LONDON, UK – Pop-up shops in some of the capitals trendiest shopping areas can offer jobseekers valuable work experience exposure, says reed.co.uk

As more and more high-street retailers continue to fall victim to higher rental and business costs in London’s most fashionable shopping areas, forcing multiple outlet closures, the number of temporary pop-up shops occupying the vacated space is seemingly on the rise. reed.co.uk, one of the UKs leading job sites, claim these temporary ventures are providing opportunities for jobseekers to gain relevant work experience exposure, especially if they wish to attain future retail or sales jobs in the capital.

Since the turmoil of the economic recession in 2008 heaved financial pressure on retailers, many of the UKs leading high-street brands have had to shut-up-shop in some of London’s most bustling shopping areas. Continual rises in costs have only added to the number of closures, however the vacated space has meant smaller, pop-up shops are now emerging across the capital; giving smaller traders the chance to benefit from higher levels of shopper traffic, even if it is for a limited time only.

With relevant experience highly sought after by prospective-employers, reed.co.uk say jobseekers, aiming to improve their chances of gaining jobs in London are now considering applying for work experience in pop-up shops; especially if, in the past, financial constraints have limited the time available to undertake unpaid placements.

The job site admits that one of the biggest barriers jobseekers face when undertaking work experience placements is financial sustainability- after-all most placements do not offer a wage or any sort of payment for work. However with pop-up shops only trading on a temporary basis (most are only typically open for a month at a time), reed.co.uk claim attaining work experience for such a short period of time is ideal for those unable to commit for greater lengths of time.

“Pop-up shops provide ideal opportunities for jobseekers to gain valued work experience, quickly. Not only can they gain great exposure to the retail industry as a whole, but they can see how smaller businesses can thrive in such a competitive environment,” said a spokesperson for reed.co.uk.

“However it’s not just small clothing retailers taking advantage of higher levels of shopping traffic- as you’d expect. Many restaurant owners, artists and top-brand designers, including Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney, have also jumped at the chance to temporarily rent from previously vacated shops, so there are plenty of work experience opportunities in several career sectors.”

With pop-up shop venues set-up across London, most notably in Shoreditch, East London (Box Shoreditch- the world’s first pop-up mall), Carnaby Street and Camden, shop owners have exposure to some of the busiest shopping areas in the world.

Image Courtesy of  Kamira / Shutterstock.com

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Utah’s experiment with a four-day workweek for most state workers is over. The state of Utah first instituted the condensed workweek in 2008. The Associated Press reported that lawmakers ended the trial for the majority of state workers, saying it was not saving as much money as predicted. The state will return to a five-day workweek on Tuesday, September 5.

Todd Sutton, of the Utah Public Employees Association, said the adjustment back to a five-day workweek won’t be easy for many employees. Some people had arranged daycare schedules for the four-day week, while others were using their free Fridays to work second jobs or volunteer.

“Employees struggled because they adapted their lives to one schedule,” Sutton said. “And then it goes to a different schedule.” It’s clear that residents and leaders in Utah have mixed reviews on the sudden schedule change.

“I think it’s a horrible idea,” Larry Swift told the Salt Lake Tribune. Swift runs a business that sells construction equipment and was registering his car Thursday evening.”I think it’s really nice to have something open after 5 o’clock so you don’t have to take time off work, ” he said.

According to the Examiner, many state workers were unhappy with the change initially, but have adjusted to long days and three-day weekends. Many are unhappy about adding another day’s commute to their week. At the same time, some are pleased about shorter hours and more time with their families on a daily basis

Jon Huntsman, former Utah Gov., launched the “4/10″ workweek — 10 hours a day, Monday-Thursday — for thousands of employees in 2008, said the AP. The hope was to improve efficiency, reduce overhead costs and conserve energy at a time when budgets are tight and resources are dwindling.

A 2010 legislative audit showed the savings never materialized, in part due to a drop in energy prices. According to the AP, while Utah legislators as a whole found the four-day workweek unproductive, some cities in Utah saw the shorter workweek as a major success.

Mayor John Curtis, of Provo, Utah, said the 4/10 system improved employee morale and saved money. He said the four-day workweek might be more effective at a local level than with a state government. “People don’t have that same interaction with state employees … and the state needs hundreds of offices, while we only need one,” Curtis said.

Provo is one of the state’s largest cities with more than 100,000 people. The four-day workweek has been in place for years, with city offices open Monday through Thursday, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Utah isn’t the only state that has tried an alternative workweek schedule in lieu of the traditional five-day workweek.

In El Paso, Texas, Mayor John Cook, is proposing a year-round four-day workweek after experimenting with it during the past two summers.According to the AP, Cook said the projected savings for the city of about 800,000 people was more than $400,000 annually, primarily because of lowered utility and fuel costs.

Creative solutions are becoming more popular for governments facing tight budgets, said Rex Facer, a Brigham Young University associate professor who has studied the effectiveness of four-day workweeks. Lawmakers in both Oregon and Texas considered four-day workweek bills this year, but neither passed, the AP reported.

According to Facer, more than 200 cities have implemented or experimented with the four-day workweek on some level.

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Unemployed Americans are completing for jobs with those who are already employed. According to the Huffington Post, the job market is even worse than the 9.1 percent unemployment rate suggests. The 14 million unemployed Americans are also competing with 8.8 million people who have part-time jobs but are in search of full-time work.

Those with part-time jobs are more likely to gain full-time positions before the unemployed. Economists suspect that when companies are able to add more work hours, they will tack on more hours to part-timers’ workdays before making new hires.  

The New York Times reported that August brought no increase in the number of jobs in the United States. Patrick J. O’Keefe, the director of economic research at J.H. Cohn, an accounting firm, said the economy has about the same number of jobs as it did in January 2000. “We expected a weak report, and what we got was even weaker,” said O’Keefe.  

The monthly report showed a 17,000-job gain among private employers but no growth over all. The Congressional Budget Office said it’s expected for the rate of unemployment to exceed 8 percent until 2014. Republicans pointed to recent job reports as evident that the stimulus tactics of Obama are not working.

In an email to reporters, the Republican National Committee took note of the worst jobs report in nearly a year, saying that there has been “two and a half years of Obamanomics and nothing to show for it.” Michele Bachmann commented on job climate during her visit in Iowa on Friday. 

“The American people don’t need speeches, they need jobs,”  Bachmann said. While campaigning in Florida, Mitt Romney called the job report “unacceptable.” The new job report had a negative effect on the stock market. The

Dow Jones industrial average fell 253.31 points, 2.2 percent, Friday, closing at 11,240.26. “As long as payrolls are weak, you will continue to hear cries of not just recession risk but cries that the United States is in a recession and we just don’t know it,” said Ellen Zentner, the senior United States economist for Nomura Securities.

Overall, unemployment is lower than it was a year ago, but those gains have been among whites, Hispanics and Asians. For blacks, unemployment has increased, to 16.7 percent from 16.2 percent.

Obama is expected to renew the payroll tax cut and extend unemployment benefits, both benefits that are about to expire. Obama is also scheduled to give a speech on improving unemployment rates on Thursday night.

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XXX news: “Student sex work (prostitution, escort, striptease and other sexual services) is gaining more and more public attention,” reported a group of four scholarship holders at the Studienkolleg zu Berlin (Berlin Centre of Studies) on May 18th at the Berlin Branden-burgische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

According to their international research project, called Nebenjob: Prostitution (Second job: prostitution), one out of three among the 3200 university students surveyed in Berlin would be seriously considering doing sex work. This is much more than those in Paris and in Kiev respectively by around 4 and 15 percentage points, although it is worth of remark that final figures will be available by the end of August 2011. Similar numbers have been published by the German tabloid Bild, which recently announced 5000 of the 140,000 Berlin students to be ‘XXX’ workers, with one in 27 (3.7%) of those living in the red-light district actually already engaged in the sex industry.

For the overall 3500 students who filled in the Studienkolleg’s questionnaire, main motivating factors to sell sexual services would be excessively high university fees and financial hardship in general. Prostitution is widely acknowledged as a ‘simple’ means for quick alluring incomes: “It’s possible that because educational reforms have increased student workloads, they have less time to earn money. Coupled with higher student fees, in this instance, leads students into prostitution” Eva Blumenschein, one of the survey’s authors, said. As a matter of the fact, 30% of those declared pro-sex workers appear to be already stricken by debts, almost double the percentage of those not willing; moreover only 50% of them get financial help from relatives, compared to 65% of the rest of the student population. Eventually, important but less immediate concerns for starting such a career seem to be the need for admiration and searching for adventure.

It is true that prostitution wages can reach £2000-5000 a week, but they entail severe health hazards such as sexually transmitted infections and violence, as well as social and psychological drawbacks, the study pointed out. In fact, even if it apparently seems to be an easy “job” to make money quickly, conversely it might become a dangerous threshold from which you might not bounce back in your life. And often even the so-called normal common people are most likely to be trapped in: open-mindedness, appeal or seriousness have amazingly revealed not to be trenchant distinctions at all, a psychological test linked to the present research carried out.

Another astonishing outcome of the German review concerns gender, since both men and women’s student prostitution rates were revealed to be almost the same: ‘we were expecting a higher female percentage’ therefore “we have prejudice as well”, admitted the Studienkolleg researcher Felix Betzler.

According to another study, the vast majority of those considering a sex job are 26-years-old, often in a steady relationship (52.3%), with heterosexuals as the largest group, accounting for 49% of the total, followed by bisexuals (37.8%) and homosexuals (19.3%); most of them mainly use internet to find their clients.

If you are tempted to relate these figures to the fact that prostitution in Berlin is legal, also being such a famous city for its red-light areas, you might be underrating that, conversely, it deals with a fast-growing very global trend. For example, much before the findings in question, an English 2007 pioneer research project called Sex work and students (Roberts et al) had provided extraordinary evidence of the association between students participation in sex work and pitting economic pressure related to university fees, carrying out over 10% of a 130 undergraduates sample in the south of England to be privy of other students involved in the sex industry in order to support themselves financially. Even not going so far, just a few days ago the University of Arkansas in US claimed to have found that more and more highly educated and affluent women are increasingly entering prostitution. They are not forced, rather choosing it ‘for many reasons that people enter the conventional job market – money, stability, autonomy and even job satisfaction’ said Jennifer Hafer, a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Business at that University.

It deals with numbers alarmingly ever more similar to those in some African countries such as Zimbawe, though with the fundamental difference that there, sadly, many do not have any real alternatives. Thus, once people decide to study in order not to be on the streets: now it seems to happen the exact contrary due to new unendurable educational policy. However, it could be also because today sex business appears far more close and ‘trendy’ than in the past. For example, being an ‘escort’ or a gigolo, and using a webcam while staying comfortably in your home maybe does not sound too much as prostitution. Anyway, it is an activity that is emerging as one of the distinctive choices of freedom made by the future ruling class of the so-called developed countries. What about you? Post your precious comments!

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