There are so many intoxicating details to the scandal of the jubilee stewards. The Guardian's Shiv Malik reported on Monday that a company called Close Protection UK had stewarded Sunday's pageant with the following staff: 50 "apprentices", who were paid £2.80 an hour, and 30 unemployed people who were not paid at all.

Some were deposited from Bristol and elsewhere in the middle of the night before the pageant, and told to camp beneath London Bridge. This proved difficult, because of all the concrete. They had to change into "rain ponchos" (cellophane, we call it in my house) and combat trousers in the open air. Some say they were only informed just before they got on the coach that they wouldn't be paid (the standard rate for this kind of work, CPUK says, is £10 an hour). They couldn't back out, because they were told that any work they might get in the Olympics was riding on the pageant.

They did a 16-hour shift, after no sleep. One woman said there was no access to usable toilets for 24 hours. They were given a paper bag in the morning, with a sandwich and a bag of crisps and told not to eat it because it was their lunch. In the sheeting rain, without any sleep, their lunch disintegrating in their hands, I am astonished that nobody ran rampage and tried to kill the Queen.

There is a distinctive disdain exhibited by all these details: paid employees are not treated like this. We are looking at the estimation of a person for whom money is everything, towards a person who's not getting paid. Molly Prince, managing director of the company, refuted the Guardian story with some lustily expressed but random facts: "CPUK have not only purchased tents for everyone (some stewards wanted to use their own but it was too wet to put them up, they insisted in having a go!). CPUK had organised a warm dry communal area for all to sleep." Well, I doubt it was warm and dry under London Bridge.

Prince also claims some volunteers chose not to be paid because it would have affected their jobseeker's benefit claims. But no sentence is as telling as this: "On investigation this morning the majority of the team who worked the event were fed and looked after as best possible under the circumstances." She talks about these people as if they're livestock. They might bellow a bit when they get wet, but they were definitely fed.

Tarry a minute on Prince, before we get on to the commissioning splice that led to two different organisations being paid for this stewarding, while some stewards themselves got paid with a bag of wet carbohydrate. She has been director of nine different companies since 2006, all of them in the same business – Event Safety Solutions, Angel Event Solutions, Voluntary Event Services, LDCUK, and others – many of them running from the same Wigan address as CPUK. Each has been dissolved. On the face of it, we are looking at someone who sucks at running a business.

Look at Prince's own justification for not paying the stewards: "The jubilee job will run at an extensive loss, and if you take a look at our published accounts you will see the company ran at a loss last year due to our investment in giving apprentices work placement opportunities which we could not charge our clients for." How, on a stewardship contract that is certainly paid – the whole job was worth £1.5m, split three ways between the Greater London Authority, the culture department, and the Home Office – can anyone run a loss on employees they're not paying, even if you include the cost of uniforms and licences? Looking at this as a career in events management, I'd say incompetence is a kind explanation.

Meanwhile, another company was involved in sourcing workers for CPUK, scouting around the country for unemployed people so luckless that standing underneath London Bridge at 3am was considered better for their morale than being asleep. That organisation is Tomorrow's People, a charity headed by Baroness Stedman-Scott, a Conservative peer, and it's anyone's guess how that doesn't constitute a conflict of interests, being in receipt of government contracts for helping the unemployed, when your own party is in government.

On Monday, as this storm broke, Tomorrow's People advertised for a communications manager on the Work for an MP website. I guess we should be thankful for the small mercy that the job is at least paid. Someone with "a sound understanding of digital media" to start "ASAP". Tomorrow's People was reprimanded in 2010 for being too partisan, in defiance of the requirements of a charity to be impartial.

So Tomorrow's People is being paid for getting people "into work"; the company with this "work" is being paid, however boracic its accounts might look; the government departments are paying out. Boxes are being ticked. Presumably someone, somewhere is making a mint from these security licences that CPUK claims to be funding from the goodness of its corporate heart. And people will have returned home feeling like they've been kicked in the face.

The audacity of these contractors makes me want to laugh, but what is paralysingly unfunny is how much larger this is than two organisations; how much desperation there is that people would do this job for nothing; how much sheer unfairness there is in society recasting the cost of training as something to be borne by the person starting out; how much inhumanity there is in abasing the unemployed.

Twitter: @zoesqwilliams