10,000 opportunities but not a single job

Welcome to another instalment of the crisis of capitalism

Andy Burnham’s Labour administration has announced the launch of the new Modern Work Experience Programme with Sainsbury’s, suggesting that it will make 10,000 ‘work experience’ positions available to young people in a supposed attempt to address declining employment among teenagers leaving school.

According to The Independent, when the scheme begins in October, it “…will focus on communities with high levels of free school meal eligibility and significant numbers of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) – which currently exceeds one million nationally.”

This project is being advertised as though it will provide decent roles that position young workers for full-time employment in the future. In reality, Sainsbury’s is not creating 10,000 jobs. It is offering 10,000 very loosely defined ‘opportunities’, including school visits, CV and interview workshops, workplace visits and a small amount of practical workplace experience.

When we break down the numbers, the announcement becomes even less impressive. More than 5,000 places will be delivered through KickStarter Explore, which is aimed at 14–18-year-olds and consists of school-based classroom learning and practical work experience. Only just over 200 places will be delivered through KickStarter Insights, a collection of regional workshops supposedly designed to improve communication skills and help with CVs, interviews and job applications. Another 5,000 “opportunities” are connected to Sainsbury’s programmes and wider industry roles.

Over half of these so-called ‘opportunities’ are therefore aimed at 14–18-year-old schoolchildren. They are not workplace roles but are essentially educational activities being thrown together and presented under the headline figure of 10,000 job opportunities.

Neither the government nor Sainsbury’s has announced this as a procurement contract, but Sainsbury’s has a very close relationship with Labour, especially through Lord David Sainsbury. He was appointed a life peer by Tony Blair’s administration in 1997 as Baron Sainsbury of Turville and served as Science and Innovation Minister from 1998 to 2006.
Lord Sainsbury has provided millions in donations towards Labour campaigns. He recently gave £550,000 to Labour in March, with a further £160,000 in support provided specifically to Andy Burnham. It is safe to say that the former head of Sainsbury’s plc has a strong working relationship with the Labour Party. No matter who the leader is.

For Sainsbury’s, the rewards do not come in the form of immediate paid government contracts, but it’s not philanthropy either. It creates a cheap pipeline of low-paid school leavers who have already undergone a period of training through Sainsbury’s, alongside the prospect of unpaid labour. The company is given access to thousands of potential future workers without guaranteeing them a wage, or a job. Not even an interview is promised.

From this Sainsbury’s also gains positive publicity and government endorsement while helping to shape what is considered ‘work readiness’. Instead of employers having to train workers after giving them a job, young people are expected to prepare themselves beforehand and prove that they are ready to be exploited.

Andy Burnham has alluded to the issue of youth unemployment, which is real but has existed for many years. Nearly one million people aged 16–24 are currently classed as not being in education or employment, they are called NEETs. However, this figure does not simply represent school leavers who cannot find jobs. It includes young people across an eight-year age range and those classed as ‘economically inactive’.

The government takes the issue of decaying capitalism and places the blame on young people not being motivated and prepared for work. This utterly avoids the real issue: the deindustrialisation of Britain and what the kids leaving school have lost alongside it in apprenticeships, youth-training programmes and secure, paid employment.

Teaching schoolchildren how to apply for jobs at Sainsbury’s does not solve unemployment. The number of jobs is not increasing. All that is happening is the creation of a cheap labour pool for the supermarket to dip into whenever necessary.
In January 2025, Sainsbury’s announced that it would cut more than 3,000 jobs. These cuts were part of the company’s plan to make £1 billion in operating cost savings.

Sainsbury’s decision to make more than 3,000 workers redundant in January 2025 by closing its cafés, pizza and patisserie counters and reducing management roles, provides a stark illustration of the priorities of capitalist production. These were not redundancies imposed upon a company fighting for survival.

Sainsbury’s remained highly profitable: its latest results report retail underlying operating profit of more than £1bn, underlying pre-tax profit of £718m and retail free cash flow of £574m. Yet thousands of workers could still be dispensed with as part of a programme designed to strip another £1bn of costs from the business.

This is the logic of capitalism laid bare. It is not sufficient for a company to be profitable; capital is driven continually to reduce costs, raise productivity and defend or increase the return on investment.

Labour appears on the balance sheet not as the livelihoods of thousands of workers and their families, but as a cost to be eliminated whenever doing so improves profitability. The contradiction could hardly be clearer: a business can make hundreds of millions of pounds in profit and still declare thousands of jobs surplus to requirements. The purpose of production under capitalism is not to provide secure employment, useful goods or stable communities, but to reproduce and expand capital; human need remains subordinate to that overriding imperative.

That same company, having removed thousands of real, paid positions, is now being celebrated by the Labour government for offering 10,000 job ‘opportunities’. Workers lose actual employment while Sainsbury’s gains access to a government-backed pool of potential recruits and receives a free public relations campaign.

This does nothing to address the underlying causes of youth unemployment. It is an attempt by finance capitalism to manage the consequences of its own decay. A system with no incentive to guarantee secure and socially useful work instead provides one of Britain’s largest retailers with a platform from which to present itself as part of the solution to a crisis it has helped to create.