Socialist planning needed to give youth a post-Covid future

By Young Socialists members

A panel led by former Tesco Bank boss Benny Higgins and commissioned by Scottish Government ministers released its report recently into how Scotland can mitigate the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including a sharp 33% drop in Scottish GDP since lockdown began.

The report recognises a recession is extremely likely, an unavoidable fact given that Scotland now has the highest unemployment rate in the UK. 

The most eye-catching recommendation of the report is the call for a nation-wide job guarantee scheme aimed at helping young people, in particular, but not exclusively, avoid long-term unemployment. This comes among other findings however; the report also calls for the Scottish Government to step in and take a stake in failing businesses as lockdown measures end. 

It also follows a report published by the TUC in early May with similar findings; namely that young workers particularly see a huge detriment in future employment prospects if they go through an extended period of unemployment. That report also points out that 18-24s were heavily affected by unemployment in the aftermath of the last recession, with the number peaking at over a million in 2010. 

Both the TUC and Scottish Government reports pose the very real danger of a lost generation of working-class youth; the TUC report goes into all of the adverse health consequences of long-term unemployment, which in itself lays bare the existential threat to workers, especially young workers, of a deep economic depression. 

Young Socialists and Socialist Party Scotland have been ahead of the curve on this; we published a charter of workers’ rights right at the beginning of lockdown and published a charter of young people’s rights just a few weeks ago. In that youth charter, we demand jobs for all and a living wage of £12 an hour as a step to £15 an hour in those jobs. 

We also provided actual solutions to the important issues of de-carbonising Scotland’s economy; something which both reports and the Scottish Government consistently pay lip service to but give no answers on.

Our approach would include a public work scheme to begin the transition to renewable energy – based on public ownership and workers’ control of the energy sector.

This could line up extremely well with a real jobs guarantee scheme; employing young people and any worker suffering long-term unemployment on trade union conditions and rates of pay and retraining them (along with existing North Sea oil and gas workers) to work on the first practical steps toward a sustainable, socialist planned economy. These steps would create the basis for full employment.

The advisory report itself only recommends “the living wage” be paid from these guaranteed jobs, which leaves the actual figure open to adaptation based on the political needs of the bosses. 

We also tackled the issue of failing businesses, stating that firms must open the books up to the democratic oversight of their staff and the trade unions. They should be taken into public ownership and run by the workers themselves.

That strategy would remove the need for layoffs as the workers could draw up a plan of production/operation and could even establish a sliding scale for wages, so that if work needs to be rationed out then no staff suffer a pay cut.

This contrasts starkly with the Scottish Government’s experiments in intervention with Prestwick Airport, which the SNP poured millions into improving before just putting it up for sale.

We stand for public ownership and democratic control of any government asset so that workers and society as a whole can run them in our own interest and not to make profits for the bosses. 

The key reason for the SNP’s, along with Labour, the Tories, and even the Greens’, mistakes on both economic recovery and the so-called ‘just transition’ is that they cannot stomach any measure which cuts against the profit-driven system they uphold.

The nationalisation and democratic control of industry (i.e. socialism) is what is needed to protect working people’s living standards and the environment. All of these capitalist parties simply refuse to consider those measures. 

Our Demands on pay, jobs and training raised in our Socialist Charter for Young People include:

• Opposition to all job cuts! For a programme of mass public works and socially useful job creation linked to a socialist Green New Deal.
• No to poverty pay! For an immediate increase of the minimum wage to £12 an hour for all workers
• For job security and trade union rights at work! Scrap zero hour contracts
• Increase benefits to the level of the national minimum wage
• The right to a job for all! No to bogus schemes for the right to a job at the end of any training.
• Trade union oversight and democratic members’ control of any public works or youth job creation program
• Take the wealth off the 1%! For the Scottish Government to use its income tax powers to tax the rich and big business.
• Bring the banks, oil, and gas, construction and manufacturing, the major retail and service sector corporations into public ownership under democratic workers’ control as part of a socialist plan of production.