Jobs

Imagine a world where employers judged applicants solely on their dress. Anyone in frayed clothes or scuffed shoes would never get a job. This would be unfair to poorer applicants so, in the name of equality, the government might offer favourable loans up to £1,000 to buy interview clothing. At first glance this would seem a wonderful way to promote fairness. Yet if the number of jobs remained constant, such a policy would have the opposite effect: it would merely ratchet up the level of wasteful, zero-sum competition for what limited chances exist. Soon, anyone not sporting Savile Row tailoring and handmade shoes would be written off. Rather than widening

Every year, like clockwork it comes, the traditional concern that the younger generation don’t do summer jobs like they used to. As the school holidays approach a politician is wheeled out to write a nostalgia piece about part-time jobs, and the ‘essential skills’ these offer. Holiday and Saturday jobs, you see, are the foundations of a successful career, with their promise of resilience-building and priority-juggling. Some statistics will be cited about businesses being desperate for applicants with ‘soft skills’, and on cue, media-friendly CEOs are trotted out to support whichever wayward minister has been handed the keys to the Workshy Teenagers wagon. And so it was that in late July,

In the same song where the brilliant lyricist Ian Dury gave the world the couplet, ‘I could be a writer with a growing reputation/ I could be the ticket-man at Fulham Broadway station’, his narrator speaks of ‘first-night nerves every one-night stand’. Perhaps we are now more accustomed to one-night stand referring to a casual sexual liaison, but in the less metaphorical sense, dating from the 19th century and was later used by Bernard Shaw, it simply means a one-night musical engagement, or gig. Gig is first recorded in 1926, in Melody Maker. By 1939 it had given rise to the modern-sounding gigster, someone who plays gigs. Now in our day, it has found a

The Spectator is hiring. We’re looking for our first full-time social media editor, but one with a difference. We are looking for someone who understands The Spectator’s voice and can present our articles on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. The social media editor’s responsibilities will include: Developing The Spectator’s social media strategy. Projecting The Spectator’s voice on all forms of social media. Promoting subscriptions via social media, while liaising with the marketing team. Producing web analytics. The successful candidate will work full time in our London office and report to the online editor. They will be expected to edit and maintain The Spectator’s social media channels to the standard readers expect from the magazine. There

More Brits then ever are now in work, with the proportion of the working age population in jobs hitting 74.6 per cent at the end of 2016. Good news such as this about Britain’s job market has become ‘almost mundane’, says the Daily Telegraph. But even in this climate of healthy jobs figures, these latest numbers are worthy of attention. For the Telegraph, this is a ‘vivid reminder that Britain’s flexible labour market has weathered all the recent storms’. Talk about joblessness and unemployment used to dominate the headlines. But no more; ‘the conversation’ now is more ‘about the nature of those jobs’. Talk of the ‘gig economy’ in particular

Boy is planning his gap year. Every few hours he rings from school to give me a progress report. ‘I’m allowing three days for Denver. Is that long enough?’ ‘We-e-ll, it’s pretty key in On the Road. Maybe five?’ ‘And I’m definitely stopping for a day in Farmington.’ ‘Where?’ ‘It’s where the Horace Walpole library is.’ ‘Oh, of course. Silly me.’ Actually, I don’t much mind where he goes so long as it’s nowhere near where I went for my gap year: Africa. I love Africa. I’ve had some of the most amazing, thrilling, dramatic experiences of my life there: climbing the Great Pyramid before dawn and seeing the graffiti

One of the most important jobs in The Spectator is opening up, and we’re looking for a pretty exceptional person to fill it. Peter Robins, our brilliant production editor (read about him here) is off to the New York Times. We’re looking for someone with skill, patience and a love of writing to take his place. When Graham Greene was working at The Spectator, he said the magazine can be described rather simply: it’s the best-written weekly in the English language. As such, we’re one of the few titles to have increased what we invest in sub-editing over the years. The calibre of The Spectator can be seen in the

The TUC general secretaryFrances O’Grady doesn’t get a lot of airtime. Compared with predecessors a generation ago, such as Vic Feather and Len Murray, she is all but invisible. But in her Congress speech at Brighton on Monday, she struck a note that must have resonated with many of the public who have no idea who she is when she spoke of ‘greedy businesses that treat workers like animals’. She was referring to zero-hours contracts, below-minimum-wage rates such as those effectively paid at Sports Direct’s Shirebrook warehouse, and rock-bottom fees per delivery offered to self-employed Hermes parcel-van drivers and Deliveroo fast-food couriers. And of course anyone not fundamentally opposed to

If you read Coffee House you’ll have noticed how busy politics is right now – and you’ll have noticed that our coverage is second to none. Coffee House now offers the latest news and analysis, but also the best and most relevant soundbites, videos and podcasts. The appetite is huge. And we need people to help us meet that appetite. So The Spectator is looking to hire a broadcast producer, who will be in charge of coordinating and producing our audio and video content. The right candidate will be responsible for producing our catalogue of podcasts, from The Spectator Podcast – presented by Isabel Hardman, and listened to by thousands of people every

In Notting Hill Gate, in west London, the division was obvious. On the east side of the street was a row of privately owned Victorian terraced houses painted in pastel colours like different flavoured ice creams. These houses, worth £4 million to £6 million each, were dotted with Remain posters. On the west side was a sad-looking inter-war council block, Nottingwood House, which had dirty bricks and outside staircases and corridors. No posters there. But that is where my fellow campaigners and I headed — down to the basement entrances with their heavy steel gates. We looked up the names on the canvassing sheets and rang the bell of one flat after

A recent Coffee House blog quite rightly noted that many British people are concerned that high levels of immigration have hurt their jobs, wages and quality of life, and noted too that this anxiety is understandable as workers have had a rough ride in recent times. Yet the authors, self-styled data-crunchers from the LSE, say that ‘the bottom line is that EU immigration has not significantly harmed the pay, jobs or public services enjoyed by Britons’. One might think that the lack of harm, let alone significant harm, is a poor argument for anything. On pay, real wages are little different from a decade ago. The counterfactual — which surely is

There are strict rules governing the language that MPs can use in the House of Commons. Words like ‘guttersnipe’, ‘stoolpigeon’ and ‘hypocrite’ are considered unparliamentary, and MPs can be chucked out of the Chamber for the rest of the day if they do not withdraw their comments. Sadly, though, they can get away with behaviour that is quite unparliamentary in the sense that it undermines the purpose of parliament on a regular basis. This unparliamentary behaviour popped up at today’s Work and Pensions Questions, but it occurs in almost every departmental question session, and at Prime Minister’s Questions too. It is the Utterly Pointless Question, one in which an MP

NOTE: Applications are now closed. Summer’s coming, and we’re looking for interns to spend a week or two with us here at The Spectator. We’re looking for people who love good journalism and understand how digital media works. The position will be paid (but not very much). We don’t mind where or whether you have gone to university; Frank Johnson was a superb editor of this magazine and he left school aged 16 (as have some of our editors). What matters is flair, imagination and enthusiasm: skills that you can’t really learn in any classroom. We’re not looking for writers, per se: The Spectator is blessed with a large number of brilliant freelance writers

The Prime Minister no doubt knew he would be fanning the flames when he waded into the argument about the admission of black undergraduates to universities like Oxford and Cambridge. We should do him the courtesy of trusting he means it when he says he feels strongly about discrimination in the awarding of university places – and I think he does. In this week’s issue Toby Young marks David Cameron’s essay with tutorial authority, and finds his case wanting. Particularly valuable among Toby’s marginal notes is his point that you can’t accept applicants if they haven’t applied – and black and working-class students disproportionately don’t. But we enter a vicious