The scandal of unemployment

It is the scandal that must not be ignored. For yet another month, UK
unemployement has risen again as we pay for the bosses’ crisis. Another
28,000 have been added to the ranks of the jobless in the three months
from Nov 2011 to January 2012.

The statistics are damming:

One in every twelve are now unemployed.
One in five young people aged 16 – 24 are out of work
One in two black people cannot get a job.
Out of the 28,000 added to the figures, 22,000 were women.
1.13 million women are now unemployed – the highest rate for 25 years.

Public sector workers continue to be hardest hit. The TUC have released data showing that 625 public sector jobs have gone for each day that the Coalition has been in power – the equivalent of one job every 2 mins and 18 seconds.

The Tories seem disinterested. Their ‘work for nothing’ scheme has been exposed for the scam it is. No wonder the government is being taken to court for breaking slavery laws. However, the new scheme announced by the Labour leadership today is not much better. Yet again, long-term unemployed youth are being offered "work experience" on the minimum wage with the employers getting a nice payout from the state. Schemes like this are rubbish. The employer gets really cheap labour so they don’t have to take on people on a real wage. All the young people get is a period doing a dead-end job with virtually no hope of proper employment at the end. Promised training is nearly always non-existant. All the young people on these schemes learn is an appreciation of the unending boredom of menial work. As usual, there will be penalties for those who do not take up the scheme, which says all you need to know about their real value. These projects are just pandering to the middle class prejudice that people are not on the dole because of a lack of jobs but because they "lack experience, the will to work, etc., etc."

These "solutions" are no substitute for creating real jobs – something capitalism seems incapable of doing as it attempts to shore up its profits. The unions must fight. If an employer announces lay-offs, we say: Open the books! Let’s see the true figures. The bosses do not want us to know how much they are pocketing and why they are cutting jobs as a quick fix to keep the profit margins up. If it is clear that there is not enough real work for an existing workforce to do then the demand should be: Share out the work with no loss of pay. If nothing else this will act as a mighty incentive – and when you look at the bonuses bosses pay themselves, it is clear they do seem to like incentives – for management to start trying to find work.

Of course, when it comes to public sector jobs the demand is clear – no cuts, no job losses. These workers are there to provide services for us – especially the old, the sick and the needy – not to help the bankers balance their books.

Utlimately a massive job creation programme is needed. However, we cannot wait for capitalism to decide that they are now able to kindly consider doing this. There is no sign that this will be hapening anytime soon. In fact the bosses quite like the idea of high unemployment rates since it creates a reserve army of labour, there to keep wage rates down and the workers cowed with the threat that "there is always someone to take your job if you don’t do what we say."

Action is needed now. We are facing the prospect of "a lost generation." Only a socialist programme can deal with the scandal of long-term mass unemployment. Capitalism acts in the interest of the millionaires not the millions. Labour should be calling for the immediate nationalisation of the monopolies, banks and finance houses, to be run as part of a socialist plan of production with the task of creating the necessary jobs for all. Left to the bosses and their cronies at Westminster, all we will see is rise after rise in these figures of shame. The system of capitalism has failed – time to tell it: "you’re fired!"