‘There’s one lesson that I’ve taken from these jobs into my post-university career: the lower you are, the harder you work, and the more thanklessly.’ Photograph: Laurence Dutton/Getty Images
Some young people do the grand tour between finishing compulsory education and the start of adult responsibility. A bit of backpacking round Europe. Getting off your tits on a south-east Asian beach. Sinking a few wells for the benefit of a Chilean village. All fine and mind-expanding experiences, none of which I did.
My personal grand tour plumbed the depths of the UK economy.
Between 16 and 21, I stacked shelves, tended bars, packed boxes, waited tables, washed floors – did anything that would make me the minimum wage (or, since this started before I was eligible for the minimum wage, at least the price of a pint per hour) and could be done in shifts around my education.
At the weekend, Iain Duncan Smith claimed that some people “think they are too good for this kind of stuff” – by “this kind of stuff” he meant experience in unskilled labour, and by “some people” he specifically meant Cait Reilly, a graduate who successfully took the Department for Work and Pensions to court after she was told that she had to give up volunteering in a museum and work unpaid in Poundland, or lose her jobseeker’s allowance.
IDS was incredulous at claims that working without recompense from the employer was equivalent to slave labour: “She was paid jobseeker’s allowance by the taxpayer to do this.” Actually, if you want to get all technical about it, and rather unhiply insist on words being taken to mean what they actually mean, jobseeker’s allowance is an allowance paid to people in the process of seeking a job (as Reilly was).
The appropriate remuneration for people who are working in Poundland is a wage paid not by the taxpayer but by Poundland. Poundland gets the benefit of Reilly’s labour, after all. The taxpayer gets … nothing.
But IDS said even more than this. He said that “most young people love this programme [of unpaid labour in unskilled jobs]“. Presumably IDS believes that these young people – shall we call them workers? State employees in the service of private enterprise? Serfs? – are getting some advantage from this arrangement. I can’t deny that I learned a lot from my five years in the hinterland of earning power.
For example: at 16, I learned the entire velocity code system for the Co-op’s produce section by heart, excluding some of the lesser-purchased exotics. (A velocity code is a three-digit number used by the till system in lieu of a barcode. Carrots were 123. Bananas, 950. I could go on. There’s an entire numerical dictionary of fruit and veg lodged in my brain where my irregular French verbs should have gone.)
But a Rain Man recall of velocity codes isn’t really one for the CV. The same can be said of other things I learn: that a Dairylea Dunker might not take too much out of your hourly wage, but it definitely doesn’t qualify as a lunch; and that there are people in the world (presumably people who’ve never had to work in the service industry) whose eyes flame with hatred when you ask if they have a Dividend card.
Working on the packing line of a mail order company, I learned that standing in a cubicle while classic cotton apparel flows on to your workbench – an unstaunchable deluge calibrated to be slightly faster than the worker can manage – feels like the worst anxiety dream you’ve ever had. Working as a waitress, I learned that I was not going to work as a waitress for very long. I tried, all right? I just don’t have the balance or the spatial awareness.
I worked in a real ale pub after that. That was one of the best ones: I learned the finer points of cask bitter, and also that if a leery man orders orange juice three times in a row, it’s not because he’s trying to up his vit C intake, but because of the view he gets when his unsuspecting server bends down to get the carton from the bottom of the fridge. All of these are good things to know, but none so good that I’d have been happy to receive this treasure of wisdom as the sole reward for my labour.
There’s one lesson that I’ve taken from these jobs into my post-university career: the lower you are, the harder you work, and the more thanklessly. I might feel moderately fatigued from a heavy day of journalism, but not the aching tiredness of scampering about in heels for eight hours, unsteadily delivering meals that cost more than I’ll make in my shift. I’ll have minor clashes in the office, but I don’t have to suck down the full contempt of a customer who considers me the personification in a polyester tabard of everything he despises (especially loyalty card schemes).
I’ll do any one of these jobs again any time I need the money, but what I learned from my grand tour of the minimum wage – what Reilly knows too, and what Duncan Smith pretends not to understand – is that none of these jobs are worth doing if you aren’t getting paid.
This article titled “The Poundland principle: the only thing to gain from unskilled labour is a wage” was written by Sarah Ditum, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 18th February 2013 13.45 Europe/London
