BACCALAURÉAT - SESSION 2015- DNL SES- ANGLAIS
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Thème : Quelles politiques pour l’emploi ?
Ghost jobs, half lives: how agency workers ‘survive’ in Britain’s shadow economy
Meet Martin, an 'unperson', one of the million agency workers facing a lifetime of insecure, low-paid work
His story confirms a truth some politicians admit in private but none dare acknowledge inpublic: that something in the jobs market is fundamentally broken.
Martin, you see, is an 'unperson', in a workforce that is breeding 'unpeople' by the hundreds of thousands.
He works at the Jacob’s biscuit factory in Liverpool, although he’s not employed by the firm. Instead, he works for Prime Time Recruitment, one of Britain’s biggest suppliers of contract labour. He does the same work as Jacob’s own staff, and often substitutes for their absences – but is on the minimum wage; they get paid over £2 an hour more. His holiday and sick-pay benefits are much worse, too. Jacob’s staff enjoy access to a workplace gym and medical centre; when Martin had an accident, the medical centre turned him away, telling him to find his own doctor.
Martin never knows when he will be working. Nor does he know where he will be working. When he turns down impossible jobs, the agency then uses a legal ruse to say he is unavailable for work and pays him nothing.
Martin’s phone, with its texts and calls from Prime Time, has more control over his life than he does. As a middle-aged father, he’s borrowed to cover food and fuel bills, and “I’ve not known when I’ll be able to pay anything back”. Holidays? Forget it.
Add the estimated 1.2 million agency workers to the 600,000 on zero-hours contracts, and you have a shadow¹ workforce of about 1.8 million unpeople, enjoying none of the security that should come with employment in a rich country. The growth of the shadow workforce points the way to a new world in which big employers draw upon a pool of casual labour, deprived of most of their rights and negotiating power.
A few hours after Martin and I say goodbye, he texts me with a message for you, thereaders. What you need to know about agency workers, he says, is, “they don’t live, they survive”.
Source : as fromThe Guardian, Monday 19 January 2015
¹ à l’ombre, en partie caché.
Questions
1. What is the employment trend described in this article?
2. Why is it a problem?
3. How should the government react?
RAPPEL
20 minutes de préparation; oral: 10 minutes sur le document et 10 minutes d’entretien