Gi's a job

This article talks about the increasingly common practice of expecting young people to work without pay to gain experience.

I am quite clear that I come down on the side of banning it as a practice.  If we claim to be a meritocracy (which I think we do) then making certain jobs open only to those who can fund free working is unfair and should not be allowed.  I think that there is also a good point in the article about the minimum wage!

However, whilst this may be seen as a modern phenomenon and one which is spreading among the more popular jobs (nearly called them professions J), it has a long history as I can recall in my younger days that barristers (and I don't mean coffee makers) had to study and then work for a pittance and be paid in arrears such that most of that profession came from those who were able to subsidise the early part of the training.  A quick look now suggests that this has changed with pupillages funded, so here is one example where action has already been taken.

An alternative would be for the government to sponsor this year, much as they do with student loans - however I am wary of this because, as with student loans, there would still be a temptation for those from more disadvantaged backgrounds to run up large debts.

What benefit is there to the companies?  To avoid minimum wage issues there should be no immediate gain to them, so presumably it is about seeing candidates ahead of time; they could always develop better recruitment procedures - after all if they are after talent then at present they are ruling a significant proportion of the population out.

Ethical Companies

It is good to see companies being monitored for ethical behaviour.  However, as always there are question marks about what constitutes ethical behaviour.  Personally I see the treatment of employees as a major part of this and do not consider the "rank and yank" approach to appraisals as ethical.  I don't know whether they still use it but General Electric certainly used to and lo and behold they appear on the ethical companies list!

Shouldn't there be a threshold for this?  Good policies in one space shouldn't be able to outweigh bad ones in another.  After all they are the only company ranked in their sector.  Or is this a case of not being able to agree that "rank and yank" is bad?

Where are all the Characters?

What has happened to the characters in politics - and for that matter in other spheres of life?  When I were a lad (strains of the New World Symphony please) there were characters in politics - people who disagreed with the party leader, but were still elected election after election.  Similarly in business, when I started there there were eccentrics and if you wanted cast iron eccentrics what better place to look than the church!

Nowadays eccentricity seems to have gone out of fashion.  Politicians have no hinterland, as Denis Healey called it, and appear to be scared to offend the hierarchy for fear of rejection.  In business putting the hours in and avoiding making a mistake appears to count for more than having good ideas and in the church there are still some eccentrics around - but we seem to be trying to catch up.  Common Tenure appears to be making the church more like business and will I suspect lead to less eccentricity.

Before I get carried away, all was not well in the old day.  The selection criteria in all of my examples appeared to be who you knew rather than anything objective and prejudice and "unfair" behaviour abounded. But we do seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our search for the "safe" option.  I wonder whether today Churchill, John Harvey Jones or David Jenkins would have been put into post.