Britain’s biggest employers to offer thousands of youngsters on benefits work experience in bid to drive down ‘Neet’ crisis
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tylerthe-theatre
Britain’s biggest employers to offer thousands of youngsters on benefits work experience in bid to drive down ‘Neet’ crisis
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tylerthe-theatre
41 comments
2-4 weeks of work experience for 11,000 people? Looks like the job crisis has been solved! /s
A local construction company participates in a ‘work experience’ programme with the local Job Centre. They happily take on work experience people to do site clearance and site cleanup – zero brain work, just moving stuff around and pushing a broom etc. The construction company has the salary of these work experience people paid by the Job Centre for two weeks – if the construction company keeps the work experience person, they take over paying the salary.
But guess what happens? The construction company just says ‘nah’ to each work experience person after two weeks and they are let go – only to be replaced by another free work experience person. The construction company gets free staff for grunt work (paid for my taxpayers) with zero commitment to keep anyone on permanently. Meanwhile the Job Centre gets to tick a few boxes labeled ‘work experience’ while the people on benefits continue to be turned down for job after job.
What will they learn in 2-4 weeks? Someone’s going to have to either babysit them, or they will be a source of basic labor.
If it led to prospects of an actual job it wouldn’t be so bad, but I can’t see how working 2 weeks at a supermarket or something makes a difference.
We’ll see the highest economic growth for the few weeks/months this scheme is live then the companies will refuse to hire any of them and we’re back to square one. The interviews will be performative.
Companies don’t want to hire, but they’re happy for the free labour at the governments expense.
Which will surely manifest as 0 hour contracts and the lowest possible pay they can get away with, only for them to continue to get declined from position’s they apply for.
Do we really need more experience? What experience exactly is required for entry level roles? Isn’t the problem there are no roles that exist?
My guess is this is just a way to deflect the youth unemployment question: “hey we have no fucking jobs…”
“Oh so you didn’t do your free slave labour for corporations yet? So how can you complain you don’t have a job?”
Cool – take work that would be paid and make people do it for nothing. That’ll solve it!
Even if this is work that people wouldn’t pay to get done, unless it turns into jobs it’s utterly useless to anyone.
I remember my first job in retail was at Argos. Only thing is taught me was the pay wasn’t enough to do anything and the general public are pricks. Especially if this is unpaid, what’s the point.
This is pure victim blaming, ‘these kids can’t find jobs, it must be from lack of experience’.
Lacking in experience is how you have always entered the job market, there just aren’t enough jobs available, and these children are never going to have as much experience as someone 10 years older than them.
Besides, how much experience do you need to stack shelves at Tesco, or work a till?
[Add it to the list!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workfare_in_the_United_Kingdom#Schemes)
Shame they won’t actually offer them jobs. Everywhere you go seems to be struggling with understaffing yet they seem to rather allow their service performance to decline than hire more staff.
Work experience for what jobs exactly? Getting people a few weeks of ‘work experience’ doesn’t translate into better prospects even when there ARE jobs. You need at least a year of experience for the experience to count, not a few weeks. This is just another way to funnel wealth up from the working class to the ultra wealthy.
So employers taking advantage of free labour and likely cutting down on staff.
Reminds me of when I went for an interview at a coffee shop in my town, the guy made me work a shift and then never got back to me.
Turned out he had been asking people looking for a job to come in to work to plug a hole in the rota when he needed it.
The government can create jobs for everyone. Almost everyone can do something. Instead of benefits, give people same money for a part time job such as driving people to hospital.
So the young cant find paid work and send endless CV’s off and dont even get a reply but they can find unpaid work for them that will require using benefits money to attend and also have to pay for lunch . So how will they pay their phone bills ,internet,food and expenses out of their benefits.? I feel sorry for the youth they have got it rough .
I was one of those that did “work experience” when the tories brought it in. It didn’t get me a job until near 6 months later when I massaged my CV a bit so it looked like employment not unpaid labour that took me away from time job hunting.
Never mention that it’s work experience, it’s a job, you just got exploited with government permission.
How much funding is the government providing to these companies for each placement?
So in a cost of living crisis we are forcing people without jobs to work for free……. fucking genius.
I volunteered for over year doin regular retail stuff it did fuck all. Saw someone say its 2-4 weeks of work experience. If 1 month outways my 1 year imma lose my mind i cant even get a fucking interview
Free labour for the greedy employer .
This has been going on for decades all the way back to YOP and YTS and probably beyond that .
It doesn’t work and won’t work because the employer just sees free labour .
Feckin politicians will never learn or maybe the have and are happy to use youngsters for free.
So the answer is still “Neither in Education or Employment or Training”? You don’t get paid. other employers will see you and all young people as a patsy and w in taf can you learn in 2 weeks?
When I left college I was on benefits for 6 months and then I automatically went into work experience to keep my benefits and they offered me the job. Why has that not always been the system?
This is a bloody shitty idea. It’s just free labour, quite often to Labour donors like Lord Sainsbury. It’ll drive down the number of actual jobs available and won’t give most meaningful experience because the jobs they’ll be doing will be so low skilled. And the jobs it might qualify them for won’t be available anymore…because they’ll be filled by other Neets doing work experience.
So free labour for huge companies (probably making record profits).
Why not instead encourage and develop a series of volunteering opportunities for local communities?
This just benefits the big businesses who won’t hire them anyway. Volunteer working will be much more rewarding for the individual and you’ll still often get the same entry level experience (basically boils down to dealing with people)
lol. Of course it’s just work experience, because even they know the job crisis is so bad that they cannot find companies willing to take on permanent youngsters
What we should really being doing with our Neet crisis is looking at the jobs that need to be done and training people in those fields. This could be jobs in care, or in home insulation, rewilding, climate resilience, construction, expanding the grid. Whatever. We could give our unemployed or underemployed good, meaningful work, and revitalise our long term industrial strategy.
Instead we have them work for their benefits as free labour for Sainsburys.
Dereliction of duty.
A million NEETs, but only 11,000 work-experience placements—enough to create an opportunity for just 1.1% of them.
And let’s not fool ourselves, if there are 100 people applying for 10 jobs and all 100 now have 2-4 weeks experience, that doesn’t create an 11th job.
As soon as more people have experience employers will simply move onto whatever the next filtering device is
People who get payed don’t want to work, how the fuck are you gonna convince people to not only work for free but do the most boring unskilled mundane shit to then be replaced by the next dumbass.
Pay them properly and yes, some of them will only be kept on until the end of Christmas, but at least they will be paid the same as everyone else.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not, but it *might* be the jump start some need.
> They will also offer those young people an interview at the end of their placement, aiming to take on as many as possible.
Why doesn’t anyone read articles. Just the companies listed advertise way more than 11,000 jobs a year.
Another story from me.
I am autistic, back around the time the Tories came into power last I was signed up for a charity that gave an actual guaranteed job after 3 months training in IT.
The Tories quickly cut funding for it the week before I was meant to start.
Which meant I was signing on for over a year before changing to ESA which I was on for another few years before getting a job.
Doesn’t matter who is in power, they make stupid decisions.
BREAKING NEWS: Businesses are willing to accept free labour.
Correct me if I’m wrong. But surely there are public services that have big vacancies which could be filled with those people looking for work?
Seems like a win-win. People get jobs, services run better and the money doesn’t just support private corporations.
I’d rather that instead of us paying tax money for the unemployed to be free labour for profit driven companies.
In other words come work for fuck all be our slave for a while then go back to being on benefits.
This happens every few years dressed up as ‘helping’ when in reality it’s supermarkets who get these people in and working 40 hours a week for nothing next to other getting paid.
Good idea in theory but all it does is subsidise the companies who get either free or below minimum wage labour.
So if they can suddenly make all these unpaid positions appear to satisfy the youth unemployment problem, does that also mean they could’ve created them as paid positions that would, you know, also solve the unemployment problem but properly since young people would be earning a livable wage?
Sounds like they just want free christmas temps, doesn’t it?
You want to solve the NEETs crisis, then moving to a 4 day week would solve it.
As productivity has increased, there’s an economic argument to be had that the bottleneck on the economy is too little free time. Remember free time isn’t just sitting on your arse at home watching TV, it’s also free time to start up your own business, work on your own personal projects. That’s where growth comes from, it comes from the people who actually have the spare time to invent things, be innovative and take risks. If you’re working 9/5 stacking shelves in Tesco you aren’t going to be getting out there and becoming an entrepreneur.
I don’t have evidence to believe this but I fully believe that a lot of problems in employement don’t stem from the particulars of work or motivation but from the utter stagnation and wastefulness of recruiting culture and hiring processes.
The idea that the average person should author hundreds of personalised CVs, apply for hundreds of jobs at a time is absurd on it’s face but also the job listings are opaque, they frequently lie about remote availability, they don’t disclose their salary, they demand years of experience for entry level positions, they want your linked in profiles, they want a detailed bio of your personal life, they want to know your hobbies…
… And then for the tiny percentage of people who get screened by some AI and then accepted look at what they have to go through: A useless cover letter, a lengthy questionnaire with irrelevant questions to the position, multiple rounds of interviews, they want a video of you grinning like an idiot explaining why you want the job, they want you to explain every minute of your job gap of one month where you dared to not work for a tiny period of your life. You need a salary expectation not too high and not too low, you need to memorise questions and remember to smile and present as affiable but not too much. By the end of this gruelling process you get told to fuck off by an automated robot and the internal candidate takes it.
Maybe if we want people to work we ought to remove this shite, remove the pressure for young people, streamline the process of getting a job and fight back against the condescension and inhumanity of corporate hustle culture.
Every employer should want their employees to understand their role as a WORKER and not as a ‘family member’ or a ‘forward thinking team player active on social media and blah blah blah’ Worker Alienation is a problem.
So are they actually going to be paying these people? Because it’s been my experience these schemes are an unpaid labour scam. I did thousands of pounds of IT work for a solar panel company for free, with the promise of a job at the end, as I was forced to by the job centre. And ofc they dumped me after I had sorted out their entire computer network, standarised all their paperwork, built a customer database, etc.