Revenge of the Worker - Blogs

The peril of ignoring the worker on the bottom rung of the company ladder
Hubristic bosses beware: sometimes the lowliest of office monkeys are the ones who come back to bite you. The work experience person walks in, cowers in the corner, makes tea, takes flak — and then writes a blog exposing your semi-legal, discriminatory and frankly quite eccentric behaviour.
Lotte Mullan has managed to blow the whistle in spectacular form. After a particularly irksome bout of work experience blues at Warner Music, and a stint having her bum pinched as a tour manager at Sony, the 26-year-old wrote a blog about the experience and has landed an agent and book and movie deal reportedly worth around $3 million.
Others have set up their own website to rate their internship while some just harness the power of social networking. One intern at Marc Jacobs had a recent public meltdown on the corporate Twitter account. “Good luck!” He tweeted on his penultimate day. “I pray for you all. If you get the job! I’m out of here. See ya! Don’t want to be ya! Robert’s a tyrant! ” Of course it could have been the maniacal use of exclamation marks that kept him at the bottom of the pile.
Intern Nation, a book compiled by Ross Perlin, 28, and published last month, shows that employers are an easy target for whistleblowers. “Occasionally an intern would sign a non-disclosure agreement but it’s relatively rare,” he says. “Most of them are informal.”
Of course, the revenge of the workie is not always so overt — like the girl at Grazia magazine made to buy the beauty desk’s skinny lattes every morning, only to reveal on her last day that they were full-fat.
What Mullan exposes are the patronising comments and privileged hand-wanderings that greet young, female, free labour. Not to mention the “sideways boobs hugs”, described thus: “The new breed of pervy hugger seems to have it sussed that this is a potential groping opportunity and that if he (it’s always a he) extends both hands towards your armpits he’s likely to get a fingerful of tit. Prime suspects are middle-aged record label executives.” Mullan, now an aspiring musician with an impending self-produced album acquiring faint admiration from the major music press (“Suffolk’s answer to Joni Mitchell”), is touring to greet her small but devoted base of fans. Before a gig in Islington, as the (entirely male) support bands soundcheck in the bar next door, she is modest about the success of her revelatory tome. “Julian Alexander from the LAW agency gave me a call. He was very civilised, we had a cup of tea. It was very different to the music industry, where the guys put their legs up on the desk and they’re like ‘hey’. . .” She does a sideways wink.
Perennial tea-makers of the world, unite! You too could change the world for underemployed graduates everywhere.