It’s official. According to Iain Duncan Smith, I am a job snob.

The past few days have been fraught with hankering over youth unemployment. Earlier this week, the secretary for work and pensions, warned the ‘battle lines’ had been drawn between, ‘those prepared to do everything they can to give a chance to young people who are looking for a job’ and ‘modern day Luddites’, guilty of ‘intellectual snobbery’- AKA job snobs. AKA me.

What’s all the fuss about?

In January last year, the government teamed up with companies, including Boots, McDonalds, Argos, Tesco and Primark, to offer job-seekers work experience placements. The placements are 2-8 weeks long and a job interview is supposedly waiting at the end.

The sticking point for critics is that these placements are unpaid, they’re statistically unlikely to end up in a job offer and if a job seeker turns down a work experience placement or quits after the first week, they risk losing their job seeker’s allowance.

Is the scheme a good idea?

Errrm possibly yes…maybe. In this current job market, fortune favours the candidate with work experience. The more relevant work experience you have, the more attractive you are to employers, so the more likely it is that you’ll come off job seeker’s allowance.

And everyone has to start somewhere. Iain Duncan-Smith has pointed out that even the former CEO of Tesco, Terry Leahy, started off stacking shelves on the shop floor. In theory the work experience will lead to gainful employment. The employee can then work his or her way up through the organisation. Work experience can be a valuable leg-up into a worthwhile career.

If you don’t look too deeply into the oft-quoted stats, you could think they were impressive. Apparently 13 weeks after starting their placements, half of participants have either been given permanent posts or have stopped claiming benefits.

So what’s the problem?

When you have multi-national corporations refusing to cough up for their workforce, you’re bound to face a back lash. Opponents have slammed the scheme as ‘slave labour’, arguing that making people work for free violates their human rights. Since there’s so much at stake if the job seeker passes up on the work placement, there’s also something darkly coercive about the whole thing.

The employment opportunities at the end are also dubious. So the government says that half of participants are in permanent posts or no longer claiming benefits at the end of their placements. Right. So how many of these young people are in gainful employment and how many got booted off benefits because they quit their placements?

Is it too much to ask for multi-national corporations to cough up the minimum wage for their labour force? I don’t think so. And I don’t think that feeling this way makes me an advocate for a Jedward-infused dystopia.

Apparently 1,400 job seekers have taken part in the work experience scheme at Tesco. Of these, only 300 have been taken on in permanent roles. So roughly 4 in 5 of the participants worked for Tesco, for free for no reason at all. Hmmm.

Another gripe is that the programme is too black and white. Recent graduate Cait Reilly was employed in work experience, which she had found without the job centre’s help. It was unpaid, but it was also tailored towards her career goals in museum curation. Cait was forced to quit her work experience to take up an unpaid placement at Poundland, or risk forgoing her job seeker’s allowance. Now yes, maybe Cait’s career aspirations are a little restricted, granted. But I’m still going to hazard a guess that she’d pick up more employable or transferable skills at a museum than she would filling bargain bins. I cannot fathom why the job centre would penalise a proactive job seeker in this way.

Apparently, I’m a job snob

For Iain Duncan-Smith, I’m a member of the ‘commenting elite’, who is ‘in danger of creating a society with a twisted culture that thinks being a celebrity or appearing on The X Factor is the only route worth pursuing in life.’

Oh please.

Is it too much to ask for multi-national corporations, who have billions of pounds in profits, to shell out on the minimum wage for their labour force? I really don’t think so. And I don’t think that feeling this way makes me an advocate for a Jedward-infused dystopia.

Work experience can be valuable, there’s no question. However it’s only valuable if it leads to opportunities that help the participant in the long term. If you’re forced to take up a placement at the expense of more valuable work experience, then you’re passing up on an opportunity, missing the point altogether. Is a brief stint of unpaid shelf-stacking, which is statistically unlikely to end in a job offer, leading to a meaningful opportunity? I’m not convinced. Now if the Tesco work experience programme was paid, involved structured rotations around the store, personal development elements and lasted longer than a couple of weeks, I’d have a completely different view.

Am I a job snob? Are you? What do you think about the government’s work experience programme?

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