At the risk of moaning on about the same old thing yet again and sounding ever-more like my father, I’m still dismayed by how work-shy some people can be these days, writes Charlie Cashdan.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to work either.  It’s cold outside, goes dark too early, trains are a nightmare, roads even worse and my cosy warm house and snugly bed make me so reluctant to leave the house!

Difference is, I still get up at 6am (ish) five days a week, pull on my clothes and trudge off to de-frost my car in the dark and bitter cold, drive to the station, wait for my daily late train until my fingers turn blue, work all day and wearily trudge home again in yet more darkness getting back to my cosy house just in time for Eastenders.  Then it’s off to bed before starting all over again.  But, I would still much rather do this than live off the state, even if the benefit payments were more than my wage.

When I worked in a pub full time, before the advent of minimum wage, the cash-in-hand cleaner was on various benefits and earned just £10 a week less than I did.  He thought it was hilarious that I would choose to work for so little money when I could simply stay home and sponge, but I never even considered it.

Now it’s December and I’m trying to get some of my reluctant temping team (my core team are brilliant and work very hard) to do as much work as possible to fill all our Christmas bookings.  Most of them are young, fit and healthy but don’t like to do more than three days a week at best.

If you do persuade them to go full time, they just land up phoning in sick or come out with classic excuses like “dog is sick”, “I have an emergency hair appointment”, “there’s no one else to feed the chickens”, “I haven’t got change for the bus”, “My cousin head-butted me last night”, “the cash machine ate my card” and on and on and on…

Then I advertise for an office part timer to do admin thinking it will be great to help someone out of work or someone who has been made redundant but out of nine shortlisted, only three turned up for their interviews.

I wrote about this in a previous blog and about the fact that my ex-secretary now earns more in benefits than we paid her and therefore has decided never to work again.  I hoped lots of equally outraged hard working folk would write up and back me up on this one.  Instead I just get someone saying that I can’t have been paying her very much then, and all other comments were very angry because I had been put off by the one interviewee’s very visible tattoos.

Someone described my job advert as a ‘Cheapskate ad’ while another commented that it was a ‘silly little job’!

We are a very small locally-based company and can’t really afford an admin assistant but I really need the help and genuinely wanted to give an opportunity to someone out of work at this difficult economic time.  The advert was far from cheap, and as only two possible candidates turned up it worked out to well over £100 per person so not cheap at all!

We paid my ex-secretary as best as we could (comfortably above minimum wage), far more than I earned as a domestic cleaner, industrial cleaner, waitress, bar worker, and she had very little responsibilities and only worked from about 10 till 4.30.

She gets lots of benefits because she is a single mom (in the sense that her boyfriend lives with her but keeps clothes at his mom’s and uses that as his official address) so she gets all her rent paid, free dental, free prescriptions and loads of other monthly payments.  That’s why she’s better off, not because we didn’t pay her enough!

But that’s not the point!  So what if she didn’t earn lots of money working here?  Surely it’s better to work than not at all unless you have independent means?  I would rather scrub floors for minimum wage than take benefits!

The job I advertised wasn’t a ‘Silly little job’ it was a job for goodness sake!  It was clean, easy office work for pay above the minimum wage with flexible hours to fit in around childcare.  When I think what I have done for far less money and never thought it ‘silly’.

And as for the tattoos, I didn’t mean to cause offense and actually like tats (once went to get one myself when I was a rebellious teen and bottled out at the last minute!) but the role does involve going out to clients on the shop floor occasionally and as we supply one of the most fussy image conscious sectors of retail, tattoos on the back of hands and wrists won’t go down too well with my clients!

My boss once walked the floor with me in very smart dark blue jeans and after she had left I had that many complaints about how disrespectful they thought it was!  Don’t get me wrong, if the tattooed person had been right in every other way I would definitely have hired her but the other two candidates were stronger regardless.

I’m not prejudice or out-of-touch, like one commentator suggested, and employed a lovely mature lady with loads of experience, big hair and a big personality who loves the job!

It’s just so hard for employers at the moment to tempt people away from great benefit deals, especially if you can’t pay big money (which many small business can’t however much they would like too).

People just don’t seem to want to work anymore unless the job meets all their requirements.  I know this isn’t true of everybody but wrote the previous blog to put across the side of an employer and just got very misunderstood.  The tattoos weren’t really the issue; it was the six people who didn’t even bother to turn up for their interviews for my ‘silly little job’ which was the key issue really.  What does it say that no one commented on that and just seemed to blame me instead and my ‘cheapskate ad’?

I’ve done far worse for far less and I don’t think it’s being prejudice or out-of-touch to expect to find workers with the same work ethic as myself?

Agree with Charlie? Post your comments below.