The lack of money doesn’t really bother me. I try keeping my spending simple and extravagancies to a minimum. I occasionally miss being able to bang tickets for gigs on the credit card but generally I know this is a much better way to lead my life. That said I could do with some extra money.
Logging into Jobs.ie resulted in what I feared. Nobody is hiring a slightly lazy writer in his mid thirties who starts work at 11:15. This meant I would have to go back to what I did before, namely customer service and admin.
It will be hard for me going back into that soulless atmosphere and following the protocol of a faceless management who view employees merely as cogs in the profit machine. I hoped I might find something a bit more personal. I didn’t. What I found was even more vile and despicable than I could have imagined.
Instead of multimillion pound looking to hire overqualified people to do basic jobs for minimum wages I found this. Insurance company Aon are hiring an intern under the Jobbridge scheme.
JobBridge is programme set up in order to help people new to the workforce gain experience through internship. To qualify the jobseeker needs to be claiming social welfare benefits which they are allowed to continue to collect, with a stipend of €50, for the duration of the internship. To me, this sounds like a great initiative allowing people to use their time to improve their skill set and increase their chances of finding full time employment.
The interns that I have met through Fighting Words were all doing it for these reasons even before the inception of Jobbridge. I think they deserve the opportunity to improve their lot without risking their benefits. I was under the impression that it would mostly be NGO’s and other non profit bodies like Fighting Words that would benefit from the scheme
The job Aon are advertising appears to be a basic entry level customer care position. Low experience shouldn’t be a problem and is probably expected as they would need to train any suitable applicants in company specific products and procedures. I can say this, having looked at hundreds of such Job specs in my time with similar requirements, aptitudes and specification.
It seems to me that they are taking advantage of the intern scheme and offering what other companies advertise as low pay, low experience jobs but with the benefit of them having to not pay the applicant a penny. The employee would be expected to work a full week for and survive on his, which works out, against an average 39 hour week, to be €6.10cent per hour as opposed to a minimum wage of €8.65.
Aon are a pretty successful company. They have a long term sponsorship deal with Manchester United and according to their 2010 Annual report they are “the #1 intermediary of primary risk insurance and #1 intermediary of reinsurance” And “created the #1 human resource consulting and outsourcing firm with unmatched talent and capabilities.” They don’t seem like a company who would need to save €337 a week for the sake of one employee.
They might argue that working with Aon is a priceless opportunity and all experience garnered would be excellent reward when it comes to future employment opportunities. I’d argue that if they need someone to the job, pay them fairly.
I won’t be applying for this job. I can survive on what I have and I don’t need the experience of being a dogsbody. And if I do get a job elsewhere and buy things that might need insuring I would be reluctant to use Aon based on this. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys, so you would have to wonder what they get.
