I’m a jobs snob. Iain Duncan Smith should be one too.

 By Hervé KERNEIS

The last 10 days have seen things turn from bad to worse for Iain Duncan Smith and his cherished Work Programme. First Tesco was caught advertising for night shift workers who were going to get paid their jobseekers allowance (!) plus expenses. Attempts to defend the scheme only led to another barrage of complaints from commentators. And yesterday the Guardian reported that A4E, a private company delivering the Work Programme, had been using jobseekers as free admin staff.

Despite days of increasingly irritable debate, a great white elephant still stands in the room. Those of us dismayed by profit-making companies abusing the unemployed and stinging off taxpayers shouldn't be fending off accusations of 'job snobbery' - we have every right to be snobs about these types of jobs. Not because they aren't jobs worth doing, but because even when employees are paid, too often the wages are pitiful and the jobs offer little opportunity to progress.

We have just completed some analysis looking at job opportunities for those without graduate degrees. Non-graduates make up more than half of the population and are more than twice as likely to be unemployed. But the problem is not just about quantity – it’s the quality of jobs that truly condemns non-graduates to a grim future.

We judged job quality through pay and opportunities to progress. By these criteria the hospitality sector is one of the worst offenders. Even at the top end a non-graduate earns less than £25,000 a year, considerably less than the median graduate starting wage of £29,000 a year. The care sectors also perform badly, with those looking after our children and elderly paid peanuts with limited career opportunities. Some may say we can’t do anything about these wage packets – after all, don't we need to compete with China? But, unless I’ve missed something, there’s no danger that our elderly are about to be shipped off for cheaper care elsewhere.

So where are the good jobs? Manufacturing, construction, wholesale and distribution, though these sectors pose problems of their own. The number of jobs in manufacturing have long been in decline, adversely affecting regions already suffering from high unemployment. Each of these sectors also have male-dominated workforces, compared with the largely female workforces in hospitality and social care. 

The government’s answer to our skewed job market so far has been to up-skill non-graduates, arming them with NVQ3s. But we found that someone with no formal qualifications in transport manufacturing would get paid more than someone with an NVQ3 qualification working in the hospitality sector. Blanket skills targets are not going to work, we need a sector-specific approach to deal with the bottlenecks to better wages within particular industries.

The recent revelations around the Work Programme have uncovered another hole in the current government strategy, but this is secondary to the principal problem of a lack of good jobs.

While some may say current circumstances make any job a good job, it’s telling that more than half of the children living in poverty in the UK are from working families. Working tax credits and increased demands on public services from those in poverty mean bad jobs end up costing the state anyway. We conclude it would make more sense to tackle the problem at its root and incentivise companies to pay decent wages while adopting an industrial strategy to create new work opportunities.

While IDS drones on about the need to teach young people the value of work, he needs to recognise that it is the market that doesn’t value their work. It is simply cheating our young people, and all non-graduates, to sentence them to jobs lacking decent remuneration and little chance to flourish.