I have another appointment tomorrow and I intend to do what I was too angry, humiliated and depressed to do the other day - ask for jobs in the social care sector, which they tell me is hungry for people.
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bohemiancoast pointed out that the Jobscentre itself needs people, but I am not sure I want to work for them, because form what I have seen, they are in an impossible position right now and the system that drives them is coming to a standstill with a great screeching of burning gears.When the good-willed woman I saw two weeks ago was looking for jobs for me on her terminal, she asked me what I did. DTP, I said. She said, what is that? I said, Desktop Publishing. Still confused, she asked me, what exactly did you do?
I formatted documents with the Office package, I said. I created documents in Word and inserted graph from Excel, and did quite a lot of Powerpoint presentations.
I think what she did at this point was look up "office", "word" and "excel" in her spreadsheet.
Do you have administrative experience? she asked.
No, I said. If I had I would have found a job even before they fired me.
She then printed out and gave to me two ads, one for "office assistant", at 11,000 P/A and 40 hours a week, and one for entering data at a centre that processes fines, at "in excess of national minimum wage".
It's hard to explain the feelings that come from seeing that kind of work in your future. In my previous job I started of making 37,000 with about 35 hours per week. I then fell to 18,000 for about 40hr. In times of crisis, any job is better than nothing, but there is not doubt that a feeling of deep humiliation and despair comes over you when you realise that that is the best you can do.
Alex told me: If I was an employer, why the hell would I advertise through the Jobscentre? And of course I don't know - I suppose there are incentives, or maybe legal requirements. But for sure, one thing you can get through advertising through the Jobscentre is people willing to work for the minimum wage. In this day and age, very qualified people willing to work for the minimum wage.
The kicker however came when I explained that I expect to be able, in a couple of years, to be qualified as a counsellor, a role for which there is at the moment quite a desperate demand for. The Jobscentre itself is thinking (and quite rightly) to provide free counselling to the people it tries to help, and for that they need about 5,000 counsellors on top of the ones that are already sorely needed elsewhere. And here I am, two years into my training.
And the woman tells me, "You have to be willing to give up your course if you find a job".
There must be, somewhere, something I can do that would both earn me money and allow me to gain experience towards my practice. Failing that, why not subsidise me me to go into full-time education to be trained as a counsellor? They do that for teachers don't they?
(Well - I know that they do that for teachers because I listen to the Today programme. Nobody at the Jobscentre ever asked me if I had thought of retraining as an Italian teacher, for example.)
The staff at the Jobscentre isn't stupid or evil. They can't find me better jobs because their database caters to the people who sought help from the Jobscentre when there were jobs around, and they tended to be people with little or no qualification who were unable to look for the right spot. And also because, of course, there are no better jobs right now. If there were, my agency would find them for me.
There isn't much that the Jobscentre can do in this climate, save perhaps trying to keep people from starving while the tide turns. In the meanwhile, there are things the Cabinet could do to face the crisis, and one is retrain those people whom the market has to let go even if they are bright, good workers, good performers. We need teachers, and I tell you, there is many an unemployed quant who was as relieved as I was to be out of the City and would gladly settle for teaching math instead of being an office assistant at 11,000 per annum. And many an ex-personal assistant who'd be glad to be doing social work.
After having watched the Jon Stewart interview with Cramer today I was struck by one thing he said about the workers on Wall Street - they are decent people who work their ass off and want to do the right thing. And I thought of my bankers, and couldn't but agree. My own bank was perhaps a bit different, a bit less evil, than others, but for sure, my bankers were decent, polite, nice young people, and God did they work hard, for not a whole lot of money more than I made. The average, I repeat, the average working week for an analyst at my bank was 100 hours. When I was working the night shift I would see them come in with a book at four am, asking for it to be ready at six because they wanted to revise it before their VP arrived at nine. They would then go home, sleep for two hours with their blackberry switched on an instructions to wake them up if there was a problem, and be ready at six for their book.
Of course as my friend and boss told me, then if they last they retire at forty with their millions. But it's hard to see them as fat cats, when you have seen them for three years as desperately overworked and put-upon kittens.
This is not to say that there wasn't evil. Evil in the machinery, not in the single people. And of course, there were unquestioned assumptions and blindness and supine adherence to ideology.
They still have their jobs though, most of them. I didn't work for Lehman or Bear Sterns or Merrill Lynch. So yes, they are scared and tense and freaking out and they're not getting bonuses, but they are spared the Jobscentre.
indescribable