I turned up today at Working Links in Cardiff to discover that my consultant was not in attendance over some personal matter. I ended up looking at various websites repeatedly for nearly one hour and forty minutes and then thought that it was an acceptable level of time and made my way to the reception desk and signed out. Normally people would ask their consultant if they could go and were usually given the okay. It is a bit like being at school and it would be helpful if we knew what the minimum amount of time we were supposed to do jobsearch for when we arrive. If we find many jobs to apply for then we could always stay a bit longer but when you go over all the sites repeatedly knowing full well that you have looked on them every day at home it does get a bit boring and pointless. If you only looked at todays jobs then it would be less than a five minute effort so I ended up scrolling through the jobs going back a fortnight and reading the job descriptions just to fill in time. I did hear a member of staff say that if a person has not heard from Working Links for a while then they should make contact. This suggests that some people are still not making sure that they have appointment dates given to them before they leave the Working Links office. I did notice that Working Links are advertising a few vacancies and the salaries are worth noting. I saw an administration vacancy with a salary between 15-18k and a consultant vacancy with a salary between 18-22k. Those are not bad salaries for Cardiff and a lot better than the minimum wage. I would never have a hope of working for any of these companies as they know I would report any unfairness handed out to customers regardless of losing a job. If I saw wrongdoing I would whistle like a canary. I believe in fairness and these companies need people who are prepared to turn a blind eye to all the tricks they get up to in return for a nice steady job and a good salary. Money and the threat of losing a job is enough to keep people quiet but not me. I am not against the idea of helping people into work and giving them the potential for a better life but I have been around a long time and I have seen first hand employees of these welfare to work providers behaving in a nasty way and threatening manner. I have also met some really nice and decent people over the years and they usually end up on the sick and I guess if you have a conscience then it really gets to you if you end up causing decent poor people stress because of orders from management. At the end of june I will have completed twelve months on the work programme and it looks like I will still be unemployed. I was surprised to see on the P60 form the inland revenue sent me recently that the benefit I have received since I joined the work programme has not been added to my taxable income. This used to be the case when people were on the old new deal for thirteen weeks and it came from a different fund but the work programme was supposed to be different. According to my P60 form I have only received £732.86 for the whole of the financial year up to the beginning of april 2012 although it should be around £3500. I have of course received all the benefit I was due so either the inland revenue have made a mistake or something is going on. Surely we have not gone back to the old system of taking people off the register for the unemployed if they are put on the work programme.