It is a Tuesday morning in Manchester, and a queue snakes outside a nondescript office block. The sign on the door reads 'Entry Level Administrative Assistant'. Four hundred people have applied.
One will be hired. This is not a dystopian film: this is Britain in 2025. The job shortage crisis, once a whisper in think tanks, now punches the gut of every high street.
I spoke to Sarah, 24, who left university with a first in History three years ago. She has sent out 600 applications since. 'I feel like a ghost,' she told me, clutching a coffee she couldn't really afford.
'I'm overqualified for everything but not allowed in the door.' The cultural shift is palpable: we have moved from a society of aspiration to one of survival. The human cost is measured in quiet desperation, in the way young people no longer talk about careers but about 'anything'.
Class dynamics are shifting too: the graduate who can afford six months of unpaid internship often wins not on merit but on parental subsidy. Meanwhile, the rest wait in a queue that never ends. The tragedy is that this is not news: it is the new normal.
We have normalised the scramble for scraps. And as the queue grows, something else shrinks: our collective belief that hard work still matters.
