We want real training not conscript labour!

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The only British confrot of Cruise missiles is to say No! YOU can see why the Tories need compulsion to get us on to YTS - their cheap labour scheme isn't working. In the first six months of the scheme 83,000 'trainees' nearly a quarter have dropped out. When Tebbit set up YTS last September the Government wanted 480,000 people on the scheme. Only 342,317 took it up, and by the end of January there were only 342,317 still benefitting from 'a valuable training for life' (read 'working with no rights for 25 quid a week').

Since December 4,826 unemployed youth have had their supplementary benefit cut by 40% from £16 to £9.90 a week for leaving schemes early. Registered unemployment of 16 and 17 year olds in January was one of the highest figures Mark Osborn LPYS in recent years: 204,300.

The Manpower Services Commission wants to expand the scheme to 400,000 'trainees' next year.

YTS schemes are just a pretence of training - they are usually boring menial jobs not a training at all. Even the end of year 'profiles' (Reports) an employer fills in doesn't concentrate on what skills have been learnt, but on how well behaved the 'trainee' has been.

The lories argue in their propaganda that if you are better trained you will be 'more employable' and will find a job. So the problem as the Tories would have us believe, isn't that there are not enough jobs, but that we're not good enough to do UK?

them. So the economic crisis will be solved when all school leavers have been on YTS, will it? The argument is so obviously wrong If the jobs aren't there then no amount of "training" will create them.

So what is the real reason for YTS then? The 'Youth Training Scheme" is simply there to provide cheap (i.e. profitable) labour for employers, to disguise the enemployment figures, and to bring into workplaces a load of non-unionised workers to smash the basic union rights of closed-shop.

We must oppose YTS, demanding that the employers top up the £25 allowance to full union rates and guarantee a job at the end. Several Labour councils are doing this. Determined trade union struggle like at Massey Furguson in Coventry has won this. Where we can't win those demands, and schemes are simply being used to take workers' jobs, the trade unions should stop the schemes. The NGA, NUJ and NUM have agreed to this, they won't touch YTS at all. Above all, we must get YTSers into their trade unions. Only in the unions can YTSers fight for their rights on schemes: for legal protection, full union rates of pay, and real lob at the end.

New video about "Rights - Wot Rights?" - available from Birmingham Trades Union Resources Centre, Frederick Street, Birmingham. Rani's E saveBell

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