Official figures put the number of 16-24 year olds not in education, employment or training at 1,163,000. The government has blamed this crisis on the previous government, the crisis in the Eurozone, the minimum wage and leaves on the track.

Youth unemployment has been stuck at more than a million for over a year, despite a barrage of government schemes to fiddle the figures and get young people into work.

The government has announced several ‘apprenticeship’ drives aimed at getting companies to invest in recruiting young people.

But last week revealed the truth behind these schemes amounts to little more than a government-backed subsidy for Britain’s richest companies – jobcentres rounding up young people and forcing them to work unpaid for 30 hours a week or face losing their jobseeker’s allowance.

Still, it’s well known that the Tories have extensive experience on boosting youth unemployment – Thatcher pioneered the tactic during the 80s, leaving a legacy which media pundits came to call the ‘lost generation’. A romantic epithet for a generation of young people blighted by criminalisation, drug addiction, poverty and precarious work.

In this article, Sally Turner examines the reality of apprenticeships in 21^st century Britain – what are they, and who do they really benefit?

The Direct Gov. website puts it as ‘apprenticeships give you the chance to learn – and gain nationally recognised qualifications – while getting a weekly wage.’ Yet the £2.60 an hour wage for apprentices makes a mockery of the work done and ensures young people remain financially reliant on their parents.

If you apply to receive Job Seekers Allowance (JSA), as well as agreeing to look for work, you also have to sign up on the National Apprenticeships website where companies can view your profile and select you to work for them up to 40 hours a week. This does not take into account the individual circumstances, experience or qualifications of the applicant – it’s about ‘bums on seats’, providing cheap labour and manipulating jobless statistics.

The majority of the government’s new ‘apprenticeships’ don’t involve doing any trade work; they’re often simply doing an adult-training scheme within a supermarket or admin work, lasting just a few weeks with no job, qualifications or prospects at the end of it. However by branding it as apprenticeships, they can pay you way below the minimum wage, dictate your hours and show you the door whenever they like, so you’re back to the dole queue, and the company takes on its next batch of ‘apprentices’.

Of course, many apprenticeships are valuable opportunities for young people who can’t afford or don’t want to go to university and want to learn a trade or a qualification; however the amount of places to do a decent apprenticeship these days is completely insufficient; for example, each year British Gas provides so many places for apprentice to become gas fitters, and the ratio of applicants to places is higher than Oxbridge.

The lack of opportunities for skilled apprenticeships is the inevitable consequence of Thatcher’s de-industrialisation and Labour’s drive to get 50% of young people into university – the aim of which was to disguise the fact that youth unemployment has been unsustainably high for a generation, rather than investing in properly funded, suitable career guidance for young people. After all, the City of London which Cameron would have us believe is Britain’s salvation makes it money gambling on government debt – and it needs an army of low-paid, unqualified staff to grease the wheels, while a tiny minority of traders take home six-figure bonuses.

The Government’s new £1.4bn training scheme, intended to ameliorate youth unemployment, has seen a near 900% increase in the number of apprenticeships begun by those aged 60 and over.

This shocking figure shows the plight of older workers approaching retirement, who are sacked, and then unlikely to find new employment, but cannot survive on the meagre state pension, so forced to take up apprenticeships meant for young people just starting their working lives.

Meanwhile, graduate schemes and courses run by public sector bodies like the NHS intended to get young people with few qualifications and experience into secure, well-paid jobs are being taken up by over-qualified university graduates who can’t find employment matching their qualifications.

The same day that the ‘1 million youth unemployed’ hit the headlines (although it has been more than a million for over a year), Vince Cable pushed for more youth to get into apprenticeships – well show us the magic jobs tree, Vince!

Forget about the government’s announcements of ’25,000 new apprenticeships’, the real problem is 500,000 public sector job cuts, and the knock-on effect which will cost a million or more jobs in the private sector.

The answer to youth unemployment is real jobs, paying a real wage which enables young workers to set out on a career, pay rent and take home a decent living wage.

No-one is condemning shelf-stacking as menial or demeaning work, but when Tesco’s announces record profits of £3.5 billion, it’s clear that they’ve got the cash to employ workers and pay them a living wage. Instead their mates in government arrange an endless supply of free workers – paid for by the taxpayer.

The governments schemes forcing young people into useless ‘skills courses’ are simply a desperate attempt to massage the unemployment figures so that youth unemployment appears to decrease, rather than investing in the future by providing secure, well-paid work.

But the Tories can’t even fudge their own figures;  youth unemployment is rising month-on-month, and tens of thousands of young people are being rotated through demoralising, temporary ‘work placements’ which have no value to employers and do not give the applicant any new experience or skills – taxpayers pick up the tab, and big business pockets the profit.

What we need is massive government investment in the work which our society badly needs – a million new council homes could stop the housing crisis and provide employment for hundreds of thousands. We’d pay for it now by taxing the obscene wealth of the 1% and it would pay for itself many times over in the future when we are living in decent homes, in communities with decent infrastructure and facilities.

The Tories announced a scheme to subsidise mortgages, in order to get giant construction companies to build ’30,000 homes’ on land which they are refusing to build because its ‘not profitable’. At the same time these companies are slashing the wages of electricians by 35% – why would young people want to take up an apprenticeship in a trade which is seeing its working conditions wrecked by Tory party donors?

This is just one example of the millionaire government’s determination to look after its own class at our expense. From construction to the NHS, to education, the millionaire’s coalition is waging a class war to make ordinary people pay for the economic crisis. Young people are in the frontline, and far from having a solution, the government is determined to make us pay the most. They are spinning us a line, while selling our future.

 It’s time to organise our resistance.

•  All apprenticeships to be paid the national minimum wage £6.08 an hour, or the trade union rate for the industry.
• No to workfare – real jobs, not free labour
• Free education for all
• Massive investment in housing, education and training paid for by taxing the rich

Read more

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