PRESS HOUNDS GRADUATE WHOSE JOB CENTRE MADE HER WORK IN DISCOUNT STORE FOR FREE
The geology graduate who is suing the government over an unpaid internship she was “forced” to do at Poundland as part of a government scheme has been savaged by the British press and public.
In December, we reported that Cait Reilly — a 22-year-old graduate of Birmingham University — was taking legal action over a two-week internship she was told was “mandatory” if she wanted to keep claiming her Jobseekers’ Allowance payments of £52 per week, in which she was required to sweep the floors and stack shelves. This week – as Cait’s lawyer issued a press release containing an update on her case — the mainstream press jumped on the story and seized the chance to give her and other job-seeking graduates a kicking.
In Graduate Fog’s opinion, some of the editorial written about Cait was vicious — and showed a disturbing attitude towards young people today. The response suggests that a troubling new trend for ‘graduate bashing’ whereby graduates are labelled “entitled” or “arrogant” for daring to complain about the way they are being routinely exploited through unpaid internships, which have become the norm, despite being illegal.
In a piece entitled “A human right not to stack shelves? She’s off her trolley” on Friday, Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote:
“Predictably, Reilly has been photographed in front of her local Poundland wearing the traditional, poor wee me, sad-clown victim face. Cait, I really want to say this to you. Two weeks stacking shelves in Poundland – a breach of your human rights? Grow up.
…It is hardly ten years’ imprisonment without charge in Guantanamo Bay. It is hardly like being incarcerated in a Nazi prisoner of war camp for five long years, never knowing each day if you would live or die, sewing cross-stitch samplers to stop yourself from going insane.”
Nobody said it was, Jan. But unpaid work is illegal in this country, and Cait has every right to complain about it. Then she said:
“I would argue that doing a little unpaid work in return for benefits is not a breach of your human rights, it is actually a bonus. See it as a life lesson – and you might get more out of it than you think.”
Which is it – a “bonus” or a “life lesson”? Come on Jan, at least be consistent. Is this two-week placement a prize — or a punishment? She goes on:
“You might think that a student with barely an NI payment to her name would be happy to put something back into the pot.”
Er, what “pot” is that exactly, Jan? The Poundland pot?
“I would also argue that her stance is deeply insulting to those whose jobs actually do entail sweeping floors and stacking shelves.”
No it’s not. They get paid to do their jobs, Jan. Cait didn’t earn a penny for her work.
“One might hope that any kid walking into a lawyer’s office with this sorry tale would be laughed out of the door.”
“Kid”? Cait is 22. That’s more than old enough to vote. She has the same rights as anybody else in this country. And didn’t you just say she should “grow up”? Yet you’re the one keeping her infantilised by implying she has fewer rights and should shut up, simply because she’s young…
Not content with slating Cait, Jan next turns to her lawyer, the highly-respected Jim Duffy, ofPublic Interest Lawyers:
“What I am really thinking is that Reilly’s lawyer Jim Duffy has much to answer for. A high-profile landmark case such as this might do much to enhance his reputation.”
Er, perhaps Cait’s lawyer has recognised that she has a strong case — and this is an important, interesting and topical area of employment law? He would hardly take the case — which we assume is not being paid for — if he didn’t think Cait had a good chance of winning.
Jan then finishes by pointing out that Cait’s bravery on this issue is likely to put some employers off hiring her — something we suspect Cait has already considered, as it is the same reason why hundreds of thousands of young people do not report illegal unpaid internships every year:
“However, win or lose, it won’t do much for Cait Reilly’s employment chances – as a shelf stacker or a geology-specialising museum boss. Believe me, such a pinched sense of entitlement at this nascent stage of her career will not endear her to many putative employers.”
Well done on underlining the point that Cait — and her fellow unpaid interns — are extremely vulnerable here, Jan. That is all the more reason why Cait’s actions are exceptional and admirable.
Still, perhaps we should not be surprised that Jan Moir lacks the intelligence or sensitivity to get to grips with the details of this case. Let’s not forget that this is the same Daily Mail columnist whose writing promoted 20,000 complaints for the piece “Why there is nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death,” in which she suggested that the singer’s sexual orientation was somehow linked to his death (recorded by corners as by natural causes). The piece earned her the title of Bigot of the Year 2009, as voted by gay rights campaign group Stonewall.
But no, other journalists followed suit. Writing in the Guardian on Saturday, in a piece called “Is all work experience good experience?” Toby Young said:
“More generally, I approve of these sorts of schemes because they denude young people of their sense of entitlement… They can’t just expect a fulfilling career to fall into their laps — and the sooner they realise that, the better off they’ll be.”
He insisted that his own experience of doing unpaid, government-backed work experience as a teen in the 1980s was the making of him. But this was more than 20 years ago, when the world was a very different place, before unpaid labour became an endemic problem that exploits and excludes hundreds of thousands of young people every year. And before unpaid internships became illegal when the minimum wage law was introduced in 1998. Of graduates like Cait, Young wrote:
“The world doesn’t owe them a living.”
True – but Poundland does owe Cait Reilly a wage. And the government owes her an apology for setting up this horrific programme, which effectively legitimises unpaid internships, which are illegal. Not a grey area — illegal. Young even went on to offer Cait some (unsolicited) some careers advice, suggesting that she will need more than her existing qualifications in order to pursue a future as a museum curator:
“Perhaps the two weeks she spent stacking shelves in Poundland will have the same galvanising effect on her as cleaning lavatories did on me and she’ll go back to university and get some additional qualifications.”
Oh, is that what these compulsory, unpaid work placements are for? Pushing graduates back into university to study for yet more expensive qualifications that also won’t lead them to a paid job?
And let’s not forget that this all happened in the same week that Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg assured us he was going to put pressure on employers to make sure they pay their interns at least the minimum wage. Yet at the same time his colleague Iain Duncan Smith is telling job centres to arrange unpaid internships? What is going on with these people?
The way we see it, Cait Reilly’s case is extremely important, because it asks some crucial questions that young people deserve answers to:
Why is JSA even being used to help graduates to fund unpaid internships? Cait wants to use her JSA to continue an internship she set up herself at a museum. But why should she need to do this? Why isn’t the museum paying her a wage?
Why is the government instructing job centres to help big companies to break the NMW law but providing them with a steady supply of free labour?
What is the aim of these forced unpaid internships — and is there any evidence that they actually help youth unemployment?
Why are big companies being allowed to gain unlimited unpaid labour, through a scheme backed by the government? How is Cait working for Poundland “putting something back in the pot,” as Jan Moir puts it?
Why are young people being treated as second class citizens?
Graduate Fog is disturbed by the viciousness of the attacks on Cait, who is sticking up for her right to be paid a wage for fair day’s work. Where did this venom come from? Hundreds of thousands of graduates have found that they spent three years doing expensive degree courses on the advice of those they trusted — and have now been by the law, the government and their universities. They have every right to be angry. As Cait’s lawyer Jim Duffy said:
“The Government has created — without Parliamentary authority — a complex array of schemes that allow Job Centres to force people into futile, unpaid labour for weeks or months at a time. By doing so, it is worsening rather than alleviating the cycle of unemployment that is such a significant barrier to addressing the economic crisis.”
We agree 100%. Why are people kicking graduates when they’re down? And why are they so keen to give the government powers to force people to work for nothing, when we already have a minimum wage law that says that is illegal? Graduate Fog wishes Cait Reilly and her lawyer Jim Duffy the very best of luck. We’re right behind you.
*Is the Poundland intern a hero — or a whinger?
Are you impressed that Cait Reilly is standing up for herself — or is she giving graduates a bad name? Was the press reaction to her case fair – or are you worried that ‘graduate bashing’ is becoming the norm in the press?
“There are huge numbers of businesses, especially in more specialised disciplines, that would never even consider approaching a Job Centre with their vacancies”
Well, it’s where I got my first job in the oil industry 15 years ago.
I have no geology qualifications. My degree is in physics.
So dont knock the job center
@Anthony Miller – Your experience was FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. Unfortunately, time doesn’t stand still. I think most people now who have experience of job centres would say largely they are not fit for purpose. As my previous job centre advisor personally told me, don’t rely on our website to find a job, or rather, don’t use it at all. And I would say they are ill-equipped to give careers advice to graduates, perhaps lower skilled job-seekers yes, but otherwise it is our universities we should be using for career advice.
@Lisa When I went to the Job Centre, I remember once talking to a guy who worked there about an IT course I was taking to help my employability skills. He wrote down the details for himself. I couldn’t stop laughing. Since when was I supposed to inform THEM about things like that??
For me, I’m fighting as hard as I can to stay away from the job centre because I’m absolutely terrified that, as a 24-year-old graduate, I’ll be one of the first they call on to be shoved into Poundland for nothing an hour. And before anyone jumps down my throat for turning my nose up at retail, I worked in retail for eight years. Regardless of what it was like before, you DO NOT have the same opportunities you did in the past. Pretty much all of my friends worked in retail at one time or another over the last five years, and we all experienced the same thing: Ten hour shifts with no break. Hours cut without notice (as you’re usually put on a part-time contract, so you might do 40 hours one week and 10 the next). Inadequate breaks (I used to have to sit on the shop floor with a sandwich in lieu of a lunchbreak at one place). No training. No possibility of moving up in the company (are you kidding me, Clive? NO ONE’S moving at the moment. You join as a cashier, you’ll leave as a cashier. Only one person I know became a manager and he had to stay with the same company for TEN YEARS).
And for heaven’s sake, I’m not looking down my nose at those jobs: I did them, didn’t I? Even after I’d completed a first class degree, I worked for six months moving sofa beds at a furniture store chain. But I never EVER would have done those jobs if I wasn’t being paid.
Also, retail positions don’t get you contacts or help you gain experience. They just don’t. The only credit you’ll get is that they’re tough jobs, and you’ll certainly be able to prove you can work under pressure: You get yelled at by managers and sneered at by customers. At the moment, with the number of chains going under every day, you’ve got extra pressure on your head and if you don’t measure up, there’s usually a loophole in your contract which means you’ll be let go at the first opportunity. The only trouble is that most employers don’t care, trust me, I’ve sat in enough interviews to know that if you’ve worked in retail, you need to get it off your CV as fast as possible if you want to work anywhere else. And since when are there more positions available in retail?? There are hardly any, and the competition is hugely fierce for every single one.
What I’m concerned about is how many graduates are going to be yanked out of meaningful voluntary placements in order to complete this stint at Poundland. When I was on JSA, I volunteered with a mental health charity. Would I have been told this wasn’t enough?
I agree entirely with the last part of this article: this sort of practice is exacerbating unemployment problems, and forced unpaid work is illegal and something should be done about attempts to instigate it.
I think the reason Cait was given such a bashing by the press, however, was that she really did come off as ‘entitled’ in interviews. She seemed to feel that being a graduate meant she shouldn’t have to demean herself with such a job. Apparently this was part of a mandatory scheme which allowed people to keep their JSA only if they completed the work experience? Whether that’s fair or not (or legal or not) by the sound of it it won’t be just graduates who have to complete this mandatory work to keep their JSA. The angle of the articles covering this story was generally that Cait felt that her status as a graduate meant she shouldn’t have to complete the work experience, when in fact her being a graduate is entirely beside the point. It is unfair to be forced to work for no pay, but it is no more unfair to be forced to work unpaid as a graduate than as someone without a degree. If her issue is with the legality of unpaid work, that should have been made clearer, in fact the focus seemed to be on how unfair it was that she had to do a ‘rubbish’ job even though she has a degree, which is ridiculous, and pretty much the definition of ‘entitled’. It may be that the press created that slant on the story and she didn’t think her being a graduate was relevant. In that case, that’s very unfortunate for her.
I have to say, as a recent graduate, I would be grateful for something to do other than fill out application forms. It’s a shame that she can’t work where she wants to but who can? As well as having a degree in Accountancy, I had to work in a shop like Poundland and go to night school to gain my CIMA. It wasn’t easy, I lived in a horrible rented flat and didn’t go out for almost 3 years. Luckily, after filling over 200 job applications, I found a job in my field. Not once did I think that I was entitled to a job in the sector I wanted and I would have never dreamed of suing the Government as a breach of my ‘human rights’. I would find it embarrassing to complain when so many people are in the same position. I agree that the press have made a hate figure out of Cait but unfortunately, when you sue for having to work (unpaid) for two weeks in return for your benefits, this is what will happen. Sorry to say, as a manager, there wouldn’t be any way I would employ her now. Most people in the UK probably feel the same.