In the Gutter of Career Failure

When you open the glass front door of the employment agency Labour Ready, in Paris Street, you know you are entering a different world. You are going through the looking glass and entering the nether world, or the world of the unclassed and workers in the dawn. This is the world of the underpaid and the desperate, the migrant newly arrived in the city. I have heard the call, seen the posters and am joining up for the duration.

Labour Ready has a slick, glazed and shiny shop front, in one of the original shopping streets of Exeter, Paris Street. You feel not like a desperate unskilled labourer or factory worker on minimum pay, but a consumer, someone entering Next to wield consumer muscle. It could not be further from the truth, however.

Go into any employment agency these days and they will ask, or demand, proof of your identity. It is not enough to speak with a broad Devon accent and look as local as a cream tea, you must prove it. It is the same at the Jobcentreplus, too. You must have a passport and several letters proving where you live, such as the gas or electricity bill and so on. True, you will be surrounded by foreigners of all known descriptions and they must sort out the legal from the illegal, subject to a £2000 fine, or something. But it is annoying nonetheless.

In the Express & Echo (the local evening paper for Exeter) they never miss a chance to state that there is now almost full employment and that anyone not working is a shirker, or too fussy. It is the other way around. Employers in Exeter are simply too fussy: they throw at you application forms that take two hours to complete; they never even acknowledge that they've received them; they might ask you for an interview where they will ask annoying, stupid question such as 'can you show that you are a team worker?'; and, finally, they want anything up to about four references.

Manpower, in the High Street, are the worst. They routinely ask for four references which, in my circumstances, is impossible. Which is a shame, really, since most of their facile jobs I could do easily. For instance, if they have a part-time job as an audio typist, or data entry clerk, you simply have to be able to type. No matter; they need four references and then all of the bullshit about 'prove you are a team worker', 'when did you demonstrate initiative'. Worst of all, when you spot a handwritten job on their board on the pavement outside - and this goes for every single agency in Exeter - and go inside to enquire, they will get you to waste one hour filling in their forms before even asking you any questions. I went through this only to be told that the job on the board outside was no longer available. Did it ever exist in the first place?

Take Royal Mail, in Sowton. A bigger bunch of pompous, robotic management morons you will never meet. They are all dinosaurs from the 1970s trying to adopt modern recruitment methods yet failing spectacularly. Job: Mail Sorter, Sowton. What do you need to sort mail? I've done it several times before, as a Christmas Casual in London, and you need simple reading skills and very basic fitness levels. But this bunch of fucking morons put you through 'psychological testing' where some idiot conducts tests on reading a postcode, copying postcodes and stuff like that.

How dumb are they at Royal Mail? The stupid woman who interviewed me - Suzanne Devonish - was a fucking ugly, stupid dumb old woman; she just couldn't see that you simply need basic reading skills and basic fitness. They turned me down, of course. When the other bloke - two interviewers to be a Mail Sorter, for fuck's sake - started asking me what my strengths and weaknesses were I knew it was time to leave. They even had the fucking nerve - since the job was a mere ten hours a week, on a weekend - to question whether I would be working anywhere else during the week. Pathetic. They expect total loyalty/fidelity, brilliant IQ scores and stuff to earn the grand sum of £5.80 an hour! And that's on a Saturday and Sunday! And then the Express & Echo complains that workers are too fussy! This is modern, Tony Blair New Britain for you.

At Kelly 'Services', as they describe themselves, they have even extended the concept of the 'embedded' journalist, the type you get in Iraq who lives, sleeps and follows the regiment around, assimilating the whole ethos of the soldiers and experiencing things from their point of view. (It is simply old-fashioned war propaganda and censorship given a new, modern name). The Kelly embedded consultant can be found at South West Water, in Sowton, with her own office and surrounded by the people she serves. On the other hand, it makes her - why are they always women, these employment agency people? - obsessed with her organisation, blinded from the reality of the world outside.

Employment agencies - and, for that matter, all employers - need to be less fussy in offering employment. It is simply a myth that workers are too fussy in Exeter, too choosy when it comes to finding work. You should be able to get work easily, without a barrage of over-personal examination and fussiness from all these people.