IN TWO YEARS youth unemployment has doubled. Thousands of school leavers head straight for the dole queues with no hope of ever finding work.
In January there were 150,000 unemployed school leavers, another 192,000 were on special unemployment schemes. The biggest is the Labour government's Youth 'Opportunity Programme (YOPs), which the Tories have greatly expanded.
YOPs has let the government hide the real extent of youth unemployment. But there has been widespread opposition to YOPs working conditions.
On f23.50 a week, working with little or no training for a year or halt a year, youth are exploited and have no guaranteed jobs when they finish. A YOPs 'trainee' can be working beside someone doing the same job for twice as much money.
As if this wasn't bad enough, 'On yer bike' Tebbit, claiming to be worried by youth unemployment, has come up with new schemes. 'Young Workers' scheme will pay bosses f15 a week to starve youth. It guarantees low wages, being aimed at employers who pay youth less than uv enveek.
His ' compulsory training' scheme is even worse. If you leave school in September 1983, you face a choice between a training scheme which will pay your parents f15 a week, or nothing at all.
School levers' dole has already been cut and can't be claimed straight away when you leave.
Tebbit is bringing in industrial conscription. It benefits no-one but the employers, who get cheap non-union labour with a f60 million subsidy thrown in.
Sections of the labour movement are taking steps to expose YOPs for what they really are. Fights for wage increases and travel allowances have been taken up by NUPE and the TGWU locally. In some cases YOPs workers' frustration has led to local strike action.
The Party Young Socialists have launched a campaign to unionise YOPs, which will be lobbying parlament on hursday February for trade union rights for YOPs workers.
They call for a decent wage, better job prospects and trade union monitoring of conditions, as well as unionisation.
These are positive steps, but they don't get to the root of the problem. It's no good just 'improving' YOPs conditions and prospects.
We need full trade union rights and rates of pay for all YOPs workers, and a guaranteed permanent job.
The wage issue has to be taken into the trade union movement with these demands. Len Murray's commitment to the YOPs -helps promote - is bad enough.
He lets his own members lose jobs while youth are exploited. But the root problem is that the trade union movement has never really treated youth as 'real' workers.
Youth face the same problems in many other jobs - low wages, no union rights, bad conditions, no training.
Neither will the Right to Work's 'Jobs not YOPs' campaign stop this.
There has to be a tant tor a minimum wage, job guarantees for youth, employment quotas for young people, with priority for young The women and young blacks who are the hardest hit by unemployment.
But this has to everywhere - including in YOPs itself, which employ 50 per cent of all school leavers.
This doesn't mean accepting that YOPs are the answer. Even Tebbit has been forced to concede the failure of YOPs. But his new proposals make matters worse.
The TUC has rejected them, but look for small improvements in YOPs conditions by pushing wages up to £30 per week, and asking for Manpower Services Commission funding for 15,000 apprentice places.
This falls well short of what is needed to actually reverse high unemployment and give youth guaranteed job. The job of the TUC is to ensure that youth are given the chance to fight for their own rights by being accepted as part of the unions with equal rights and pay to other trade unionists.
Training for the Dole - that's what the Tories offer young people. It's time, alongside the LPYS campaign to unionise YOPs, for the trade union movement to organise for union rights, Unloe r:es massive public expenditure, and place responsibility for youth unemployit belongs - on the hacn anere shoulders of the employers and their government, not on young people who need 'training'.
YOP Trainees Union Rights Campaign of Parliament which he unemployed in for Recovery, week. Aimed 672,000 be taken up 677,000 new jobs.
used tor government, plan the proposals THERE ARE now four million the Britain, says the TUC's 44-page Programme launched this budget, the report says there at the next capitalism', 'unregistered' and calls for £8.3bn to be spent to create Len Murray calls for the report to 'new deal between TUC and employers to path back full employment'. But despite the TUC's would pleas the report doesn't hold out much hope of a Tory U-turn. The TUC is betting on a new government.
The detailed plan, which includes youth, women and blacks, extends the TUC's 1982 'Plan borrows! for Growth'. It has been 'lest-run on government. proposal for planning should be discussed seriously.
La plan could be developed.
government's own forecasting model, and the TUC claim it will cut government borrowing by £28m and raise inflation by only 1.1 per cent.
'Plan for saving
as the New Statesman slightly cynically dubs it, the TUC sets out some pretty thorough homework to convince Britain that there is an alternative to Thatcher result is a damning indictment of Thatcher's policies and with u une cra ogc or uncuioovuc li Productivity, which she says she will raise, has fallen. Inflation, which she double figures.
Remember the tax cuts? Taxes are higher than ever except 'for the very rich'. Investment is 21 per cent down and unemployment is costing the covernment toso - more an ı workers with no TUC has produced its own proposals for the 44-page, detailed plan which is likely to be a major topic of discussion in the run-up to the A fight for a plan is an essential compopolicies of both Thatcher and the last Labour Despite our strong disagreement with the spirit of the TUC's policy, we think that any This week, therefore, we assess the TUC' plan and explain how a fighting campaign fol money, and idle factories that can't sell their product - this is the vicious circle the TUC wants to break by spending in the public sector so as to expand production by four per cent.
Expansion always causes inflation and hits the balance of payments, so the TUC proposes import control: and a 'National Economic Assess ment' to regulate costs. This should 'take a view on the movements in costs and prices which will support and sustain expansion', and try to iron out inequalities.
In 1975 the employers said that wage cuts were needed to sustain expansion - but what should be done if they make the same demand again the TUC doesn't say.
However, since they wall mutual agreement with the employers and the government, and since the employers can sabotage the economy if they choose, we won't be giving out prizes for the answer The real problem, however,
----- pull-quotes -----
WITH three weeks to go to the budget, the economy. Its Programme for Recovery is a nent of the fight for an alternative to the