Olympic Jobs

15-Dec-2011

One clause in the Ethical Bid for the 2012 Olympics was that jobs would be available to local people and remunerated at the London Living Wage, as a minimum. Despite repeated reminders and several meetings with LOCOG, the body responsible for delivering the games, these jobs were hard to find. Telco London Citizens, to which our community belongs, decided to take positive action by preparing and presenting candidates for interview for these jobs. This time we were determined to succeed and East London Mosque, Queen Mary and Westfield College London University, St Antony’s and St Stephen’s Parishes, all Telco members, became recruiting centres. Between them over 500 jobs have been offered.

At St Antony’s Parish with the support of our Parish priest we ran a large publicity campaign. Parishioners were told about the jobs at the end of Masses, we set up a stall with information on the jobs, offered teach-in session on completing CVs and then took names and addresses of those who wished to apply. These were invited to timed preliminary meetings, held in the Red House, a parish club lent to us free of charge for the occasion.

On 6th December the official recruitment team came, this time to St Bonaventure’s Technology College very near to St Antony’s. The interviewers were impressed by the quality of the candidates and 240+ left the interview room proudly carrying cards showing they had been offered a job. We had a 100% success rate. These jobs are by their nature temporary, as they are for the games only, but that did not diminish the joy and sense of achievement of those who got them.

This was good too for the local community and the church. It bonded diverse East London groups together and strengthened London Citizens , made our parishioners pleased to belong to the Church, was a tangible expression of Catholic Social teaching, and it made us all good friends . We smile much more at each other now, and it has been heartening to hear so many say “I would never have known about this if it had not been for the church!”.