When Cait Reilly threatened to sue the government over her forced ‘work experience’ in Poundland, some thought her a prima donna, others a brave campaigner, Tosin Omilaju reports.
If I’m honest, at first I had the University of Birmingham graduate, Cait Reilly, down as a bit of a drama queen. I mean, suing the government for “forced labour” just because stacking shelves in Poundland for two weeks was a bit extreme, if I do say so myself. But clearly, Reilly is someone who has had enough of the dire situation that is youth joblessness. You see, Reilly is just one of the 1.027 million 16-24-year-olds who are out of a job and trying to keep their head afloat financially.
According to Reilly, the government aren’t quite clued up on the needs of the youth, she said: “The coalition’s commitment to getting people into work is admirable, but this is not the right way to do it.” I suppose that is her polite way of saying ‘the coalition is totally out of order and that’s why I’m taking them to court.’ What Reilly finds annoying is not being able to take her place at Poundland, which means she will lose the £53.45 a-week Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) – her only source of income. And even though the government has introduced such work experience programmes with hopes that 250,000 of those on JSA will be helped into the workforce, trapping young people into taking up programmes irrelevant to their career pursuits risks increasing youth unemployment rates rather than decreasing them.
For one, the experience that individuals get needs to have some sort of resemblence to the job they actually want to do in the future. The most significant requirement that all work places have is relevant experience. So as the employers involved in the work experience scheme include places like Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Argos and Asda, this leaves a very limited scope in which relevant skills can be learnt – to be honest the coalition can’t honestly believe that an unpaid voluntary job in Tesco is what the millions of unemployed 16-24-year-olds want to do.
Don’t get me wrong: for those young people who are interested in a career in retail the scheme does seem like a good opportunity, but for the thousands of us interested in the other vast number of work sectors, Asda simply will not do. To work at Poundland, Reilly had to give up her placement at the local Pen Room Museum, which was helping her fulfil her dream of becoming a museum curator – and being forced to swap canvases for tin cans was not about to improve her employability. It’s obvious that young people who have no experience in their chosen career path will find it much harder to secure any job.
What is more, complaints that the experience is more like exploitation of the jobless young may mean that they remain without work in the long run. Many young people who have been through the scheme have found that they are doing the same work as employed staff without pay. So does the young unpaid worker become more skilled, employable and an asset to the UK economy? I think not. They basically end up with the joys of being free staff for the company for a couple of weeks and go back to the sorry state they thought they were leaving behind – unemployment.
At the end of the day, if the government doesn’t introduce a more effective scheme, youth unemployment will unavoidably become middle-aged unemployment. In a speech at the end of last year Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said, “If people are out of work when they’re young, they bear the scars for decades. If they have a false start, they might not ever fully catch up. These are tomorrow’s mothers, fathers and taxpayers. If they end up falling behind, our whole society pays the price.”
If Clegg really thinks this, that he needs to get a move on.
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