I COULDN’T resist a snigger when I spotted this quote from a "Strategic Recruitment Manager" for Alton Towers theme park…
"Whether it’s a part-time, full-time, permanent or summer job you’re after, if you’re bright, enthusiastic, customer focused and like to get on with the job in hand, it’s highly likely there’s an opportunity here."
Hmmm. Recruitment professionals such the once responsible for that drivel do not live in the real world, it seems to me.
They inhabit an entirely imaginary society where people are "bright, enthusiastic and customer focused".
The reality in 21st century Britain is this: most people who work are very stressed and depressed by their jobs.
They are also deeply, deeply bored by the daily grind, and full of contempt for those whingeing customers / clients / stakeholders their employers expect them to interface with.
Sorry if that seems a trifle cynical, but I detect a profound and widespread workplace alienation that is becoming quite worrying.
And I think we should be honest about what sort of country we live in.
Britain is a nation full of crap, low paid jobs and even crapper public services.
You have only to scan the jobs pages of the regional media to see what a travesty of dysfunctional quangos and creeping State intervention the employment market has become.
In every sizeable town and city, the dreary, bloated local council is by far the biggest employer –complete with parking mafia and anti-smoking nazis on the public payroll.
Real industry, such as the former silk mills of Leek, just a few miles from Alton Towers, and shipbuilding on Merseyside, are long gone.
Now, indeed, some of Leek’s mills are being converted into hostels for cheap labour from abroad which is being hastily recruited to work at the aforementioned cheesy theme park.
Foreign workers are more likely to put up with low wages while being "bright, enthusiastic and customer focused" – in a place where the official emphasis is on Having Fun and a Thrilling Time on white-knuckle-and-tight-sphincter rides.
Local Staffordshire people, it seems, are not that interested in having fun while at work, or working for the wages offered.
That’s why the Towers are having to recruit from farther afield. Hence the PR bullsh** from our "Strategic Recruitment Manager".
It’s the same story right across the country. Workers are piling in from the former Communist nations of Eastern and Central Europe.
Because even people from cultures previously under the jackboot of sour-faced tyrants are somehow better suited to being ‘bright, enthusiastic and customer focused’ than we poor, long-suffering Brits.
Meanwhile, the many millions in the UK who are still employed are stressed to the limit of their endurance by long working hours culture, endless target-setting, performance inspection and assessment, spiteful office politics, workplace bullying, boring meetings and moronic management jargon of the kind so effectively satirised by TV’s The Office.
I have come to these views not really out of personal experience but rather because I have been talking to many friends and acquaintances about the subject of work.
They all tell the same story: that they are so very bored by what they have to do for a living; that their jobs are slowly corroding their souls.
And as for employment opportunities offered by "Strategic Recruitment Managers" and their ilk, it all seems very unappealing – though not all of it is low paid.
Recently I saw a job advertised by Halton Council (that’s Widnes and Runcorn) for a Principal Officer – Client Design Advisor.
I’ve no idea what the work involves – though I hardly think good design will feature in anything a council does.
The salary for this post is attractive, mind – £37,543 to £40,101 for a 37-hour week.
Even so, I’d need to be paid considerably more than that before I agreed to spend so much of my week in Runcorn. Or Widnes.
And I speak as someone with considerable experience of our country’s celebrated Crap Towns …
I was born in Wigan, worked in Hull and Stirling (and I still have nightmares about my time in that particular Scottish hell hole) – and I buy me underpants in Birkenhead Market.
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Lord Vino du Matin wrote...
Ever think about the child chained to a sewing machine in Bangladesh who makes your underpants?
REGAN REPLIED: I hardly think of underpants at all, milord. I simple don't have the traditional British obsession with gussets.
Posted by: Lord Vino du Matin | February 4, 2008 11:46 AM