By Craig Jackson, Professor of Occupational Health Psychology.

A new ultra-low in television’s use of the jobless as entertainment, by Channel 4

Last night, Channel 4 screened the first episode in the second series of The Fairy Jobmother. The premise is a simple and tired one - Hayley Taylor is a work “guru” who takes on a group of long-term unemployed people, and over a few weeks turns them into confident go-getters who then head out into the world to get a job. In the first episode, Hayley Taylor makes her charges engage in the usual “empowering” activities that teach the participants new skills, while ladling on the shame and embarrassment. It’s been described as “Supernanny for the Unemployed” which itself is an unfortunate term – infantilising and disempowering those without meaningful work.

This is disgraceful and unethical TV – the bullying of people too lost, uncertain and fractured to fight back, or to even know they’re being manipulated and abused. The producers went to Liverpool to hand-pick four unemployed caricatures, including the stereotypical middle aged “Jim Royal” trapped in the past, spouting off about “T’atcher dis n T’atcher dat”; his daughter who has never had a job; a young single mum; and a cripplingly shy soon-to-be father. Each and everyone of them had low confidence, self-esteem, and an absence of workplace skills. Anyone who is familiar with the character of Pauline from The League of Gentlemen need read no further. It was that bad. Taylor of course has graced our screens before in another unethical series from Channel 4 – Benefit Busters – where she barked Apprentice-style Neologisms at the unemployed in an attempt to shame them into ceasing to sponge from the State. Ironically, I would not employ Taylor – she has the hardened and unpleasant edge of a bully who has worked with the un-empowered for too long, has lost any compassion she may have had for them at the beginning of her career, and now barks and berates them while hoping the newly austere-public and their “disgust” with the unemployed will make it acceptable.

Hayley also attempted her hand at the soft psychological therapies too – surprising Jim Royal on his doorstop with a fish and chip supper in order to get over his threshold. Once she had got in, she ate with him while probing him about his arrogant desire to live on benefits, then coming a cropper and getting out of her depth when he confessed to previous severe alcoholism and losing his children. Her bellowing was not going to help at this point and the interview abruptly ended there.

Taylor’s character-building exercise this week was to get each individual to stand on a podium outside a busy shopping centre, wear a tri-cornered hat, and to ring a bell like a town crier and shout nonsensical slogans. Degrading. This act, to my knowledge, has only ever been topped by Gok Wan in one of his TV shows where he took a group of naked women and hosed them down in an empty swimming pool, all in the name of making them feel better about their bodies. However, last night, Taylor’s next move was for the four participants to each take 2 minutes to “pitch” themselves to a panel of four leading figures in local / regional commerce, and show why they should be given a job. This was the point were my anger seethed at its maximum – watching other humans begging for work in front of cameras. The dénouement was then for each participant to attend an enforced job interview. Only one was successful in their attempts – thereby robbing the show of it’s ethical defence that the indignity was worthy for the goal. Clearly it was not.

Channel 4 was once a proud channel that challenged and provoked. It was as anti-Thatcherism as any mainstream broadcaster could dare be in the 1980s and 1990s – but those days have long gone, and programming has been replaced by shallow, unethical and uncomfortable documentaries. For a channel which once had Alan Bleasdale, Phil Redmond and Jimmy McGovern as bedfellows all at the same time, such a swipe at Liverpool is pretty unforgivable. Watch it without feeling uncomfortable and guilty for being complicit in the whole mess, I dare you. When Countdown is the most edgy show on a programming schedule, the broadcaster must surely be in trouble.  And indeed they are: Channel 4 is currently advertising for someone to be the head of their documentary commissioning process. Anyone fancy a go? Have a go. Seriously.

By Craig Jackson, Professor of Occupational Health Psychology.

Our attitudes to taking sickness absence belie how hard the UK really works.

For the last few years, those in the Human Resources field have labelled the first Monday in February as "national sickie day". Contrary to some media reports, this is not an official day of sickness recognition, or even reflective of some orchestrated facebook-campaign to take time off - it is simply based on epidemiological data collected by the office of national statistics, the confederation of British industry, the chartered institute of personal development, and the labour force survey. For the last four years this data has showed that short one-day absences from work have peaked on the first Monday in February, resulting in anything between 300,000 to 370,000 workers being absent from work on that one day. The reasons behind this peak in absences is varied, but often attributed to workers feeling they are "owed" a day or two, given that Easter is still a way off yet, and that Christmas is so far gone. It comes down to individual workers and their feelings of what they are entitled to and their own sense of responsibility. Some industries are prone to this more than others, with the public sector usually having greater sickness absence rates than the private one, and this also relates to the single-day figures too.

Our attitudes to taking sickness absence provide a great snapshot of UK workers and our feelings about work. It also provides us with an ability to examine the UK position in the labour market and reflect on how much effort the average UK worker gives. We still have more people in full time employment than other EU countries; fewer people in part time work; more workers engaged in paid overtime work, and perhaps most concerning of all, we take on more unpaid overtime work than workers in other EU countries. For this reason alone some think we should overlook the occasional sick day, but more evidence shows us that workers have rarely had it so bad. If anything, we have a problem with "presenteeism" in the UK - with many organisations not yet realising that the office / workplace is the place where people don't actually get work done. Indeed the TUC run an annual campaign for workers to "work to time" for one day of the year, and to shun the unpaid overtime that many professionals engage in that has become the norm. In the UK even the lunchtime break has been reduced to a 23-minute sandwich-at-the desk for many workers. On average, UK workers get a total of 22 days of annual leave as well as a few public holidays. Only last week the UK government were reported to be considering dropping the traditional May Day bank holiday - a public holiday observed around much of the world and acknowledged as "International day of the Worker". If this bank holiday goes from the UK it will herald a new low in how little the working man and woman is regarded and valued.

On average just under 3% of UK workers take a single day of sickness absence per year, and these days are usually spread evenly across the week. The idea of sickie Mondays and Fridays is not reflected in statistics. Interestingly, females take slightly more sickness than males, and it is greatest in workers below their mid-thirties. Some experts suggest that the economic downturn may reverse this trend of the one-day sickie, and that job insecurity may prevent workers from taking unnecessary time off. Other experts disagree and suggest that there is an increased likelihood of taking sickles if our job is precarious, as a form of social protest.

Despite the "sickie" news stories, the cost to the UK economy of one-day absences when workers feel they need a "duvet day" is insignificant compared with the costs involved in treating seven million sickness days taken by the hundreds of thousands of workers with cases of occupational disease and work-related Ill-health brought about by doing dangerous, difficult and unpleasant jobs. In some respects we should consider ourselves lucky that people turn up to work at all.