Every morning, a friend of mine who recently graduated drags his sorry self out of his warm bed at 6.45 in the morning and gets ready for work. He catches his bus and arrives at the train station some forty minutes later, at which point he boards a train to London. After an hour and twenty minutes he arrives at Liverpool Street, squeezes himself into a sweaty tube train and finally, mercifully, gets to work. After seven hours of sticking stamps onto envelopes he does the whole thing again, in reverse, and then pretty much goes straight back to bed.
The things people will do for money, eh? Except he isn’t doing this for money. Unless you count reimbursement for a mid-afternoon, mangled Tesco sandwich as “money”, but I’m fairly certain that most of you wouldn’t. No, forget money, all of his efforts are being made in return for something much more valuable (allegedly) to us graduates, The Dreaded and Horrifying ‘E’ Word – experience.
For all of you bastards who already have jobs, and don’t understand why the word ‘experience’ sends a shudder down the spines of the youthful, I would like to share this recent job advertisement with you:
FISH & CHIP SHOP ASSISTANT
Wage
Meets Nat Min Wage
Description
Previous experience needed.
Now, call me a snob, but I’m pretty sure that anyone who has ever made their own meal is capable of being a Fish & Chip Shop Assistant. (But what would I know? I don’t have any experience in that field.) Nevertheless, in the current climate employers aren’t willing to gamble on a person’s capabilities and potential, and therefore they are left with no choice but to go for those with a proven track record. As a result, ‘young people’ struggle to find a job that they can even apply for, endlessly falling over that first intimidating hurdle of ‘experience’. The only way to get the experience needed in order for one to acquire a Proper Job is to do an internship, and herein lies The Curse of the Jobseeker.
I have only heard of ONE paid internship in my months of searching, and it was one that I did for a well-known global drinks company a few months ago. It had been advertised as a competition prize, rather than a paid internship, and it was extremely generous of them to pay me when I hadn’t expected it. I was very lucky, because this money (and the fact that I live with my parents) has kept me going for the past six months. Unfortunately, though, most companies (and MPs) do NOT pay their interns, and are essentially using young, desperate people as slave labour by advertising ‘rolling internships’. My aforementioned friend whose life is one long commute is working as a Fundraising Intern and was promised months of insight into how charities operate, but instead spends his days doing mail merges. I expect there are thousands of interns across the country all doing the same thing, because they have no other choice.
Me? I can’t afford to do an unpaid internship. There are very few career opportunities in my local area, and there is no way that I can afford to move to London from the north to work as an unpaid intern. My parents can’t support me in this way either, and so it’s a paid job or nothing for me and many others, the result commonly being nothing. This curious phenomenon means that only those who live in London, or who have parents wealthy enough to pay for their rent in London, are able to gain the experience necessary to kick-start their careers, and so begins a cycle of a sort of class self-perpetuation.
Unpaid internships are one of the biggest issues leading to youth unemployment in Britain at the moment, worsened by the fact that many interns aren’t offered a job at the end of their term but are simply cleared away to make room for more unpaid labour. As to whether this is illegal or not, I cannot comment other than to share the fact that when I was browsing the ITV work experience site a few days ago, I was stunned to discover that they do not take on people over the age of 18 and not in education because “due to legislation around minimum wage guidelines you are not eligible to participate in unpaid work experience.” Hmmm.
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