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.

How much Diversity is Good?

How much diversity is good?  That was the challenge from Steve Hollinghurst, which given that the title of the conference was Celebrating Difference, working with and learning from ... started us off with some hard thinking!

I have recently returned from the Diocesan Curates Conference (about which others have already blogged here and here).  As chair of the organising committee I don't want to write about the conference but about some of the ideas which struck me.

In particular Steve's challenge kept returning to me.  For example is paedophilia (I have blogged on paedophilia before when I saw some statistics on the number of sex offenders in church) or murder "good" diversity?  And yet while summarising the various talks for the Bishop (when he came on the Sunday to preach and preside) he reminded me of the "Circles of Support" that are active in the Diocese and this took me away from my knee jerk reaction that he was right.

Vera Hunt (profoundly deaf) quoted John Hull (blind) that she is not an 8 cylinder engine running on 6 cylinders, but a 6 cylinder engine running on 6 cylinders and I remember John Hull saying that the risen Christ had wounds.  This set me wondering whether there are examples of difference which are 8 cylinder engines running on 6 cylinders.  Perhaps a simple example is someone with a broken leg - this is something which is temporarily not working as intended.  I wondered whether there are things which are God given (equating to the number of cylinders) and things which are "sin" (equating to firing on fewer cylinders than you have been given).  I am not sure that this works perfectly - but it gave me something to chew on.