Today I watched a few episodes of West Wing (yes I am still addicted), did a few things around the house and read, a little. I was able to do all these things because I am unemployed. I returned from travelling to a bleakness I can hardly describe. It was within me and without, the within is a much longer topic than the without so I’ll start with that. The Bleakness without was and is the current employment potential for university graduates in the U.K. I spent 381 days travelling, not all of them were spent insatiably devouring the unprecedented beauty of some of the places I visited, some were spent working. I disliked my job, well for the most part, meeting and interacting with people, even on a superficial level has something about it that can be whimsical (yes I used the whimsical). Indeed whenever you manage to crack the crust of a persons social shell you get a brief moment of unparalleled human connection; a strangers trust might be difficult to earn but when received it is the most valued. Moving towards my point, which I realise just disappeared into a thicket of self-indulgence, I carried out and stuck with this often difficult and unrewarding job because I knew it was a necessary precursor, the entrance fee if you will, to the buffet of beauty available in the world.
Now I am home, I am unemployed and seeking something worth while and or interesting to do to earn my money this time. I jog and work out, I volunteer with the Red Cross, I write and read, I juggle (not well) and yes, sadly all to often I find my self in the haunting blue glow the television. I tell you this because none of these aid my employment status, in fact they probably hinder it. And yet, signing on with the job centre and with employment agencies seems to have also done little to improve my employment. I admit that I took jobseekers allowance, wholeheartedly, I have to apply for 8 jobs a fortnight and be constantly in my home town in order to seek work, apparently the job centre haven’t learnt you can access the internet from anywhere. I have now applied to an almost countless number of jobs and I haven’t heard back from any of them and I’ve been applying for jobs I’m over qualified for so who is it I’m competing against?
Despite my dislike at this truth, this is not this posts quibble, my issue comes with the type of employment I must seek; pretty much anything. The thing is when I was on jobseekers before I went travelling I was more than happy to seek any job that would pay because I just wanted money to leave. However now I have a gradually growing desire to find something a little more substantial and definitely something a little more interesting that simply filling a role in order to get off jobseekers. I have had no encouragement to apply for graduate roles, in fact I’m not even sure they care that I have a degree and £20,000 debt as a result that won’t be paid off earning minimum wage but it is minimum wage jobs they give me. In fact the girls words were “admin work, you can do that right?”.
I am not trying to demean these type of roles in a anyway, I have done them and the people that do them are some of the brightest and nicest people I have ever met but I went to uni for three years, I paid for that time by not working apart from in a bar and by studying a subject that has no direct application to any particular job field but I went because I wanted to experience the university life, to learn and yes I did want to fall comfortably into the hedonism that comes from almost total freedom. I learnt more than what my degree implies; I advanced in ways I don’t think living in my home town and working could have. Regardless of what you might think about university it is a place of discussion, of intellectual stimulation and debate, a place where opinions come in an incessant hum of individuality. I know that most people who don’t go to university have an understanding of what happens their, they experience it from second hand stories of debauchery and regret but of course they experience it through those stories, no one tells their friends about piles of books they read, the number of hours spent in silence in libraries and reading rooms across the country. No one tells their friends about the secret disappointment we all endure when an essay comes back with a mark lower than our expectations because essays aren’t just the number of words you can write or the number of hours you can write them in, they are a sample of our intellect, a few pages of our opinions on things that once seemed so far beyond us that to imagine that someone else read our opinions on ideas shared by geniuses is almost so arrogant it induces pride by association.
I have digressed once again. To gather back this unravelling post I’ll move directly to my point: I was offered little to no help in finding a suitable job to my skills. Perhaps it is idealistic, even naive to expect the government appointed job centre plus agents to find suitable jobs for everyone they see, I understand that this would possibly be a huge undertaking and extremely difficult but shouldn’t they at least try? I feel that cloak of bleakness, disrespect and shame drape across my shoulders every time I enter that patronising establishment, as if they have one hanging above the door attached to an invisible trip wire that drops it once you enter. I wouldn’t mind going if they didn’t look down on you like you were a burden to them; I find a slight irony in the idea that if unemployment was suddenly stamped out the people who would become unemployed would be the ones now working in the job centre. So why shouldn’t they work harder to find an appropriate appointment, most people have some skills and if they don’t then it should be the job centres job to rectify this. The job centre is funded by the government, if people leave school with no applicable skills and no will to find work then the government has done too little prior to this to be absconded from blame. But I won’t get into education reform, not today.
The idea, I believe, in the degradation painted onto the unemployed is to want them to run screaming to the lake of employment and wash away their dirty unemployed skin and rejoice in silken touch of the cleansing water. Only the lake has become a pool. And when the pool becomes a pond, its then that people who are unemployed will need to be anything other than patronised. Perhaps more schemes to push voluntary work whilst unemployed or how about the young unemployed being sponsored into jobs they might not have enough experience for; by this I mean the company is encouraged to take enthusiastic younger workers on to higher paying roles for minimum wage, the government then matches this, once the person has enough experience in the role to be worthy of it outright, say six months down the line, then the company pays the full wage. It would be a benefit to companies -only having to pay minimum wage for a job that might have cost them double – and to the young unemployed – who may just learn that they are good enough to do important jobs, now, not in twenty years – but I realise the added expense to the government in a time when added expenses aren’t an option. I also realise that this doesn’t help older unemployed people or people who just aren’t capable of doing those roles for whatever reason. I know this would cost hundreds of millions to do, not to mention all the other hair-brained schemes I want them to instigate. The truth is this is a blog by someone who knows little about government financing or what being a long-term unemployed really feels like, I’m incredibly lucky, I have a degree, family support and friends around the country. Not everyone does, so lets stop ignoring them, they aren’t just statistics and they aren’t a burden, they’re just unemployed.
ifiweresmartericouldwritebetter 