Hi ho, hi ho, it's back to work we go. With luck. Even those who took a long Christmas will be heading back today, and if there is one safe prediction it is that the usual unseemly scramble over holiday rotas will be a bit muted this year. In 2009, if you've got a job you don't rock the boat. In retail, building, banking, manufacturing, marketing, media - even bits of the bloated public sector - jobs are twisting to the ground like dead leaves in the financial gale. As the Prime Minister convenes his “jobs summit” today, there will be a change of tone from the accustomed fret about the long-term workless and the unwilling. The new and tormenting problem is what to do for the willing: the newly redundant and the newly adult.

For new graduates, the buzz word is “intern”. There is to be a national scheme - finances, scale and rules still murky - to give them short paid internships in white-collar business. The Higher Education Minister, David Lammy, speaks of “preparing for the upturn” with useful experience. Alan Milburn, meanwhile, has been ordered to improve social mobility. He writes that recession is an opportunity to do this, although, frankly, it is hard to see why 11 years of boom were not.

Internships arise again: his mission is to end the “middle-class monopoly”. It seems that government has finally grasped what some of us out here have been saying for years - that unpaid internships are a racket. All the experience and networking (especially in arts, media and the City) go to kids whose parents can house and support them while they act as unpaid drudges.

Meanwhile equally bright young people have to flip burgers for the rent money. And companies exploit it: in France, where the racket is even more common, in some companies 20 per cent of the workforce are permanently interns. One New York magazine boasts 50 per cent. If the new scheme makes it all fairer, good.

But in the end people need real work. To leave university and spend three impoverished months being half-trusted at a corporate keyboard is clearly better than hanging around on benefits. But what all workers deserve, as much as money and experience, is honour. Whether you are a cleaner or a QC, you want to know that you earned your money and would be missed. Even the most solipsistic “creative” needs validation - bums on seats, commissions, viewers, buyers.

And, by happy coincidence, this is also what the economy needs: not millions on benefits and millions more in perpetual training that leads nowhere, nor artificial jobs (such as the new “food leftovers advisers” now allegedly turning up on doorsteps after a one-day course). And - here's the tough bit - in the end it is better to have a job that does not fulfil you creatively than no job at all.

This may be a difficult pill to swallow: a recent television series took teenagers to work in Indian sweatshops. One English girl, promoted to the coveted job of machinist, threw a tantrum because “it's just sewing bits of cloth, it's not crea'ive”.

Schools must bear some responsibility for letting children think that they have a right to earn their living being creative. The truth is that they have both a right to earn a living and a right to be creative, but not necessarily at the same time.

I met a lot of Cowley assembly-workers in the 1970s: men who made museum-quality models, played in bands, won dancing cups or bred winning pigeons after each tedious day bolting the same bit of trim on endless Minis. And even in medialand, trust me, there are unspeakably mundane tasks to be done before the tiger of creativity runs free.

So - real jobs for the “upturn”. What might help? At the moment the Government's obsession is training - internships, grants to mothers, penning teenagers in classrooms until they're 18. Some of that training is pointless, leaving us with such a shortage of practical skills that we need Polish craftsmen and poach Third World nurses.

The thing which ministers seem never to consider is removing some of the impediments to hiring that they gaily put in place during the palmy years. Note that in the US in normal times the average gap between redundancy and a new job was four weeks. Here it was six months.

This is because in America you can fire people you can't afford. Thus when an upturn begins, US employers hire early. Here, employment protection law makes an exhausting and time-consuming process of “managing people out”: written warnings, meetings, monitoring, watching your language lest lawyers pounce. It takes three months, during which time you are still paying wages as business crumbles. Even genuine redundancy involves lengthy rituals and compulsory verbal hypocrisies about “alternative roles in the organisation” even as bailiffs prepare to board up the windows.

Workers need reasonable protection from caprice and exploitation: you can't bin all the rules. But in seeking to encourage employers, ministers should reflect that helping lame dogs over stiles is more difficult if you have previously laced the stile with barbed wire. The same applies to health and safety law: if, say, a rural bicycle business wants to take on a school leaver but can't guarantee that the shed will be maintained at the prescribed minimum temperature and a dedicated employee toilet provided (rather than the one in the farmhouse), it is not legally enough to give the lad a fleece and a back-door key.

On top of that you might worry about being hammered for sexual or racial discrimination, or indeed kneecapped by the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003. This was designed to protect gay workers from persecution, but, as usual, is so loosely drafted that from day one an employee has a case even if he or she just subjectively “perceives” that the boss is feeling homophobic.

This applies even if the employee is not gay, and if the boss has never given it a thought but just happened to be a bit testy that week. Although few cases actually arise, the law makes such fears real: so the bike business remains a one-man band, unwilling to expand as trade looks up. Only the big battalions will score a delightfully disposable national intern.

Government can't make everyone prosperous and good. But it can help a bit. And it could certainly smooth away some of the obstacles to hiring which, in happier times, it invented to demonstrate its idealism. At today's jobs summit, I fear this will be the unacknowledged elephant in the room.