Youth unemployment in Britain is skyrocketing – with cuts in both secure and insecure employment.
The reliance on precarious, marginal, peripheral, insecure or unstable work within the British economy has meant that, with the capitalist economic crisis now begging to hit, the effects on working people is disastrous. It is no coincidence that unemployment, is over 2.2 million (the highest it’s been since 1997) and is expected to reach 3 million by the end of the year. It is estimated that almost half of unemployed workers are and will be under the age of 25. The majority of those who were in precarious work, women, youth and ethnic minorities are the same groups that are flooding to claim JSA.
Young Communist League (YCL) General Secretary Joanne Stevenson called on the people of Birmingham and beyond to come out in support of action on creating sustainable jobs for working people this Saturday. The March, called by Unite the Union, calls for a national strategy for protecting and creating jobs, as well as an ending to the UK’s ‘cheap and easy to sack’ culture.
Ms Stevenson, a resident of Handsworth, Birmingham, demanded that the Government step in and address the alarming decline in sustainable, long term employment that has hit the country, in particular, the Midlands.
The government has pledged to halve teenage pregnancy rates by 2010 and is expecting to reduce by 2,000 the number of girls who become pregnant this year. And yet one wonders - how it is attempting to do this?
If they aren't making contraception free and easily available, if they aren't going to change the ridiculously outmoded sex education system, then the only other way to reduce the numbers of teenage parents is via abortion - yet we have seen an increase of attacks, often supported by New Labour, rather than a strengthening of the current system.
So, BBC News thinks that the biggest draw of the great end of pier show that is congress was the Prime Minister’s quick trip for Brown Windsor soup, Dover sole and crème Brendane. Yet, before reading the menu and in an attempt to sound like listening ministers, Alistair and Hattie had asked the TUC secretariat to get delegation leaders to mobilise their admin and research teams to draw up lists of questions and questioners.
The composite lists were then funnelled through Kay, and then Frances, and then Brendan who imaginatively fretted their way through the vetting until anger and frustration was transformed into slightly testy composite hopes, launched towards the furrowed ministerial brows more in sorrow than in anger. (Maybe we could’ve just asked Jack to push a question card across the breakfast table?)
Youth unemployment in Britain is skyrocketing – with cuts in both secure and insecure employment.
