'Stacking shelves is better than dreaming of stardom on the X Factor', says Iain Duncan
By James Chapman
Last updated at 9:50 AM on 21st February 2012
Stacking supermarket shelves is better than dreaming of stardom via TV’s The X Factor, Iain Duncan Smith insists today as he mounts an extraordinary attack on critics of a flagship work experience scheme for benefit claimants.
The Work and Pensions Secretary reveals that thousands of youngsters on the dole have already secured jobs after taking part in a Government programme which offers two-month placements with leading employers — with more than half coming off benefits.
Human rights lawyers representing an unemployed graduate who objected to stacking shelves in budget store Poundland have led critics to liken the scheme to ‘slave labour’.
Mr Duncan Smith argues that some of the country’s most successful businessmen — including former Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy — started their careers on the shop floor.
Work, he says, can give people languishing on welfare handouts a sense of purpose and open up opportunities.
Mr Duncan Smith argues that an obsession with celebrity risks breaking the link between ‘success and hard work’ — as well as indirectly fuelling mass immigration.
‘It is because of such attitudes that we have seen British businesses bringing in large numbers of foreign nationals to do jobs for which they cannot find people at home,’ he says.
According to the latest figures, 34,200 benefit claimants so far have taken work placements under the Government-led programme. Firms taking part include Tesco, Boots and Holland & Barrett.
Initial analysis of 1,300 cases shows that after 13 weeks, only 49 per cent remained on welfare handouts. Some stop claiming, but thousands are getting jobs.
However, Labour frontbencher John Woodcock is expected to warn today that while the scheme appears ‘shambolic’, his party must acknowledge its own failure on welfare reform and back the ‘something for something’ principle.
‘We must not be diverted by the inadequacies of one particular scheme into stepping back from the principle of increasing obligations placed on benefit claimants as we increase support available to them,’ he is expected to say.
Over the past few days, the battle lines have been clearly drawn on the issue of youth unemployment.
In one corner, we find those prepared to do everything they can to give a chance to young people who are looking for a job and help them gain experience of the workplace.
In the other, armed with an unjustified sense of superiority and sporting an intellectual sneer, we find 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’.
Let me start by saying that I am enormously proud of our Work Experience scheme, as well as of the companies who have chosen to take part.
Under the scheme, young people on benefits are offered placements of up to two months with a variety of employers to give them an opportunity to get an experience of work.
Firms who have signed up include Boots, McDonald’s, Argos, Tesco and Primark. In return for working 30 hours a week, the unemployed continue to receive their normal Jobseeker’s Allowance as well as expenses.
The thinking behind the initiative is the recognition that when considering whether to take a young person on, employers will highly value any relevant work experience.
It is up to young people to decide, voluntarily, whether they wish to take part in the scheme, and they can pull out of their placement during the first week without sanction.
This is why the scheme has been so successful. The fact is that 13 weeks after starting their placements, around 50 per cent of those taking part have either taken up permanent posts or have stopped claiming benefits.
Take, for example, 20-year-old Samantha Davies, from Neath, South Wales, who took a Work Experience placement at a local nursery. She impressed them so much that she was offered a job, and now she has signed off Jobseeker’s Allowance. Or Chris Burke, from Lewisham, South-East London, who got a job as an administrative apprentice at a local college.
What’s more, the scheme is so popular among young people that it is oversubscribed. As a result, we are expanding it later this year through the new Youth Contract to guarantee a place for every unemployed young person who wants one.
Given this, you may be surprised to hear some of the criticism that has been directed at the scheme in recent days, including the claim that young people are being forced into ‘21st-century slavery’, or that we are engaging in so-called ‘workfare’.
Let me be quite clear: this Government does not have a workfare programme. Workfare is an American term used to describe employment programmes which force all jobseekers to work at a certain point of their welfare claim — a practice which we do not consider to be effective.
Here, in Britain, it is true that we have a programme which can require claimants to undertake a short period of compulsory work if we do not believe they are engaging properly in the pursuit of employment. But the programme is carefully targeted and — importantly — it is entirely separate from the voluntary Work Experience scheme which I described above.
The fact is that the Government’s opponents — who constitute a group of modern-day Luddites — are throwing around these misleading terms in a deliberately malicious and provocative fashion, and will stop at nothing in their attempts to mislead the public on this issue. What is utterly unacceptable is that many of Britain’s largest and most prestigious employers have found themselves caught up in the middle of this undignified row.
The firms who have offered work experience to young people on this scheme have been absolutely brilliant and, most importantly, they are making a difference in terms of helping the young unemployed get into work.
For example, out of around 1,400 individuals who have taken part in the Work Experience placement at Tesco, more than 300 have been taken on in permanent roles with the supermarket.
Most admirably, these firms are offering opportunities and helping the economic prospects of our younger generation.
I hope more companies will see the benefits and choose to take part by investing in our young people in the future. However, to help these youngsters, we also have to expose the lies of those who have launched unedifying attacks on our programme.
Sadly, so much of this criticism, I fear, is intellectual snobbery. 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.
How insulting and demeaning of the many thousands of people who already work in such jobs up and down the country!
I doubt I’m the only person who thinks supermarket shelf-stackers add more value to our society than many of those ‘job snobs’ who are busy pontificating about the Government’s employment policies. They should learn to value work and not sneer at it.
Furthermore, those 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.
As well as betraying their ignorance and snobbery, our opponents have pathetically opted to use human rights laws, making claims about people being subjected by force to ‘slave labour’. These, though, have no basis in reality, since our work programme is purely voluntary. It’s time to put an end to this damaging nonsense. The hard truth is that finding the right job for someone is not easy. There isn’t always one simple route.
Meanwhile, 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.
In light of such attitudes from so many indigenous Britons, it’s small wonder that businesses have hired so many foreign nationals in the past decade or so. The fact is that they can’t find the employees of quality that they need from the available British workforce.
Now is the time to provide opportunities for young people, to help get them back and competing in the workplace, and to give them real opportunities for the future.
Work experience is part of the fight-back of welfare reform — based on the principle of enlightenment, not entitlement.
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