It’s very popular – allowing them to make decisions to how they want to train.”She admits that the relationship between staff and the unemployed was often poor “Our job is instilling confidence in people Five years ago perhaps that message wasn’t getting across It’s a less confrontational relationship … Once they know we’re not here to penalise them and catch them out, then you can turn whole thing round.” Jojo MoyesA life onlow pay’I can’t afford to lose myjob. But a large part remains, mainly covering the lower-paid, as does the basic state pension, which between them raise and pay out pounds 30bn per year.A DSS spokesman said the visit was to keep up to date with social security developments elsewhere. They do things like mucking up interviews – but employers give us feedback.”"Work trials” allow both employer and employee to try each other out for three weeks and Jobcentre staff also tell clients how to claim Family Credit and incentives such as training vouchers, which they can cash in to “top up” their skills.Ms Kay added: “So someone may take a part-time job in a warehouse, and they can actually use pounds 300 training vouchers to take driving lessons. After that time they might have to reconsider and broaden their horizons a bit,” she said.The newly unemployed often have firm ideas about how much they need to earn and generally know what the going rate is for their skills. But sometimes this has actually dropped since they entered employment.Some unemployed people do not take kindly to having to work for pounds 3 an hour – despite”top up” benefits “Yes … where we encourage them to come off benefit, people will put obstacles in the way.

If they have qualifications, we actually give them a permitted period of up to 13 weeks where they can concentrate on looking in their own areas of expertise, on the salary they want. The union said that Sainsbury and Tesco could expect their profits to be cut by around 6 per cent while Marks and Spencer and Safeway could expect returns to drop by 3 per cent and 1.7 per cent respectively.View fromthe Jobcentre’We sit them down andsay: This is all you’ll get’Stephanie Kay’s Jobcentre operates its own minimum wage policy “Our cut off point is about pounds 3 per hour Anything below that I would query. Employers do try it on a bit.”Ms Kay, a supervisor at Orpington Jobcentre in Kent, said: “Our first aim is to tell the employer that the salary needs to go up. In most of the jobs we’ve got I can give them a comparison.”She and her colleagues encourage the unemployed to take jobs for less money than they might have wanted, and top them up with benefit.”When people first come in, their major concern is always how they’re going to survive. But a MORI poll conducted for the GMB showed that three out of five small businesses supported the policy.A study of larger companies in the retail and hotel sector by the Labour Research Department for the GMB showed that businesses could expect their profits to be reduced only marginally.

Companies employing between 11 and 19 workers paid an average of pounds 6.33 an hour and those employing more than 50 paid pounds 8.05.Opponents of the law have always insisted that while larger companies might be able to afford a minimum, smaller firms would be forced into liquidation. However, Bill Morris, leader of the Transport and General Workers Union, whose delegation will vote for the Unison proposition, argued that all three resolutions were compatible.The TUC yesterday released evidence that small firms were already paying above the level of any likely statutory minimum wage. Congress House analysis of the official Labour Force Survey reveals that average pay in Britain’s smallest workplaces – those employing 10 or fewer people – is pounds 5.52 an hour. “We are going to have a drama on Wednesday, but it will be completely devoid of reality,” he said.The debate over the issue will come the day after Tony Blair visits Blackpool to attend a dinner with union leaders. He is insisting that the party should not adopt a figure and that a low-pay commission would be set up to advise a Labour cabinet.Unison, the public service union which is proposing the pounds 4.26 motion, studiously kept out of the limelight yesterday. More than 3 million people in Britain earn less than pounds 3.50 an hour; 70 per cent of them are women.