Learning Experience?

So, according to Ian Duncan Smith, failed Tory Party leader and current Work and Pensions Secretary, believes that shelf stackers are more important than geologists.  At least, that's the implication of his latest ill-judged comments.  We was, of course, responding to the outcome of a recent court case in which a young unemployed woman - who happened to be a geology graduate - successfully challenged the government's policy of forcing the unemployed to do unpaid work, typically in supermarkets, or risk losing their benefit payments.  Now, what Duncan Smith is quite blatantly trying to do is reframe the whole issue, to make it one of an unemployed graduate thinking that manual labour was somehow 'beneath' them.  Which, of course, the court case wasn't about.  The geology graduate's objection was to being effectively used as slave labour by a large commercial concern that already makes huge profits, in the guise of this being work 'experience'.  Quite apart from the fact that she learnt nothing from the experience, she, not unreasonably, pointed out that shelf-stacking had no relevance to her planned career path and that being forced onto the scheme had actually resulted in her having to give up the unpaid work experience she had arranged herself at a local museum.  But why let the facts get in the way of a bit of opportunistic Tory propaganda, eh?

Speaking as a graduate - actually not just a graduate, but the holder of a Master's degree and Post Graduate Certificate of Education - I can honestly say that I don't think that manual labour is 'beneath' me.  Indeed, whilst I've never stacked shelves, I have flipped burgers, sold double glazing over the phone and worked as a driver in my time - and was paid for doing those things.  What I learnt from those experiences was that I wasn't very good at most of them and that I wasn't interested in them.  The fact is that they are usually mind-numbingly dull, physically demanding and extremely low paid.  I have enormous admiration for the people who have no choice but to do such jobs day in and day out just to survive.  Which is why I find it completely unacceptable that anyone should be forced to do them for nothing!  The fact is that anyone, if they could, would choose to do something else for a living.  Which is why many people go to the trouble of gaining qualifications, whether academic or professional.  Curiously, as a member of a government which likes to bang on about wanting people to be aspirational, Duncan Smith seems to be saying that some people have no right to aspire to anything other than low-paid manual drudgery.  Not that he or any of his colleagues have ever done any of these jobs they think are so important - and if they are that important, why aren't they better paid?  Or in the case of this 'work experience', paid at all?  That said, I'm sure that lots of those Tory bastards did unpaid work experience - as interns at their fathers' or friends of their fathers' multi-national companies.  That must have been hell for them.