Some years ago, whilst I was still at university supplementing my student by loan working in a bar up to five nights a week and living in a shared house, one of my then housemates came home announcing that she had found ‘an amazing job’ which allowed her to work just one day a week and bring home more money than my five bar shifts used to earn. Intrigued, I asked for more details of this wonder job and sat back as my housemate launched into a breathless account of how she and her fearless new colleagues were out to save the world. “Firstly, she gasped, in a froth of self-congratulatory altruism, “the best thing about the job is that it’s working for charity!” So far, so good I thought; charity is good. “Basically, you go out with a team of people and you talk to people in the street and you ask them to sign up to donate money for your charity.” “Which charity is this?” I asked. “Oh, it could be a different charity every week, we work through an agency” she replied. At this point, alarm bells began to ring.

To cut a long story short, it transpired that my housemate was being paid around £9.50 per hour to stand in the street, harassing the general public into surrendering their direct debit details and donate to charity making, over a ten hour shift a daily total of £95, which was a pretty damn good take home for a days work for a 20 year old student. Add to that the fact that employment agencies of any sort levy a charge on top of this daily wage to the employer, in this case the charity, which can easily be equal to or even in excess of the actual wages paid to the employee. Lets be generous in this case and assume that the agency in question charges 30% on top of wage charges. That leaves a daily cost to the charity in question of £123.50. After a rushed mental calculation, I exclaimed to my housemate “wow, you must have to work really hard to pay for yourself; how many are you expected to sign up in a day?” “One” she replied, “at least while we’re new to the job, later on you’re expected to be better at it, the really good ones get four or five in a day!”. Four and five in a day sounds like a pretty low rate considering the cost; “how much are these four or five people donating?”; “about £3.50 a month on average”.