Jobs?

I've just been to town to do my shopping, while the weather's nice. Across the road from the seafront is a new Premier Inn being built with a Brewer's Fayre (iirc) restaurant, and possibly some other places (all owned by Whitbread). All under the same roof. I noticed in the window it said "3000 qualifications will be given out, 1000 work placements/apprenticeships for young people, and 5000 jobs over three years (or something like that)". That's 6000 jobs in a seaside Premier Inn in a matter of a few years, and this is being presented in such a way as to make me thing 'wow, lots of opportunities; maybe the government really are helping, and maybe the private sector really is the great saviour'. What it really says is that they are happy to exploit young people in jobs, not just the placements/experience (workfare?), that can't have much of a lifespan.

 Is Premier Inn such a shitty place to work to explain such a turnaround of staff to justify that figure? They must fast track people into upper management and move them somewhere else perhaps? It's the usual spin we are seeing more and more of. Looking on their career page I see only two vacancies (in management) for the place in question. So these are just casual positions that mean nothing (they don't advertise those on the web and I can't be bothered to ring them up).

I walked into Waterstones and saw someone I've never seen working there before. Not a big deal, I don't go there every day after all. But I've noticed that Waterstones is the sort of place where this happens. Their staff strike me as comprising students. Someone such as myself wouldn't stand a chance competing for a position, and even then I regularly look on their web page which, outside of the holiday season, never has anything anyway. 

There was also a new 'ristorante' along the seafront with its own ice cream parlour (or probably 'ice creme parloriatte'). I had known this place was under construction over the last few months but I had no idea who owned it or what brand/company were running it (I still don't, the company name meant nothing to me). So had I wanted to be the person I saw selling ice creams on the seafront how could I have applied? This place was not advertising for staff in the local press and, given that I use the (poorly programmed) DWP database (almost) daily, I didn't see it there either. 

There is a whole attitude built around finding these sorts of jobs that seeks to make people like me, the people that obviously aren't doing 'enough' (otherwise we'd find out about these jobs) look lazy. But where is the help? I still haven't heard from the Salvation Army, would they have known about these jobs? Doubtful; their tired little enterprise is just as casual as anything else I've seen. It really is about being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people - such as the owners of seafront ristorante's and local bookshops (even then most retail positions are part time, or 'key' time as they started calling it, back in the day).

Of course the elephant in the room is the fact that I don't want to sell ice cream and frankly I'm fairly ambivalent about selling books, though I prefer books to ice cream. Neither of these things inspire me, neither of them contribute to society (we have enough booksellers). Retail is tiresome, especially when you can't relate to people and have to put up with their inane babble; comments like "careful, the ink's still wet", when being handed money, or "you look bored mate, here's something for you to do," as if you're the customer's personal skivvy. Yes I'm bored, I said when once working on till in a garden centre on the NMW, because there's fuck all to do except sit (stand, actually; unless you were elderly the till supervisor got stroppy with people sitting) and wait for some hot till action to materialise.

My jobsearch for this Friday's delayed signing time (can't wait) will, I fear, be very minimal. Frankly I'm too tired to do any more. This merry go round is just a fruitless waste of time, no matter how easy it might seem to the working multitude to sit and do an online search. Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. He wasn't wrong.