Career Opportunities - Remastered

The lyrics to the song criticize the culture of demonizing the unemployed and assuming that taking a low-level, dead-end job is better than being unemployed at all ('The offered me the office, offered me the shop/They said I'd better take anything they'd got', and 'Career opportunities are the ones that never knock/Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock'). It is about unemployment and the culture of no-hope for those stuck in menial jobs, like that is the best they will ever get in life. In an interview with Caroline Coon in 1976, guitarist Mick Jones baulked at the suggestion that someone had to do the dirty and menial jobs, noting that technology and machines had advanced to the point where a lot of manual labor jobs in factories could be done with machinery now, before adding, "There's a social stigma attached to being unemployed. Like Social Security Scroungers every day in The Sun (a British newspaper)...go up North and the kids are ashamed that they can't get a job." Clash bass player Paul Simonon said that this song is about the lack of jobs and how kids had the same old, nearly identical lives. Most of Paul's friends from school went to work at a factory around the corner because the school didn't give them any other opportunities or decisions.

The title of Career Opportunities came from taking a headline in the Evening Standard newspaper - the same method the band (and bassist Paul Simonon in particular) used to name the band.

Part of the lyrics (largely the line 'I won't open letterbombs for you') could have been inspired by Mick Jones' experiences in a part-time job he held a few years before forming The Clash, where he worked as a clerical assistant at a DHSS Benefit Office. At the time, government buildings were on a high terrorist alert, with the IRA terrorist organization using letterbombs as weapons. So with no one wanting to open the mail at the benefit office, his senior co-workers made Jones, as the most junior staff member, open and check all the mail. He mentioned in a 1977 interview to Tony Parsons about his experiences, saying "Most of the letters the social security get are from people saying their neighbors don't need the money. The whole thing works on spite."