'Work'-but no jobs!
Socialist Press1980 1980-12-03Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 4 →
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Thatcher There is to be work" made available to tens of thousands more young people in James Prior's extended farcical Youth Opportunities Programme' and his other schemes to disguise the level of unemployment.
But there are still no real jobs for the young workers who' are eventually spewed out at the end of these "work experience" and other plans. Indeed there is not even any pay for many of them. The Tories have replaced the Special Temporary Employment Programme (a 'STEP' onto the dole queues) with the Community Enterprise Programme. This will recruit a few staff whose job will be to enlist unemployed workers into unpaid, "voluntary" part-time work! • But considerate Tories are at least proposing to the Social Security Advisory Committee that they kindly allow unemployed workers to do such "voluntary" work • without docking their benefits!
Meanwhile, Prior has announced a rejigging of the scheme which is currently keeping several thousand workers off the unemployment statistics.
The Temporary Short Time Working Compensation Scheme is to be maintained-despite its spiralling costs. The idea is to pay employers to keep workers on short time rather than sack them. Now firms can apply for such subsidies for nine months rather than the previous six.
But Prior is cutting the level of the subsidy from 75% of daily earnings to 30%. This means either more sackings-ot anything up to a 25% wage cut for the workers now covered by the scheme at the end of their first six months-followed by redundancy three months later.
Every Tory "silver lining" comes with its own wrap-around cloud! 350,000 jobs ceased to exist, the official unemployment figure went up by only 250,000 -leaving 100,000 unaccounted for.
In the last twelve months this figure of 'disappeared workers has reached 225.000.
It is true that in some cases older male workers have taken early retirement, having been made redundant.
In other cases workers may have found 'cash-in-hand' jobs in the so-called "black" economy.
But the majority are likely to be married women who have been excluded from the workforce-driven back to an existence as 'housewife' in, the isolation of the home.
' Small wonder SO few working class women can hear the name 'Thatcher' without becoming angry.