Poundland, who opened their 400th store in July, are thriving in the recession. Last November, however, the growing business took on a graduate for "unpaid menial work", as a judge at London's High Court declared.
Cait Reilly's recent court case needs to be seen in context of the bigger picture. The question that remains unanswered is not whether the Government's back-to-work schemes are failing, but how Poundland let it happen. A company that should understand the value of its workforce turned a blind eye to a contradiction in their policy.
The basic tasks Ms. Reilly was asked to perform, including sweeping and shelf-stacking, didn't offer her an opportunity to develop skills or gain a greater understanding of how the business worked. Instead, they were necessary tasks delegated to unpaid labour.
For the managers who gave Reilly her orders, even as employees of a company famed for looking after the pennies, there should have been alarm bells. Instead, the wider British business community demonstrated that it lacks an understanding that unpaid labour is rarely respectable. That has to change.
Yesterday's ruling failed to hold Poundland accountable both for failing to provide constructive and instructional work for graduates (in spirit with the government's back-to-work scheme) and for their lack of compliance with the law on minimum wage. Only by demanding greater corporate accountability can we foster a culture in which all productive work, no matter how menial, is remunerated.
At Instant Impact we work with fast-growing SMEs and require that all of our interns are paid at least the minimum wage for their valuable work. We will continue to struggle to change the assumption graduates should work for free if the big companies don't lead by example.
Alongside our interrogation of the back-to-work scheme, we should be asking how a large corporation has been able to use it as a vehicle to employ an un-paid lackey. One can't help but wonder how many other companies have been able to abuse the system.