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Socialist Youth Belfast <SocialistYouth>

	No to slave labour youth schemes – For real, decent jobs NOW!	186 giorni fa
	18,400 young people in Northern Ireland are languishing on the Job Seeker Allowance (JSA) of £50.95 a week. By the end of the year it is expected at least 1 in 7 young people will be on the dole. There is no real assistance for young people looking for work. After six months of signing on, young people are forced onto the Steps to Work programme. This programme provides advice in CV writing, interview skills and filling in application forms. The problem for young people though is not how to fill in forms – there are hardly any jobs on offer! According to the Job Centre’s online database only 1,500 jobs are on offer for 46,000 people on JSA. The British government’s response has been to create a slave labour scheme in the form of the Flexible New Deal and the Welfare Reform Bill. This means the 250,000 young people on the dole face being forced into working for benefits – the equivalent of working £1.73 an hour for a 35 week! No new jobs will be created. In reality it means supplying slave labour to bosses who won’t have to pay a penny in wages. The Northern Ireland Executive could now attempt to copy this move. A similar programme was brought in by Maggie Thatcher in 1983 called the Youth Training Scheme. This resulted in young people being conscripted into benefit-paid work groups. People were pushed into pointless tasks such as digging holes and filling them in again or painting buildings that had only been painted a few weeks before! These degrading schemes and the lack of real jobs resulted in a backlash with a school student strike of 200,000 young people in 1985. Youth Fight for Jobs is demanding no return to youth slave labour programmes. Instead we want a real job creation scheme of socially useful work that pays a minimum of £8 an hour.
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