On Thursday, twitter was alive with the news that Tesco was using the unemployed to stack its shelves, which would ordinarily be A Good Thing. The difference here was it was advertising jobs for no actual pay; the unemployed were expected to do the job for the same government benefits as they'd receive for looking for a real job, or, for that matter, sitting on a sofa. What Tesco characterised as "offering work experience", others saw as "offering no money for normally paid work". This was rather reinforced by news that those refusing to take the Tesco non-shilling would lose those very benefits Tesco was substituting for wages. It doesn't take a Shakespearean imagination to see this scheme as something approaching indentured servitude, to use an anachronistic euphemism. Or #TescoSlaveShame as the rather more pithy twitter hashtag would have it.
After spending the day trending on twitter, things skidded into a full-blown car-crash, as Friday's Daily Mail published the full story. Not normally known to be sympathetic to the needs of benefits claimants, even Paul Dacre's myopic scribes could see there might be something awry with the fairness of the scheme. Tesco's response seemed curiously slow-witted, as though it couldn't see the damage being done to its reputation: by the afternoon, its twitter stream was on lockdown, with the only response to the thousands of tweets and retweets being a single 140-character reply.
Tesco seemed paralysed between choices, like Buridan's donkey, busily deciding to do nothing: it neither defended its actions with particular skill nor took decisive action to reassess its participation in the Workfare scheme. The rather mealy-mouthed rebuttal was that the scheme came with a guaranteed interview at the end (whose date was unspecified) for all participants, blaming "an IT error" for it appearing in Job Centres as a real job. To those who questioned why a company with annual profits of £3.8bn would need to use unpaid labour, it offered the pledge it was trying to persuade the government to remove the threat of benefits withdrawal to those who didn't want to take part.
The episode had all the hallmarks of an Age of Damage fail: a badly thought through scheme, poorly understood internally and a corporate communications team paralysed from taking decisive action. It also shows a failure of leadership by senior management at Tesco, a failure by anyone to take charge of a worsening situation and to tackle genuine customer concerns head on. When it entered Workfare, Tesco was probably already planning the PR triumph it could claim from helping the unemployed - and in some cases those written off as unemployable - into full time work. By failing to understand the implications of the scheme - in particular, the forced participation under threat of benefit loss - Tesco's social antennae were uncharacteristically out of tune with how this would play with its customers.
With a few tweaks this could have been something of a PR win for Tesco. For some long-term unemployed people, the opportunity to get some work experience with a major employer, even just for expenses, might be attractive - to help build up some self-confidence, give them something to put on a CV, or just put them in contention when a paid position came up. Tesco could have offered to pay the difference between Job Seekers Allowance and the wage for the job, making everyone quids in. Or they could have done what Sainsbury's did: took a long hard look at the scheme and decided it would be better if they withdrew.
Tesco had better be sure that it's worth the candle for them, with the like of boycottworkfare.org on their case, using social media like twitter and Facebook to beat them daily until they do something decisive. Not to mention customers like me who might now have, in the back of their mind, the nagging feeling that the person helping me with my shopping is a modern slave. That sort of thing can do terrible damage to a brand, in a competitive market like food retail.
No comments:
Post a Comment