"Work-fare International" List charter. This is a new e-mail discussion list intended as a resource to welfare recipients and activists around the world who are attempting to resist the spread of what is known, loosely, as "workfare". Workfare, for the purposes of this forum, refers to the practice of attaching coercive and punitive conditions to welfare, income support, charitable, etc. benefits. Workfare is not simply work-for welfare (as the term Work-fare implies). It includes all practices which make the receipt of income support conditional on undertaking some service, activity, training, medical or psychiatric treatment or the like. This practice having become an international phenomenon, we find that it is not sensible for those of us defending ourselves from the evils of workfare to remain isolated from others who are engaged in essentially the same fight against the same evil and pernicious practices in other parts of the world. This list is intended, as a tentative step towards international organisation, to contribute to a sharing of knowledge and a greater understanding of the nature and causes of the problem. As such it will be be as free and open a forum as possible, encouraging the widest possible range of viewpoints to contribute to debates about possible tactics and strategies for anti-workfare activists, survival strategies for welfare/workfare recipients and a general exchange of basic information about just what is happenning in various countries. To assist, participants are asked, and will be reminded if they forget, not to stray too far from the subject (which is already quite broad-ranging in scope) and not to send unnecessarily long posts. A minimum of good manners respect for others would also be appreciated and probably reciprocated. ------------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe go to the ONElist web site, at http://www.onelist.com Register with onelist first then subscribe ------------------------------------------------------------------- Or send request to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> to be subscribed manually by list-owner (easier, but probably not 100% reliable as it relies on human intervention. ;-) -------------------------------------------------------------------
