Youth fight for a future
The politicians keep telling us that the recession will mean our lives will be hard for a short period but that young people can still have a bright future. They say those who have lost their jobs or can’t get work should try going to university, training will be provided for those without a job and the economy will pick up sooner or later.
Matt Dobson
Socialist Students organiser
They are lying! The current economic crisis is bringing with it mass unemployment and attacks from the government on education which will block the hopes of the majority of young people who aspire to a decent standard of living. We can’t hope and wait for things to get better! We have no option but to fight for our future!
This year a mighty battle has been fought for university places as many turn to Higher Education to escape unemployment. The number of Scots entering Scottish universities has risen by 11.7% compared with last year.
In England, tens of thousands of young people have missed out on the chance to go to university. The government has cut the funding available for university places because of a £200 million shortfall in the education budget due to an underestimation of the number of university applications and of poorer students needing to claim the full maintenance grant. Rather than increase funding to meet the educational needs of young people, New Labour is punishing them for its own incompetence!
It isn’t as if the extra money in education isn’t available with private companies making millions by profiteering out of services like catering, accommodation and research on campuses. The New Labour government views continuing to spend billons on the quagmire in Afghanistan and bailing out the rich bankers as more of a priority.
The top institutions are becoming increasingly inaccessible. A recent parliamentary report found that only 29% of students – and just 16% at the Russsell group of universities – come from lower socio-economic backgrounds, even though they make up 50% of young people.
This year on almost every HE and FE campus workers face the sack, departments face closure and services will be slashed. Staff at FE colleges such as Tower Hamlets, Liverpool Community, Manchester and Doncaster have been forced into taking strike action against job losses and huge budget cuts. The UCU teaching union points to 6,000 jobs being lost across the UK as a result of the recession, with 300 in Scotland.
Students and workers are already fighting the closure of courses and departments at Strathclyde, Edinburgh, Sussex, UWE (University West of England), Southampton and many other universities. Courses that are less profitable for universities and big business, such as languages and arts are the most vulnerable.
If the government was serious about offering higher education as an alternative to mass unemployment they would use the wealth in society to remove the barriers blocking young people’s right to learn.
We fight for the immediate introduction of a grant covering the living costs of all HE and FE students and for a free, fully publicly funded high quality education system.
University and college students now have the horrifying prospect of mass unemployment. 50% of employers are not taking on graduates. The situation is desperate, door to door sales companies have reported a 200% increase in applications from university leavers (Observer 26 July 2009). Students hoping to find part-time work to subsidise their studies will find this much more difficult than before as they will be competing with over two and a half million unemployed workers.
According to the Princes Trust a young person has lost a job almost every minute over the past three months. Thousands of young workers have lost their jobs. Bosses find it cheaper and easier to sack young people as they are entitled to smaller (if any) redundancy payments or work in the casualised service and retail sectors on temporary contracts and are not protected by trade unions.
Socialist Students has linked up with workers, trade unionists and the unemployed to build the Youth Fight for Jobs campaign. Already Youth Fight for Jobs has organised a successful March for Jobs at the April 2009 G20 summit and a fortnight of action with campaigning taking place across the country as term finished last year. Youth Fight for Jobs has the backing of the PCS (civil servants), RMT (transport workers) and the CWU (communications) trade unions.
Youth Fight for Jobs is organising a national demonstration on 28 November 2009, under the slogan “For real jobs – for free education”. As well as making this a focal point for the fight back in the universities and colleges we want to make it clear that schemes like the Future Jobs Fund don’t go far enough to meet the needs of young people.
We will organise young workers in workplaces and campaign inside the trade unions to make sure that workers on this scheme are on comparable conditions to the established workforce, paying at least the minimum wage. Any “placements” must lead to real jobs and not mean bosses can use unpaid volunteers to fill job vacancies. This campaign will also be aimed at young people in the dole queues, organising them in a united fight back with workers organised in trade unions and students for genuine employment schemes.
Socialist Students says no to students, young people and workers being forced to pay for this recession. We take lessons and inspiration from the recent mass movements in Germany, Austria, Italy, France and Greece which are also combating right-wing governments who try to force workers and young people to pay for the crisis.
Recent mass struggles of workers in Britain have shown that the bosses can be forced to retreat or be defeated. This has been seen with the Visteon car workers who occupied their factories in response to being sacked and offered nothing by the company they worked for, eventually winning a redundancy package. Construction workers at Lindsey Oil Refinery and other sites by taking illegal unofficial strike action, have forced multinationals like Total to retreat from attacking conditions and attempting to divide the workforce.
Students need to unite with workers to build effective mass action in local areas and across the country to stop immediate attacks on our rights and conditions in workplaces, colleges, schools and universities, and to fight for our future against the effects of capitalist crisis.
