Recently, I applied for a part-time customer service position in a local supermarket in the hope of earning some extra cash while studying for my A-levels. I was soon contacted to arrange a date for an interview. I was nervous, excited and worried – I, like many people, have a number of commitments and extracurricular activities, but I understood that working and earning some money would have to take priority over them. How could I complain? After almost two years of relentlessly handing out CVs and application forms, this was the closest I had ever got to employment.

A day after the interview was arranged, I received another call to inform me that a recruitment ban had been put in place at the store and they were no longer hiring. Despite my frustration, I wasn't all that surprised. With this supermarket having originally been named as one of the prime leaders in the government's "work experience" scheme, why on earth would they hire me for a permanent position when they can sift through all the eager, cheap young labour being filtered through the system?

Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne said on the BBC's Daily Politics show that workfare was designed to combat a "something for nothing" culture in our society. However, the major flaw in this argument is that major corporations are getting exactly what they want for nothing. Some of them claim that they may end up paying work experience placements, but this will never amount to the full wage of an employee contract.

Everyone can agree that work experience and training are important and fulfilling, but they should not be to the benefit of exploitative businesses, designed to minimise cost and maximise profit. Surely it's worth questioning that there is now such a plethora of available work placements on a weekly basis: are we to believe that none of these could be converted to actual jobs? The system is just self-manufacturing biased and false success.

The government is constantly throwing statistics at the media in attempts to qualify their "achievements", but the rate of people finding work following the scheme does not differ much from the amount of time it usually takes someone on benefits to find employment anyway. The information is too quantitative and not qualitative enough to explain unique individual cases of how employment was found.

Here's a statistic that the government is been rather quiet about: seizure of cannabis in England and Wales has more than doubled since 2004. Growing frustration at a lack of proper employment is only likely to make that figure grow higher and higher.

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