Game to go into administration young people hit hardest once again

With the retailer Game UK to go into administration after a succession of poor profits according to them they look to be heading downwards. As a result many of their stores shut yesterday with administrators immediately coming in and telling the staff to go home with no compensation no nothing from what I understand.

Bearing in mind many of Game’s workers are young trainee’s who have found a job there to earn some money to get by. Possibly in between jobs as the job market has been poor for many years now let’s are honest.

But for young people this is a further attack on the youth of today. With over a million young people out of work and not in training of any sort this further addition of 2000 more to that pile of discarded workers is further evidence of a failing capitalist system. Where the profits are not there to be had so workers are the first to suffer being chucked on the scrap heap.

Youth fight for jobs marched from Jarrow to London last year a full 330 miles to demand a future for young people. They don’t want to be a lost generation and I don’t think we should let them be either. Let’s fight for jobs and education decent socially useful jobs, living wage for all trade union rates and pay and free education for young people.

These are some of youth fight for jobs’ basic demands and are entirely possible. Maybe not under this current rotten system of capitalism but with the view to transforming society to one based on people’s needs rather than profits for a select few.

It is news like this that angers me when young people are encouraged to find jobs and do in places like Game and then are told your no longer needed where are they to go ?

It is not like there are lots of jobs out there. Every 1 job has 6 people going for it there simply aren’t the jobs out there for people.

A mass creation of socially useful jobs for people and young people in particular would go some way to getting things moving again. Of course this would only be temporary as the underlying contradictions of capitalism will still exist. So the need to transform society needs to be taken up by a new workers party putting the interests of the 99% before anything else.

Working for your doll ? join the fight for real jobs that pay

Over the past few months the government's work experience scheme has come under increasing scrutiny. The scheme attempts to introduce slave labour for the young unemployed, with young people working 30 hours a week for eight weeks and receiving no additional pay on top of their Job Seekers Allowance (JSA), which they are threatened with losing if they do not participate.

The case that has received the most media attention is that of Cait Reilly, a geology graduate who had been volunteering in a museum to try to get a job there, but was forced to work in Poundland.

The scandal reverberating from this has prompted Sainsbury's and Waterstones to pull out of the scheme.

According to the government's propaganda this 'experience' will give young people the skills to make employers take them on.

But there is no guaranteed job at the end of the 'experience'. Tesco has already taken on 1,400 'volunteers', but only 300 have received jobs and who's to say that they wouldn't have been taken on anyway.

Tesco has now started advertising jobs as 'JSA + expenses' in the job centre plus system, including one dated 9 February for night shift workers (usually premium rates) in East Anglia.

The truth is that this is a massive attack on pay, terms and conditions of retail workers. Instead of filling vacancies with real jobs, companies can bolster their profits by taking on conscripts for a month or two.

It is welcome that shopworkers' union Usdaw has now heeded the call made three months ago and has come out in open opposition to the scheme, with general secretary John Hannett being quoted in the press as demanding 'the rate for the job'.

Usdaw putting pressure on companies it has agreements with is a step forward, but it shouldn't be left there.

Activists and reps should link up with unemployed campaign groups such as unemployed workers' centres and Youth Fight for Jobs to build a campaign linking those in and out of work to scrap the 'work experience' scheme and replace it with real jobs with union rates of pay and conditions.

Youth Fight for Jobs is organising actions around the country for the 'Boycott Workfare' campaign national day of action on Saturday 3 March. Get involved if you can.

contact youth fight for jobs on twitter at @youthfight4jobs and on their website at http://www.youthfightforjobs.com

Have world governments given up on full employment

Full employment seems to be a mystery to many and a fantasy for others. Did we ever have full employment in the United Kingdom and will we ever see this again ?
In todays Britain we currently have 2.6 million unemployed people at present with over a million of those being
16-24 without a job. or in any form of training

But has there ever been full employment? That depends, like a lot of economics, on one's definition of the term.

"Full employment never meant zero unemployment," says Christopher Pissarides, professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

As long as most people were in work it was seen by the majority of people that it didn't matter if rather a lot of other people, albeit a minority, were not. So unemployment lost its profile as an issue”
End Quote
Historian David Kynaston
Instead there is what the free market capitalist economist Milton Friedman termed a "natural rate" of unemployment, where nobody stays out of work for long, unemployment fluctuates between 5% and 6% with jobless workers quickly being hired in growth sectors of the economy.

Other economists argue this is too high. William Beveridge, the man who inspired Britain's post-war welfare state, said full employment meant a figure of under 3%.

Before the world became industrialised, nearly everyone outside the ruling rich elite would have had to work to survive, usually in the fields. After industrialisation all that changed. Mechanisation offered people work in the factories but also brought huge spikes in employment and an intensification of economic boom and bust which is built into capitalism like night and day. Due to its various contradictions which i have detailed in the past on this blog.

Pissarides argues that full employment was a reality in the US in the 1990s under Bill Clinton and from 1997-2007 in Britain, and in modern day China.

Other economists say it's not fair to compare democracies with autocratic societies. Children learn in history lessons about the mass mobilisation of men in Hitler's Germany for armaments production and public works programmes. "Conscripting people over the barrel of the gun in totalitarian societies is not full employment as economists understand the term," says economic historian Tim Leunig.

In 1955 unemployment was very low indeed So has genuine full employment ever been achieved in the post industrial world? "Of course we've had it," says the economist Lord Skidelsky. "Between 1950 and 1973 unemployment averaged 2% and was always well under one million."

This was the golden age for jobs in Britain. Also the biggest period of growth for capitalism ever. The high point came in July 1955 - shortly after Anthony Eden had taken over from Winston Churchill as prime minister - when unemployment reached a post-war low of 215,800, a mere 1% unthinkable today.

So what happened to full employment? Ian Brinkley, director of think tank the Work Foundation, says the term went out of fashion in the 1970s as unemployment passed one million.
This is the period which the ruling class gave up on the idea of full employment and focused far more on growth and making profits in other ways.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher pursued a different approach, which economists characterised as the prioritising of tackling inflation. The concept of full employment was dead, says Brinkley.

Unemployment climbed above the symbolically important three million figure, and stayed relatively high even still today.

So will full employment ever be achieved again ?

I dont think so under capitalism this will ever happen. As Karl Marx wonderfully explained the ruling class in their desire to divide and rule discovered the idea of keeping a army of reserve workers as Marx put it which enabled the ruling class and the boss's to hold wages down with the threat of unemployed workers coming in to do their job for the same or for less if a worker demanded more wages.

Today this is one of the capitalists most powerful weapons the threat of unemployment hangs over many of us still today as the ruling class looks to make the workers pay for the mistakes of a ecnomic system they have no say in running.

The only way i feel we will see full employment again allowing for the debate if it ever was will be a socialist ordering of society. Where the blind drive for profit will have gone and people can and will i'm sure want to work for society. Working for the needs of society and for others will bring out workers full potential. For many people this will be the first time they may enjoy work when they are not having to work for their boss's profits but for their own society, based on human needs.

The desperation of unemployment

For a growing number of people today unemployment is a way of life. Finding a job is harder than most people think.

The ruling class announce it is easy to get a job just get on a bus or a bike and find one in the next town. Not so easy for all of us unfortunatly. For many working class people just finding a job that you are qualified for is something with more jobs wanting more and more from us. Also with most jobs now wanting experience and if your young and never having had full time employment this is really hard to get as where would you have gaiend your expereince from ?

There may have been part time work you did while at school or university but no doubt it wasnt what you eventually wanted to do for a job.

The sheer desperation of many to get a job these days at any cost has lead many to take a job in a industry they are not familiar with or ever had any intention of taking. This is another reality of the labour market in 2011. The fact that as workers we are forced to take a job we are not happy in just to pay our bills or mortgage is another sign of how brutal and rough the capitalist society we live under today can be.

Even once in a job of low paid poor conditions work we may not have the chance to join a trade union and be forced to work very long hours for very poor pay. But yet these are the choices many are taking just to get a job and feel apart of society.

This is no way for workers to live and as the working class we all deserve better.

This is why as socialists we must portray whenever and wherever we can that there is a alternative for workers and unemployed people all who we look to win over to our ideas that there is a better way. A better way of running society. To benifit the many not just the few.

The system and society we wish to see is a socialist society where peoples needs were met before anything else. There would be enough jobs to go around and would all be well paid for the jobs people do. All this can be achieved despite what the ruling class and the right tell us. It cannot happen in this current society by reforming the system as capitalism is flawed totally and cannot provide for everyone. Which is why we must continue the day to day struggles fighting for workers and working peoples rights and concessions off the ruling class untill the working class become full contious to take on the ruling class and over throw this rotten capitalist system.

We must raise socialist ideas and theories wherever we can winning workers to our ideas. Pushing for workers to have the rights to a trade union and to push back and defeat the extreme anti trade union laws in this country. Which are some of the harshest in Europe not helped at all by a capitalist supporting labour government over the last 13 years.

Workers need to know their rights and fight for more. We as socialists always try to raise working class struggles and stand up for workers as we believe in the collective power of the organised working class. The time for morning is not now the time for organising and fighting back is now.

Workers need to realise that there is power in a unite working class and a better future is possible.

Child povety in Condem Britain as cuts begin to hit

Last Monday on BBc 1 there was a documentary shown called Poor Kids. these documentaries dont come on that often as we are distracted from the real reallities of what really goes on in parts of Britain today as the working class people realise the tories are back at the helm. Documentaries like this one shown last week are shown not because the ruling class wants the mass's to see such things but they are obliged to keep their state funding to show these sorts of programmes to remain somewhat balanced.
The programme was good and underneath i've placed the review of the documantary from our paper this week- the socialist which you can read more at www.socialistparty.org.uk

Three and a half million children in Britain live in poverty. The gap between rich and poor has never been greater. BBC One's "Poor Kids" filmed children in their homes and neighbourhoods and let them talk. What a sad, sickening picture of life in one of the richest countries in the world.

We're told we all have to tighten our belts; that we've all been profligate and now wasteful public spending has to be reined in.

We saw a boy who was bullied for wearing hand-me-down school clothes from his older sister, and a girl who had never had a holiday apart from a school trip to Scarborough. All the children filmed occasionally went without meals, and all of them were cold in the winter because their parents couldn't afford to properly heat their homes.

I normally hate programmes like this. we are very aware that our own children and many of their friends are in the poverty statistics, and I dread programmes that claim to show what it's really like. Aside from the fact that inevitably editorial decisions distort what we see, they also lift people out of their context. With very little commentary we are largely left to draw our own conclusions, and it would be very easy for some viewers to see these children's lives as the product of individual problem parents.

But that is clearly not the case. The statistics injected at various points in the programme showed that these children simply illustrate general conditions. When children talked about their asthma and eczema problems, we were told that poor children are two and a half times more likely to suffer chronic illnesses and 85% of children living in damp conditions suffer breathing problems.

What linked all the families shown was long-term unemployment. One was a single father, struggling to find work that would fit around childcare, while in his city five people chase every job. Officially, the poverty line for a family his size is £1,000 a month after housing costs. This family lived on £420 a month. The father explained that when he was in work their income was that amount a week.

Massive public sector cuts are going to make these conditions far worse. If the government realises its plans, job prospects are going to get much worse, benefits will fall, housing conditions worsen and access to decent children's services, limited as it already is, will be slashed. The happy ending for one child in the programme, when her damp block of flats was knocked down and her family was rehoused, is unlikely to be repeated for many children in this age of austerity.

In fact the people in the programme are the target of Con-Dem attacks. These are the 'scroungers' allegedly living in luxury at the expense of hard-working taxpayers.

The final statistics in the programme were probably the most devastating. On measures of child poverty, Britain comes 18 out of 22 European countries, with only Slovenia, Poland, Hungary and Italy worse. And child poverty is set to rise 11% over the next three years.

Of course the programme offered no solutions. It is up to the Socialist to provide that - to end the horrors of child poverty we must organise to defeat the cuts, and fight for a programme of full employment, and investment in decent housing and public services.


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In this issue


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Fighting the cuts

Strike 30 June

Workers tur