeable group of unemployed people who spend their time engaged in other activities that can be considered useful to society. I offer my experiences and knowledge, as well as my ideas, for which I am known, to a local charity. I am not an employee of the charity, so I cannot list my charity activity as work in any form, but nevertheless, it is an example of me using my time and energy to the benefit of society in general. It is my opinion that this kind of thing is vastly unrecognised and understated. For sure, it is not work, and should not be equated to employment, but it is an example of unemployed people being quite frankly the opposite of time wasters and layabouts. Further still, to those people who do not invest their time in such ways. Is it not at all likely that they have found an employment market that has little to no accommodation for their actual qualities and points at which they are valuable? I advise great thought be placed on how to utilise each and every person to the best of their ability and their areas of merit, and I feel that the current employment market itself seriously needs a major overhaul. Too much emphasis is placed on experience and qualifications, or a combination of both, and not enough emphasis is placed on things like potential and the merits of the individual. Furthermore, there is little in the way of honest matching of each person to a career. For benefit claimants in general, it seems it is more a case of matching a set of criteria to a short term, low paid job with little to no security or room for growth.