Well Done To Poppy Noor, A Masterly Dig At The Guardian In The Guardian

I might just have to change my opinion of Poppy Noor here. Normally she trots out the usual regurgitation of currently fashionable points when she’s not managing to entirely misunderstand something. Then she pulls an absolute blinder like this. For what she’s done is used a column in The Guardian to point out that The Guardian pays absolutely vile, pisspoor, wages. Which is really pretty good if you can get away with doing so and still keep your job.

The column is the usual stuff about millennials being burdened down with student loans, high rents and all that sorta stuff. And so how can anyone save for a pension and all that? I particularly enjoyed this:

“I have to be constantly conscious about money. If I buy a coffee, or don’t make my own lunch one day, or have something other than Super Noodles for dinner, I can’t afford a drink at the weekend,” says Eloise Fry, a student in London. Saving is the last thing on her mind – Fry scrimps on luxuries, such as washing her clothes (“I have to pay £3 for it, it just feels painful”) after moving to the capital to do a master’s in journalism and taking out a £10,000 loan.

The bulk – £9,600 – of Fry’s loan pays for a tiny room in London (of 104 “journalism jobs” listed in her home town, not one was based at a paper; a London search returned coveted positions at the Guardian and Vogue). She sleeps pushed up against a pod with a toilet in it that she can smell from her bed. A sofa in the kitchen is her living-room; her heating is sporadic and her water frequently runs cold. But it’s not how much she spends that prevents her from paying into a pension – it’s debt.

Left reeling from a student loan that didn’t cover her costs, she is now thousands of pounds into her overdraft. Just paying back the interest and the career loan will cost her around £400 every month. She isn’t making a dent in what she owes, let alone contributing to a pension. “How can I think about saving when I don’t have the money to pay what I already owe,” she asks.

I make my living as a freelance journalist these days. And there’s something interesting about the gig. Which is that if you need more money then you work harder. You go and find an editor who will pay you to write something for them. No, this doesn’t mean beating down the door of The Times. Sure, it’s nice to get in there but that’s not bread and butter work. There’s all sorts of stuff out there which a vaguely competent writer can make £5 an hour at.

Sure, sure, I know, but seriously. There’s as much work out there for someone who can write as you can shake a stick at. I had a builders’ bill looming a few months back. Picked up a contract to write a trade book to cover it. 100 hours of my work (at a little better than £5 an hour to be sure) bill paid, thank you. Or write student essays (wrote one, just to see what it was like doing it, $15 for 30 minutes work). Or – well, there are thousands of these sorts of scut work out there.

And here’s the point. If you want to be a journalist then you really ought to be doing these sorts of things, no? In fact, if I were evaluating people who should be journalists I’d want to see that they’d been making their pocket money by doing this sort of guff for their pocket money since they were 13. It is, after all, how Caitlin Moran started out….

Apparently none of that makes sense to someone doing a masters in journalism. Sigh, I’d rather take it as an essential qualification for doing such training that you can in fact pick up freelance work.

But this is the true joy. Poppy talks about the Noor household:

So basically, millennials such as me should be bloody depressed. Today was my rent day, and despite owing only £400 in rent, I was £330 short. The other £70 came from selling an old phone for a quarter of what I bought it for; and the rest came in the form of a loan from my 22-year-old sister, who has an overdraft and is on her way to racking up £50,000 of student debt.

Well, that’s a pretty good millennial moan you’ve got to admit. So, who is it that treats poor Poppy so cruelly?

Poppy Noor is a Guardian columnist and commissioning editor

She’s not just getting a per piece payment (from memory, £250 a piece or so in The G) we must assume that she’s also paid some form of salary arrangement for the editorial work. For of course The Guardian wouldn’t oppress the workers, would it?

Or, in fact, obviously it does. And isn’t that a great thing for a Guardian employee to manage to do? Print, in The Guardian, the proof that The Guardian oppresses the workers?

Hats off to Ms. Noor there, hats off gentlemen!

Unless, of course, she doesn’t realise quite what she’s done there. As none of the other editorial staff seem to have done?