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A CEO earning nearly £10 million a year sounding the alarm over 'youth unemployment' is a piece of clumsy performance art. Lord Wolfson’s so-called 'crisis' is actually an anxiety over the impending failure of zero-hours contracts—the ultimate tool for extreme exploitation. When capital can no longer use 'one-sided flexibility' to squeeze cheap labor, their go-to narrative is to package this loss as 'concern' for the survival of the youth.

This logic is classic: he claims that guaranteed hours will harm student opportunities and service quality. In plain English: if I cannot discard you the moment I don't need you, or force you into unpaid overtime during the Christmas peak, I am no longer willing to offer that subsistence-level wage. In this masculine power logic, employees are not humans; they are 'resources' or 'plugins' to be scaled up or down based on seasonal fluctuations.

More ironically, Next's profits are rising while automation (AI and self-scanning lockers) is systematically erasing entry-level roles. The disappearance of these jobs is not some 'economic law,' but a deliberate structural violence where capital wipes out low-end employment to maximize efficiency. He enjoys the profit spikes from AI while simultaneously blaming minimum wage hikes and labor protections for 'hurting' the market.

This is a textbook example of complicity: capital defines 'flexibility' to legitimize structural violence. They want young people to internalize the state of 'being disposable' as a form of 'career experience.' Under this meta-violence, any legal attempt to provide workers with certainty is branded as a crime that 'stifles economic growth.'