Employment

As many of you may be aware, I attempt to do other things than post on this blog to make ends meet. Until someone offers me a colossal sum of money to spout bollocks about things that’s just the way it will have to be.

My job searches have led me to apply for absolutely everything that’s available and yesterday I received an email inviting me to an interview.

At this point must people would have felt quite good, but not I.

Why’s that?

Well, the job was as a kitchen assistant for a pub chain. Rather than name and shame this pub chain, I’ll just call them Featherspoons.

The people at Featherspoons wanted me to attend an interview. I’d already spent half an hour of my life that I’ll never see again filling in their online aptitude, language and possible-workplace-scenarios tests, but that’s to be expected nowadays.

The thing that really pissed me off was when I read further into the generic response email they sent me.

“If the interview goes well, we’ll invite you to attend a 2-4 hour UNPAID WORK TRIAL. Admittedly, this amounts to us just exploiting people for free labour and will keep our overheads down and our directors’ bonuses up, but that’s it. Like it or lump it. We’ll also expect this to be done at our busiest time to make sure we exploit you as much as physically possible,” is a close approximation of what they said.

I was appalled.

A swift bit of research appalled me even more. It turns out this practice isn’t remotely illegal, which once again demonstrates once again why our current government are a set of colossal bastards. It is however an illegal practice in Australia, but the commute would be hideous.

So if they have twenty applicants for one job, they can get up to 80 hours of free work done for them. At minimum wage that represents a saving of £520, or the wages of two fulltime staff members for a week.

And really, how hard is it to stick tasteless food in a microwave and make them warm and tasteless?

Needless to say, I told them to stick their interview where the sun don’t shine. Or I may have just silently withdrawn my application online. Whatever.

Fuck you, Mr Featherspoon and fuck you, The Government.