http://newsbiscuit.com/forum/topic.php?id=2850 The NewsBiscuit Community en-US Sat, 25 May 2013 00:42:44 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 q http://newsbiscuit.com/forum/search.php http://newsbiscuit.com/forum/topic.php?id=2850#post-8322 Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:38:56 +0000 QorbeQ 8322@http://newsbiscuit.com/forum/ <p>Ooh, ta sauce! </p> http://newsbiscuit.com/forum/topic.php?id=2850#post-8308 Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:13:36 +0000 sauce 8308@http://newsbiscuit.com/forum/ <p>Have 5 - gainfully earned - stars. One or two of my neighbours are like those pensioners. </p> http://newsbiscuit.com/forum/topic.php?id=2850#post-8303 Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:54:29 +0000 QorbeQ 8303@http://newsbiscuit.com/forum/ <p>Part- and full-time employees across the UK have become the latest targets of the Dail Mail as the newspaper dubs workers 'scroungers simply waiting for handouts'.</p> <p>The paper reports that virtually all of the payouts made to employees are legitimised through a widely exploited loophole called a 'Contract of Employment'. These contracts, typically drawn up by the employer, permit staff to legally claim payments totalling many thousands of pounds each year, adversely impacting the UK economy.</p> <p>A great many retired Daily Mail readers have become impotent with rage, decrying the payments made to what they are calling 'employment hangers-on'. Many have written letters to the editor in squiggly, almost illegible cursive script. Some of the few with the technical ability have even written so-called 'flames' on the Mail's website, posting the same text three or four times in a row followed by 'oh bugger you why wont you work you stupid computer'.</p> <p>'There is so much news to get angry about,' said 97 year-old Gerald Eltham, visibly shaking, 'but I only have the strength to rage about one thing at a time these days and this is the story I have chosen this week. I nearly picked the Icelandic one so that I could use the pun about feeling "volcanic with rage", but I haven't been able to board a plane in years so the ash hasn't really impacted me a great deal. I have had to listen to them go on about it on Radio Four a bit too much and there is a bit of dust on the 1992 Nissan Micra that I leave sat on my drive, but it's this scroungers-earning-money story that has me really pumped up, the fuckers.'</p> <p>The paper makes the claim that the government should do more to close this major legal loophole and that many people make unacceptable use of their payouts from the private sector to 'live in relative comfort, sometimes behind closed doors in the secrecy of their own homes'.</p> <p>'Our government really needs to crack down on such a disgraceful waste of pension scheme funds,' said an irate Glenda Kilburn from Burford, 'These people say they get their money because they are entitled to it, but this entitlement is a joke and there should be a stop put to it, just like they should for benefit fraud and maternity leave.'</p> <p>'My life could be so much better if I was enjoying a bolstered monthly pension. I could also take a great many more foreign holidays each year, having to limit myself to the current three is pitiful.'</p> <p>Those in receipt of the employee payments are able use the money in any way they choose, and the Mail provides an example of the type of shopping list a claimant might draw up, including such worrisome items as 'foodstuff sufficient for a meal for two, condoms, alcohol and the currently-legal sex toy and morning-after drug Alka-Seltzer'.</p> <p>'What on earth could they have been planning with a disgusting list like that,' said Clive Weson, an ex-railworker from Hartlepool, 'if the stories in the Mail are anything to go by, they could be terrorists living next door for all we know, intent on fabricating explosives!'</p> <p>Several UK trades unions have tried calming the issue, publicly explaining the differences between a 'scrounger' and 'someone in gainful employment' with little effect on the pensioners. 'With people claiming these huge payouts from private sector companies, how on earth are our pension funds supposed to survive? It's obscene', said Mr Weston, 'Union schmunion, we have been willingly spun into a furious rage by this newspaper article and we will stay there until it tells us not to, or at least gives us something different to rage about, ideally involving bloody teenagers!' </p>