Dreams, aspirations and ‘Work experience’

Iain Duncan Smith was today given the opportunity – by the Daily Mail – to reply to criticism of the government’s Work Experience scheme. The scheme has been labelled as ‘workfare’ by critics who suggest that it was a scheme that actually offered cheap labour to wealthy corporations – as those on the scheme would only receive normal Job seekers allowance and expenses for working 30 hours per week for up to two months.

Iain Duncan Smith was quick to attack opponents by labelling them a ‘group of modern-day Luddites’ – a rather odd label to choose. Luddites were a 19th-century English social movement which protested against the industrial revolution and the subsequent mechanisation of factories that took jobs away from workers. It isn’t obvious – at all – how the recent disquiet and protests over the government’s Work Experience scheme invokes this comparison.

He certainly does not take the time to enlighten the reader as he quickly moves on to accuse these ‘Luddites’ of ‘throwing around… misleading terms in a deliberately malicious and provocative fashion’ – as well as claiming that they ‘will stop at nothing in their attempts to mislead the public on this issue’.

His central point seems to be that anyone protesting against the scheme is a Luddite, is misleading and dishonest about the intentions and workings of the scheme or worst of all they belong to a:

commentating elite which seems determined to belittle and downgrade any opportunity for young people that doesn’t fit their pre-conceived notion of a ‘worthwhile job’.

Having read a lot of the ‘Workfare’ related tweets, blogs and mainstream commentary on the matter I fail to see how he can seriously suggest that this is the reality of the situation. It seems to me that the main argument behind the criticism of the scheme is that the length of it – along with the large supply of Job Seekers – actually enables large corporations to use this supply of expenses-only labour as a full-time source of temporary staff. The consequences of this scheme would therefore actually reduce jobs in the long run because the work is being done by this temporary labour instead.

Whatever the merits of the argument it is clear that it does not stem from a Luddite mentality nor from being a member of this mysterious ‘commentating elite’ that seem to get so much coverage in the mainstream press.

Iain Duncan Smith seems utterly convinced that believing people deserved to be paid for a week’s work is actually ‘intellectual snobbery’ and that:

The implicit message behind these ill-considered attacks is that jobs in retail, such as those with supermarkets or on the High Street, are not real jobs that worthwhile people do.

He then gives an example of just how great an opportunity such work experience is. By citing the example of Sir Terry Leahy:

hose critics waging war against work experience also forget that some of this country’s most successful businessmen and women started their careers on the shop floor. Lest we forget, Tesco’s former chief executive officer Sir Terry Leahy started life scrubbing floors at a Tesco store in his school holidays.

The problem is that Sir Terry Leahy hardly ‘started his career on the shop floor’. He actually – as Duncan Smith suggests – did work for Tesco briefly during his school holidays when he was 17. However, he then went on to complete a degree in management sciences after which he joined Tesco as a Marketing Executive in 1979 – being promoted to Marketing Manager in 1981. A lot of successful people may well have had paper rounds when they were young, but this isn’t a legitimate argument for sending people on Job Seekers allowance off to deliver newspapers in the vague hope that one day they may end up – after taking a completely unrelated route – editing a newspaper.

You might at this point be confused by the title of his article – ‘The delusions of X Factor and sneering job snobs who betray the young’ – but he gets onto this:

we are caught in a battle between those who think young people should work only if they are able to secure their dream job, and those like myself who passionately believe that work in all shapes and forms can be valuable, for it gives people a sense of purpose and opens up further opportunities.

Anyone who is gulled by those who believe in the first path 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.

The belief that you can just sit at home or wait to become a TV star and that work simply lands in your lap, in turn, feeds the pernicious idea that success is not related to effort and work.

I understand this argument, I work with young people and I realise the culture of delusion is real – a lot of young people genuinely believe that they will be successful and rich without having to make any effort (however, a lot of young people are intelligent enough to realise that ‘hard work and effort will get you anywhere you want in life’ speech is also a laughable myth). However, young people are not the creators of this culture, they are its victims. They have celebrity culture and obscene wealth drilled into them from every piece of media that they consume and they are all sold the American Dream in which anyone can become rich.

This dream is created by the very capitalists that Iain Duncan Smith and the Conservative party represent and champion – for modern capitalism is fuelled by wanton consumerism which relies on everyone buying into unrealistic aspirations. This is largely what drove the credit bubble and fuelled the false economic growth of the last two decades – after all, the banks didn’t just lend money to each other they ultimately lent it to people grasping to keep up with a culture which demands that all worth derives from the ownership of material goods.

The problem is that for most people this meant taking out loans, buying houses for mortgages larger than the value of their house and using credit cards to supplement salaries – because the majority of salaries fail to match the aspirations that people are told to have.

For years educators have been under immense political pressure to increase aspiration amongst young people even though the reality is that the jobs and opportunities will never exist for the vast majority of people living in the world today. It seems insulting that politicians knew this all along and still insisted educators had to kid young people that we are an ‘aspirational society’ only now to be told that essentially young people should stop dreaming about fame and fortune and get back to stacking shelves for Job seekers allowance and expenses for 30 hours a week.

And, of course, what example does he use to back up this demand? Sir Terry Leahy. A multi-millionaire who happened to once have a holiday job stacking shelves and scrubbing floors in the same supermarket that he would later manage. Remember kids: don’t dream about fame and fortune via the X-Factor, but do dream about one day being the CEO of the supermarket you’re working in for your benefits.

Featured image credit: Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty

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