Ok - It's not 24 hours but I got bored and decided to carry on from where I left off  (Hey - whose writting this blog anyway! ;) )

Ok so here we are. We can take on anybody to replace a full wage earner when they leave - and pay them sh*t. We can work them for 32 hours a week, pay them £64 for thier trouble and dump them after 6 months to replace them with new ones. We can hold down wages and bugger around with working conditions until the people we currently employ at £6.10 per hour (minimum wage) get pissed and leave - and then replace them with cheap labour in the form of people who, if they  have the balls to kick up, stand the very real chance of loosing all thier income via loss of benefits. We can enrich ourselves via this form of wage-slave labour and simultaneously benefit from the downward pressure it exerts on wages and the fear it engenders about thier futures in the ones we already employ. Woah.... this is getting good!

Now lets see what this does to society as a whole. Well for starters we all live (or have done to date at least) with the fundamental assumption that if we work, we will get paid fairly and at the going rate for the work which we do. There have been systems in the past where people have been put to work under threat of punitive reprisals if they complain, for way less than the going (or indeed livable) rate of the day - but these systems normally come under the term of slavery and we don't want to use that word here! The first and painfully obvious result of this misconcieved, ill-executed scheme (four related ones in fact) is that it undermines a 'real' job (ie one that pays at least minimum wage) every time an employer does what mine are considering. For every clown forced into work at £2 per hour a fully paying job goes to the wall - but hey, perhaps this is what 'they' want. There have always been elements of society for whom minimum wage is anathema, and it seems now they may at last have found the way to circumvent it legally. Why was the person at the job centre unable to tell me anything about the criterea an employer had to satisfy - maybe because their aren't any? Why could I find no information 'online' - maybe because their isn't any. Perhaps if you are going to undermine one of the fundamental rights of our society - a fair days work for a fair days pay - you might not want to shout to loudly about it.

The second thing that this does - and some people might not like this point of view - is it allows all of the dead -beat parasites who are prepared to sit on their backsides and do sh*t while the rest of us support them to justifiably do so! This is a 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card for them which they will use mercilessly to continue to avoid doing any work - and the rest of us will not be able to say anything about it because they will be right!

For us who work at the bottom end of the 'status pyramid' it means don't expect a wage rise anytime soon - you just became an expensive luxury to your boss and he may well decide he don't need expensive luxuries some time in the pretty damn near future!

Now all this stuff may seem pretty deep (and to be frank a bit boring guys), but do me a favour - stay with me. Never forget that when we work for wages we sell our labour, not our souls. The minute you walk out of that place you are the equal of anybody in it including your top, top, top boss. He want's a bar of chocolate - he pays. He want's to go to the cinema - he pays. He want's your labour to make him richer - HE PAYS! This is such a fundamental right that to interfer with it in the way the 'work-experience' scheme does, is to cut to the very heart of what we in the UK know as our society. It's never been massively fair - but hell, it's never been that unfair. You've never been able to force someone to work for next to nothing and then discard them like a used cigarette butt when you have finished with them - at least not in the recent past you haven't, but it seems that this is about to change.

Interestingly the Americans have long had the 'free-intern' system in place which restricts the acess of those from lower social backgrounds into certain areas. In this system you get your degree in some area - say Law - and then in order to get work you have to give your services free to the proffession for a year or so before anyone will give you a paid job. As your own financial rescources will be the only thing to support you over this period, chances are that if you aint rich or your parents aint, then you can't afford this period of unpaid work. Hence your CV will not show the requsite year of internship - and no-one will employ you. The Qeen herself recently showed her own distaste for this system of holding back people from 'the wrong backgrounds' by advertising for 'a paid internship' at Buck House! Good on her - that's a start at least. Perhaps now she'll take a look at the other end of the scale and show a similar dissaproval of making the low end workers perform thier 'menial' duties for less and less of a living wage!