Slave labour schemes must be resisted

Graham O'Reilly

The supposed training opportunities the government is offering young people are nothing more than a back door way of moving people from the unemployment figures into unskilled work whilst not having to spend any money.

An example of this happened recently in Boots in Southampton, where the manager has agreed to take two people on for work experience. They will receive basic Jobseeker's Allowance of around Ł45 a week and work a 38 hour week for the next three months, which is equivalent to Ł1.20 an hour.

When challenged by a member of staff, who is a member of the Socialist Party and Youth Fight for Jobs, about the fact that this will take work away from the fully employed staff, the manager became abusive, accusing him of stirring up trouble.

The manager called him an extremist who has no idea about how the world works and said he was not to talk to other members of staff about his ideas as he was frightening them with his lies.

He also said the people doing the work experience should be grateful for the opportunity.

Over the next seven years between Ł3 billion and Ł5 billion of government money will be paid to various organisations to help tackle 'long term benefit dependency'.

This money is to come from the benefit 'savings' made from people getting back to work. The government trumpeted these organisations as belonging to the voluntary sector.

However of the 18 organisations only two are from the voluntary sector, the rest are private companies. But there is no public accountability within the voluntary or the private sector. This is nothing short of the wholesale privatisation of the unemployed.

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