Glossaries injected daily

"Organisations will say they are doing well with a pilates class or a bowl of fruit but it has to be a much more integrated approach."

See how easily it all slips away. In this minor masterpiece of  employment journalism, the unnamed journalist tells of disengagement in a manner that is itself disengaged. Perhaps it is a protest against the drudgery of arranging media releases into the pretence of a story, the work of one who had dreamed of a journalism career, gathering news and writing real stories about things that matter, but who now languishes on the employment pages where the copy serves little more purpose than keeping the advertisements apart.


And who can blame the writer? Every story in the employment section, after all, is a little bundle of anxiety in which employers are warned about the employee - a constant source of woe, a liability, a threat. The writer is an employee. The writer may have some interest in détournement. The writer may have tired of reading the findings of dubious surveys that purport to show the true state of the workforce but do little more than promote the survey company.


Might we be living in the early days of a new literary movement, some sort of gonzo employment journalism, in which the media flannel of organisations like Gallup is cut and pasted into bizarre new shapes, defeating its original purpose and sowing the seeds of discontent among the bewildered army of job seekers? We can only hope.