Artist making one-off welded metalwork
A long-term unemployed with engineering skills, who keeps his hand in, doing difficult welds on old metal. In doing so, he produces art-work. Art in its true sense, with no vision of a marketplace or value. Just, art.
Labour intensive large workforce manufacturing might have gone forever. It’s cheaper, better quality and quicker to use machines. What if pioneering new ideas by making prototypes, still needs the skills he has? Are there any industries out there which would need small scale, occasional, manufacturing?
True the Job Centre will have him sorted. Applying for jobs he’s not suited for, which don’t pay enough for the cost of moving and might not last, leading him into an ever downhill spiral. To travel 50 miles at your own expense, or you lose your benefits, to apply for such a job when there are a lot of others being sent on the same journey. Of course, if he was to earn any money, or be seen to be trying, that would hurt him financially. His benefits would be withdrawn and by the time they are re-instated, he would have had to move. The benefits trap exists.
That’s the problem. Giving him a window to the world in which to show his art-work in the hope of selling it or better still, being offered employment on the evidence of his skills, isn’t the problem. Fighting the bureaucracy is.
Being on benefits is a block to trying to get off them. I’d heard this and not believed it. Now I’m on the side where the ministers would be telling me I’m wrong.
The black market, cash-in-hand, payment in kind or through a third party, is normal. It’s also illegal. Is there a legal way out of this quandary, when even freely volunteering for charity work is considered as being unavailable for work and benefits must stop. How could eCommerce take someone from unemployed to paying taxes, when the transition is so fraught with financial risk?
Ideally if he earns money, it could be declared and his benefits adjusted, without any bombastic action by a bureaucrat, which is quick to do, but not so quick to undo. That is a fantasy which should exist but doesn’t. I am now at six separate examples of this, with my disbelief swept aside by two Citizens Advice Bureaux and a Disability Action Group. Even to enquire is walking on egg shells.
The mechanics for a website, would be photographs from a selection of angles, with close-ups. It’s partly ASP.NET in the computer, but mainly lighting, backgrounds, smooth transitions. Probably not smart phone photography for eBay.
My attitude, bearing in mind that this is to try and get employment for this man, is to do the website anyway. In the unlikely event that he sells anything, I could enquire so he remains safely anonymous until we have a reasonable answer. Until then, I don’t think we’ve done anything wrong. How little of this project is programming.