The British labour market is a puzzle. On the one hand, it’s a low-wage economy that needs to import sandwich-makers from Hungary because nobody in Northamptonshire wants the job. On the other, to work in a shop that sells the selfsame sandwiches, the jobseeker needs to pass an exam that might give pause to a fellow of All Souls.

Two young people who share my house recently applied to be assistants at a supermarket chain; if I insert the adjective “fashionable” before the last two words, there will be little mystery as to its identity. The days when grocers stuck notices in their windows – “smart boy wanted” – have, of course, vanished with the trolley bus, the lead model soldier and the liquorice pipe. Applications need to be made online through a three-stage test. Failure at any of the stages means rejection. “The more honest you are, the more informed our decision can be as to whether or not you would enjoy life here, working for us,” says the supermarket. But honesty is a risky policy. Better for the employer, probably. But better for the candidate who badly wants a job? It’s the story of interviews down the ages: which of us is immune to the temptation of telling the employer what we think they want to hear?

First we have to understand the question. I tried applying for an assistant’s job at one of the supermarket’s London petrol stations. An early question wondered about my approach to personal development. Which of the following statements best described it?

“1. I am happy to complete the learning and development opportunities that my manager suggests to me in order to do well in my role.

2. I focus on learning and development opportunities that are directly relevant to my role, in order to become as good as I can at my job.

3. I take every opportunity possible to develop in my role in order to give my best performance.”

The first looks to me the most passive – or realistic – of these choices, and the third the eagerest, beaverest. But these are fine gradations, and as someone who has earned a lot of his livelihood trying to clarify text, I can’t see much difference between 2 and 3. The next question asked about the kind of organisation I would like to work for. Would it be “efficient and hierarchical, where decisions … are made and progressed quickly?” Would it be one “where everyone is consulted about the majority of decisions, even if this means decisions take a long time to progress?” Would it be “a flexible but relaxed organisation, where employees can take responsibility … but decisions are not always followed through?” The last two sound both desirable and ill-fated. It would have to be the first: “progressed quickly” carries the employer’s note of approval.

Awaiting me at the end of this rigorous and high-flown process, supposing I got through all 60 questions and the interview, was a position on the nightshift, 10pm to 6am, serving petrol in Ealing for £7.42 an hour – say £15,500 a year for someone who knows what “hierarchical” means and has previous experience working in a “fast-paced customer-service environment”, and is prepared to sleep through most of winter’s precious daylight. That’s £15,500 a year in a city where £100,000 is said to be the least you need to afford a mortgage on the average dwelling.

True, some of the 300 workers that Greencore, the UK’s biggestsandwich-maker, wants to hire from Hungary will be earning even less: one in 10 will be paid the minimum wage, £6.50 an hour, or £1,127 a month for a 40-hour week – compared to £260 a month, the minimum wage in Hungary. But Northamptonshire is a far cheaper place to live than London. In terms of what his or her wages will buy, the Ealing pump attendant probably has the worse deal.

Why, then, does the sandwich-maker need to go searching for labour in Hungary when the supermarket has such a plenitude of British applicants that it can sieve them like an Oxbridge college? Because of an inescapable fact: making a sandwich is much harder work than selling one – more taxing physically, less esteemed, less visible and infinitely more monotonous. A fairer society would reward the maker much more than the seller, just as the miner was, by the 1950s, paid much more than the coalman. Until it does, which is to say until supermarket and supplier set a higher price for their sandwiches, or the two firms decide to take less in profit, the hands that spread the tuna with the mayo and the chicken with the sweetcorn will increasingly be hired abroad.

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I failed the test. Waitrose didn’t want me for the nightshift. As for our young house-sharers, one failed at the second stage, while the other got to stage three and is still waiting to hear. None of this is a disaster, but the ease and inevitability with which my generation slipped into paid employment now seems miraculous. As a fairly aimless 17-year-old, I answered an advert for a job in the library of our nearest town. The next morning, a small man in a blue uniform knocked on our door to ask if I would come immediately for an interview – he was Mr S, one of the janitors, and he’d travelled six miles by bus. I went with him to meet the librarian, Miss R, who sat grandly in her office beside a sparkling coal fire. I was hired and the next day met my colleagues, who were nearly all women, apart from the two janitors, Mr T as well as Mr S, both nearing retirement age and in their uniforms looking like figures popping out from behind the doors of an ornamental clock.

Work was secure. I suspect nobody had been sacked from the library since Andrew Carnegie founded it. Every morning we arranged the fiction alphabetically and the non-fiction according to Dewey’s decimal system. We stamped books with due dates; Miss R, read the TLS by the fire and ordered more; occasionally, Mr S or Mr T would go to a house with a “notifiable disease” and put the books there in the incinerator. Nobody suggested that I took “every opportunity possible to develop in my role”. It was only a job, for heaven’s sake. Between five and six every evening we would hear the rush to and from the bus station on the street outside, as workers from the mills and offices went to catch the buses that had just been emptied by workers from the dockyard. So many jobs; it made the first one easy to leave.