Stipend may not be the correct word either, but $20 was given upfront presumably so the workers could eat and travel while partaking in the scheme. $50 may not sound like much, but I know if I'm homeless and guaranteed $50 daily + donations, sign me the hell up. That'll add up quickly with the proper support.

What concerns me about the author of this piece about human wi-fi hotspots is what she herself does to make a living. I am not quite clear about what is going on with her but it does sound as though she makes things up in order to be paid for writing. Her view is firstly very out of date, and I imagine she knows this. Secondly, she complicates the issue with political rhetoric, in my opinion. I would ask Clarence how he feels about his job at this convention. Then I would take it from there with his point of view. That is the only real point of view of value here, and certainly the author in her well educated stance has nothing to offer me.

What concerns me about the author of this piece about human wi-fi hotspots is what she herself does to make a living. I am not quite clear about what is going on with her but it does sound as though she makes things up in order to be paid for writing. Her view is firstly very out of date, and I imagine she knows this. Secondly, she complicates the issue with political rhetoric, in my opinion. I would ask Clarence how he feels about his job at this convention. Then I would take it from there with his point of view. That is the only real point of view of value here, and certainly the author in her well educated stance has nothing to offer me.

I agree with Marc - I don't see this as exploitation at all. I cannot see what is so appalling about homeless people making some much needed cash. I've never been homeless myself so I can't speak on their behalf - but if I were homeless and skint I would probably jump at the opportunity to earn some much needed cash at a difficult time.

These days, I find myself more offended by the comfortably well-off white middle class bloggers and twitterers of this world who seem to be constantly offended on other peoples behalf. I mean, these homeless people were getting paid $50 a day and were interacting with a public who in the past would have ignored them - doesn't sound too bad to me? Now these poor sods are getting nothing at all - just a lot of self-righteous sympathy from a bunch of bleeding-hearts who can now sleep well at night cos they have a clear conscience .

Sorry, but I just don't see what good stopping this scheme has done, myself?

To call Penny an airhead is an insult to air.

Somehow a job that requires you to send 'important emails' doesn't strike me as one that will have you scrambling for pennies to be able to afford a coffee...

As for the matter at hand: Yes it could be seen as exploitative, but I'm sure the homeless who are involved in this and can't afford to turn their noses up at job opportunities have weighed their options and see this as a better deal than their usual everyday situation.

They don't care what the righteous and privileged blogosphere think, they've got to get through each day anyway they can.

It's frustrating that the self-appointed new Left seems more interested in stating 'I disagree with [insert current event], look how progressive I am' rather than 'This is how we can fix it'. It's narcissistic self-promotion of one's personal brand rather than a genuine desire to fight inequality.

@ Marc & Tesco Shelf Stacker

What is funny to see, or rather disturbing, is that you are blind to the issue. Now, that could be through a neurolgical condition or poor socialisation which has resulted in your lack of understaning of the content of the article and what it is about it that offends the humanity of the author and the others commenting here. You can argue until you're blue in the face whether it's okay or not if someone is getting money out of it but that isn't the point. It's about people taking advantage of someone in a desperate situation for their own gain. Now, if you have trouble figuring that out after you have step out of your nappies, the likelihood is that you're never going to understand. For me, and presumably the others commenting here, reading your responses is like watching a fly bashing its head against a window because it has no concept of glass. To spell it out for you, your comments suugest that you have no concept of compassion.

Come on, let's try to see Marc's points.

1. These guys got more than twice the $20 per day the article said (if Marc's right).

2. Ok yes, it's shitty "pay". But it's better than nothing. Unless you're doing better by homeless people, it's difficult to take your criticisms seriously.

Dear Laurie

'Twas ever thus and thus it shall ever be. And the avergage accountant REALLY is shaved and waxed chimpanzee. Trust me, I know.

One thing really perplexes me about Laurie Penny. I like her writing and think she is really clever. What I can't understand is how someone so clever (and who could therefore earn as much as she wanted, within reason, doing exactly what she does which is, I suppose, campaigning for a better world),finds it so easy to plead poverty. Can she really not afford a cup of coffee?? Does someone so talented really have to "scrape together" the £1.80 for a cup of coffee?

Or does someone need to take Laurie aside and explain to her that it's really ok to have Marxist ideals and still be able to pay the mortgage and have a little fun with a cappucino every now and again? Or does she feel that her credentials as a socialist tub-thumper will be irreparably damaged if we find out that she actually has a roof over her head and doesn't have to drink her own piss to survive?

@ Rob M

It's got nothing to do with the amount they were paid or even that they were paid. You too miss the point. Go away and think about it until you understand.

@Viper

It's the same and you're right. I vomited a little

@Stuart

So first you discredit it and then make an idiotic attempt to link left-wing thinkers to the BNP presumably so you can argue they are right-wing and therefore thick, though you don't accept the findings.

We should be used to such contradictions by now though as the 'workable solution' is essentially a continuation of New-Labour's policies with a sprig of nasty-party slave-labour for good measure. The privatization continues, the lack of affordable homes continues, the rights of ordinary working people continue to be eroded, and people like you clap like seals who have been thrown a fish because if you see someone who you associate with the left i.e. impoverished and dispossessed people being treated badly you think you must be winning.

It is very sad, but it's your life.

All waged labor constitutes exploitation, so to use the term as a pejorative is not helpful. A better argument might be what does a worker receive in addition to the money on offer - skills, training, anything that will take them forwards in their next interaction with the labor market. From the story in question, it looks like they will be back to being homeless people without jobs afterward. http://www.lifeinsurancehq.org/

@Jim,

You're so smart. Thanks for helping me out. Answer me this, though. Exactly what kind of person gets desperately upset about needing to send an email but has to "scrape together money you can't afford for coffee". Who is that person? You're living in a fantasy world if you think this is poking fun at anybody at all. There's only one person I could speculate would fit the bill: a rather arrogant woman who pleads poverty as an excuse to pay exploitation wages, and then spends her time roaming foreign countries, on a quest to personally experience social ills so she can then go online to post her vapid observations about them.

The giveaway comes at the end, if you actually read it properly: "paying the homeless poverty wages to stand around whilst the rest of us check Facebook is no place to start". There you go: "the rest of us". The supposed users of this service are not some "kind of idiot who thinks they do know how it feels to panic when they want to send an email" but rather, a potential version of "us".

I'm having fun pulling your nonsense apart, so let's continue. If the 'principal' aim of my writing this was to encourage everyone else to laugh at a pompous imbecile, would that invalidate a 'non-principal' aim of also wanting to annoy you? You create a fiction regarding what is or is not 'principal' and conclude that any real-world benefits enjoyed by homeless people are 'not okay' because they are not 'principal'. What rubbish. Perhaps the NHS should sack every nurse whose 'principal' aim when going to work is to get paid, on the basis that caring for people is only a 'non-principal' by-product of their hard work, and hence 'not okay'.

Finally, you insinuate that short term solutions are not okay. Not okay when compared to what? Not okay when compared to being someone who moans about injustice on the internet but does nothing of any practical worth whatsoever? Short term solutions are infinitely preferable to doing nothing whilst waiting for (unknown) long term solutions to fix everything.

The problem with criticizing other people's comprehension skills is that it rebounds on people with an inflated sense of their own abilities.

I think one of the problems is the choice of words.
"I am a 4G Hotspot."

The fact that homeless get a chance to earn money isn't all that bad, even though they should be paid roughly the same as promotion staff.

Although Clarence and no doubt many others living on the streets will, and have taken the chance to become a "wifi hotspot" - in order to purchase some sort of nutritious substance, or worse a dose of narcotic pseudo-medication in an attempt to subdue mental health issues/addiction that are, of course extremely common within the homeless population...

http://www.crisis.org.uk/data/files/publications/Mental%20health%20liter...

The basic crux of Miss Laurie Penny's argument is sound... "paying the homeless poverty wages to stand around whilst the rest of us check Facebook is no place to start." !!!!

Although it is common for the majority of the above to ridicule Penny for her middle-class roots, and granted, her sometime lack of understanding with regards to working class perspective on social issues etc... should the "left" opposition to the neo-liberal state (which i would presume are the types to bother with the New Statesman) not unite in common cause against such social ills as the exploitation of some of the most vulnerable members of our so called society?

Terrible reporting, sorry.

Your facts on the amounts being paid are terribly inaccurate. A $20 STIPEND was given each day, made up later to minimum $50 a day, and all donations on top of this (mandatory donation for using the hotspot, but no minimum) go to the participants. They'd have been making more than the local minimum wage anyway, now likely much more given that people can donate online, and the publicity the program has generated.

Certainly much more than CURRENT ("Lefties" didn't spoil that party!) Workfare "participants" (slaves) in the UK are making.

The issue is clearly not what one would do if one were homeless. Neither wether these specific homeless people welcomed the opportunity to "work" as wifi spots. That entirely misses the point of the exercise Laurie was putting forth. The issue is precisely the concept of paying someone to stand around being a machine. What is shocking is that a society - and not specific people - would think this doable and natural. Laurie is treating this fact as a symptom of a deeper cultural reworking of the meaning of work. Personal views of what you, as an individual, would do are pointless.

Marc. I'd be fascinated to know what you think Stipend means, except given that you seem to be comfortable with the notion of a mandatory donation, it's unlikely that anything you say will make any sense.

Stuart, just a point but the article header is: "The normalisation of exploitation is the real scandal here."

No mention of economics.

But you have a point about the BNP protectionist policies: the difference is that left-wing people want the state-ownership because it is safer - proof of which is the fact that the banking system only avoided total collapse because of state intervention. The motive for the far-right is probably more a 'British jobs for (white, straight, etc.) British people' attitude.

As for Conservative policies of paying people less and less, it won't work. Unless we were to have a totalitarian regime which reduced some people to surfdom so that they can compete for manufacturing jobs we had better start thinking of how we can compete with Germany and Japan in high-quality markets. But there it is, our old friend the totalitarian (non-liberal) with his plans for enslaving his people - we might almost think of him as the far-right, or he could be communist, but his policies give him away.

Here is a direct quote from the article I cited: "New psychological research claims that people with authoritarian or socially conservative right wing views are, on average, less intelligent than those with more liberal attitudes."

Hope that clarifies my point, and why I think it is relevant to this blog.

@ No Class

Thanks for living up to the name you are commenting under. Why can't you see this isn't a solution at all? It's a cynical ploy by some marketers to gain some publcity. Tell, you what, if they come back and tell us that each and every person they have used this way has been given the apporpriate care and treatment that has allowed them to deal with any mental health, drug related or other issues then fine, I;ll accept it as a solution. Until then I'll look past the end of my nose and see the kind of manipulative, immoral turd that thinks turning someone's misfortune into profit is okay. If you can't see that, you need to do some more learning and living.

The world is truly a never-ending parade of the morally bankrupt. I disagree slightly that it is the 'normalization of exploitation' that is the issue. That is bad enough, but the fact that the people behind this didn't think there was something wrong about it means that some areas of humanity are too far gone already. I blame the technological revolution and we should distance ourselves from it. Consider, if this were 20 odd years ago we would have been in those halcyon days of 'executive stress' and silly desk toys. If we applied the same 'business model' as this then we would have homeless people with targets painted on the back of there trousers and a slogan like 'boot me up the arse you'll feel better, and I don't matter anyway'

It make me hate the human race.

P.s. Sir Michael - spot on!

"You know how it feels -- you're stuck in a city centre with an email to send and you can't get online. You start to panic. The feeling of being cut off from your friends, colleagues and important task begins to nag at you. You scrape together money you can't afford for coffee you don't want on the offchance that the drinks stand has wifi."

I don't know how this feels. Is it true that everyone else has gone through episodes of being-in-town-centre-panicked-at-need-to-send-email-hence-bought-coffee-and-hoped-for-wifi? If so, I must be a freak. I can't even make sense of it. Just send a text instead, or call them. Or ask the coffee shop if they have wifi, before you buy the coffee. Or chill out because no email is that important.

But then, I didn't understand the ending either. So paying homeless people a small amount to do a sh*t job "is no place to start" when it comes to getting others to acknowledge that homeless people are still people. Why not? It's not a place to finish, but it's a start, because it's better than doing nothing. It's also a hell of a lot better than writing a blog that says what people shouldn't do but doesn't say what they should do. Presumably that's because the solution is the same obvious and implicit one that always gets rolled out for everything. Solve homelessness by taxing someone who can afford it. Solve urban-coffee-wifi-panic by taxing someone who can afford it. Solve exploitation at work by taxing someone who can afford it. In other words, prevent businesses exploiting workers by having governments exploit workers even more. Yup, I must be a freak to think like that. Please send me for re-education, preferably to an expensive private school, paid for by... erm...

this is a very difficult issue as people are homeless for different reasons, they are a few quite extrovert homeless people i have met who might quite enjoy it, its a question of choice.

after all, the other day i was walking past a shop, and a woman came out of it, holding something she had just bought, saw me, and started spinning a line about how yesterday her boyfriend had hit her. which is more degrading?

Kenny, stop being a pedantic ass. Mandatory if you wish to use the hotspot, which in itself is entirely optional. Alright, a non-zero payment, better?

Stipend may not be the correct word either, but $20 was given upfront presumably so the workers could eat and travel while partaking in the scheme. $50 may not sound like much, but I know if I'm homeless and guaranteed $50 daily + donations, sign me the hell up. That'll add up quickly with the proper support.

My point stands that the article was researched poorly.

It's cute how you all pretend to be morally outraged too, when you're really just uncomfortable talking about those guys that you ignore in the street every day.