A Cycle Of Pointlessness

Recently, I applied for a part-time customer service position in a local supermarket in the hope of earning some extra cash while studying for my A-levels. I was soon contacted to arrange a date for an interview. I was nervous, excited and worried – I, like many people, have a number of commitments and extracurricular activities, but I understood that working and earning some money would have to take priority over them. How could I complain? After almost two years of relentlessly handing out CVs and application forms, this was the closest I had ever got to employment.

A day after the interview was arranged, I received another call to inform me that a recruitment ban had been put in place at the store and they were no longer hiring. Despite my frustration, I wasn't all that surprised. With this supermarket having originally been named as one of the prime leaders in the government's "work experience" scheme, why on earth would they hire me for a permanent position when they can sift through all the eager, cheap young labour being filtered through the system?

Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne said on the BBC's Daily Politics show that workfare was designed to combat a "something for nothing" culture in our society. However, the major flaw in this argument is that major corporations are getting exactly what they want for nothing. Some of them claim that they may end up paying work experience placements, but this will never amount to the full wage of an employee contract.

Everyone can agree that work experience and training are important and fulfilling, but they should not be to the benefit of exploitative businesses, designed to minimise cost and maximise profit. Surely it's worth questioning that there is now such a plethora of available work placements on a weekly basis: are we to believe that none of these could be converted to actual jobs? The system is just self-manufacturing biased and false success.


The government is constantly throwing statistics at the media in attempts to qualify their "achievements", but the rate of people finding work following the scheme does not differ much from the amount of time it usually takes someone on benefits to find employment anyway. The information is too quantitative and not qualitative enough to explain unique individual cases of how employment was found.


Here's a statistic that the government is been rather quiet about: seizure of cannabis in England and Wales has more than doubled since 2004. Growing frustration at a lack of proper employment is only likely to make that figure grow higher and higher.

Full article HERE

I had an interesting conversation with someone the other day, in which we discussed the lack of jobs currently available, and how many graduates end up working in placements at supermarkets or other retail jobs.

Now, I think it is obvious to say that a job is a job, it should never be frowned upon, but I think it should also be noted that no graduate ever expects to come out of University and find themselves in a position they could have taken before they'd even entered College.

So the other problem is now faced of where the 16 year olds go for work? If every University graduate is taking a position in the local Tesco, or Poundland, or Sainsbury's, then what positions can the younger citizens take?

Although an obvious exercise, I think it worth going over in your head to really contemplate the utter pointlessness of the current WorkFare scheme, a scheme that places people into these retail positions while they are also looking for work.

All-round, it is a cycle of pointlessness.

I think what might be nice, if the WorkFare scheme really is to continue, would be for companies offering internships or other office based positions (or even numerous other companies that don't do office work, but also don't do retail) to be brought in to this scheme to offer more graduate level experience programs for those that have chosen to move beyond retail work and more into managerial or similar positions.

That's just my thought for today at least.