YOUNG WORKERS LOBBY THE 1970 T.U.C.
There are now more people unemployed and the total is generally expected to reach the million mark by the winter.
This figure doesn't of course include the many others, particularly women, who don't sign on when they don't have a job.
And the numbers will be further swelled by many of the 500,000 or so who are saving school this summer.
Unemployment hits particularly at these last, and at youth in general. They are totally unprepared by school for this situation- careers masters and youth unemployment officers will tell you what obs are available but nothing about what to do if you can't get one -and are therefore more easily prone to frustration and demoralisation. In most cases they will not be in trade unions (schools don't tell you about them, either) and will therefore be completely on their own; even if they are union members they cannot expect too much help from their local official. Young people who are unemployed get lower benefits than older workers. And in many cases they will be dependent on parents, with all the pressures and restrictions which that can involve.
In this situation unemployed youth need to get together and organise themselves to change it. The Spartacus League is arranging a series of meetings round the country on this question, and hopes that in many areas these can lead to the formation of Youth Unemployment Committees to organise action. Of course such committees should not operate in isolation, and should include representatives of the trade nions, of Claimants Unions, of Schools Action Groups, etc. But the main initiative and the hain responsibility must come from the unemployed youth themselves. They themselves must take the lead in fighting for their rights, in organising local activity such as meetings, pickets, marches, etc.
These committees must also seek support rom local trade union branches, trades councils, hop stewards committees, etc.-arranging for peakers at meetings of these organisations is one of the best ways of doing this. Money of course is the most urgent need. The committees should as one of their major tasks make preparations for the "mass youth lobby" planned for the TUC Congress in Blackpool on 6th September, and should aim to make the problems of nemployed youth one of the major emphases of this lobby. Local trade union organisations should be asked to sponsor coaches to this lobby as well as helping in other ways.
The organised labour movement must be left in no doubt that the problems of unemployed routh are extremely pressing and that immediate it was going to produce a lot more brainy people iction on their part is essential. For its part, the Spartacus League will make every effort to nure that unemployed youth can organise When you leave school, or if you have left school parents, the range of subjects taught is much already, you will find yourself confronted by probably the most difficult period of your life. in Britain than at any time since the War, CSE exams you will find yourself torn between Having struggled through the figal O level or two contradictory ideas about your situation.
On the one hand, it seems that you are now free to choose what you want to do rather than what your teachers or parents wanted you to do. On the other hand, you will be increasingly aware that the number of exams you passed, the streams in which you were placed, the remarks in school reports, etc., are what really determines your job future and therefore the future of your life as a whole. By the time you have tried out several dead-end jobs-office teamaking, factory work, etc.-you will come to the conclusion that it is already too late. You will come to realise that what you finally do is not at all your own free decision -it was determined in advance several years ago by examinations, pressures exercised on you by parents, attitudes you adopted to certain teachers, etc., the consequences of which you certainly did not realise at the time.
The fact of the matter is that the educational" system is not so much an education as a sorting and grading process. Its real purpose is to give you a label which enables future employers to size you up. The way the educational system works is not an accident or a design of nature. It is determined by the longterm labour requirements of industry —or more accurately of the small class of people who own the industry in a capitalist society. Schools are there to sort out and train a minority to do the skilled jobs in society. The rest (the vast majority) are then discarded to find their own way in society-which usually means getting a lousy dead-end job or increasingly no job at all.
Now you may reply that really you did your best but there were many others in the class who were "brighter" than you; that nature just isn't very kind to most of us but mysteriously bestows upon a few some extra brain capacity. This lucky few then go on from school to get the most rewarding, most exciting, and best paid jobs, while the majority on the other hand get the dirtiest, most tedious and boring, and worst paid jobs.
But if nature is to blame for this state of affairs, then isn't it rather strange that nature produces roughly the right number of people to do the skilled jobs and roughly the right number to do the unskilled jobs? How did nature know? Of course we could say that there must always be a few skilled jobs and lots of manual jobs in any society, because nature just doesn't make lots of brainy people. However this answer to the question can't be correct - because it can certainly be demonstrated that while the population of the British Isles has risen quite considerably since the last War the number of skilled jobs has risen very much faster. If nature is the cause of "intelligence", then why did it suddenly decide that after 1945 than it had done previously?
If nature isn't the explanation, then what is? Maybe there have been more skilled jobs since 1045 hangmea wider, and these subjects are taught to a more advanced level. But then the question arises:
why did society suddenly decide to extend the educational system?
The answer, of course, is that since the War the amount of skilled labour required has risen much faster than the amount required over the previous century. That is, industry today requires more technicians, engineers, designers, architects, scientists, planners, accountants, etc.
than ever before. More and more people have to be trained, before they go out to work, not simply to read, write and count, but to do complicated mathematical problems, to understand the scientific structure of matter, to do physics and chemistry, to learn accounting, to have an elementary grasp of the history of the country, its geographical structure, where its minerals are found, what its transportation pattern is, and so pn.
What has happened is this: over the last 25 years an industrial expansion has been carried out by the capitalist class (not just in Britain, of course which has created hundreds of thousands of new skilled jobs. However, the capitalist class is not so numerous that it can fill all these occupations with its own sons and daughters. Consequently they have been forced to extend to the sons and daughters of the working class the educational facilities which they had previously kept for themselves. This involved a large and ongoing building programme of colleges and universities, new grammar and comprehensive schools, and the raising of the school leaving age from 12, and sometimes 13, to 15 years and now 16. The money for this of course came mainly from taxes gathered from the wages of the working class and not from the capitalists' own pockets.
The whole purpose of this expansion proclass children a "chance" a chance to get gramme was to give larger numbers of working skilled jobs and produce more profits for the capitalist class through the quality of their labour. But at the same time it had to ensure that ALL of us didn't get these jobs, because that would leave none of us to do the unskillea work. What the state therefore did was to construct and expand a system in which everybody (it was "universal") was given the opportunity but which at the same time ensured that only a few would be successful. That is why it is competitive. Competition doesn't arise day after day in the schoolroom because some of us are brainy and some dull. Competition is deliberately introduced into the day to day life of the classroom through the teacher and through the examination system to which day to day life is ultimately geared.
That is why we are all given the same "abstract" kind of education. We are all forced to run a race (which takes several years) -a race to gain mental formulae and facts which are of value only to the successful few. For the majority of us, destined to become the unskilled labour force, they are of little or no value; but it is not the teacher's task to tell us the truththat for most of us the whole process is a complete waste of time and hell into the bargain. Hare near streams in the school even when it is apparent to everybody that the game is up. It has to perpetuate the illusion that its purpose is to "educate" us all; despite the fact that it is patently obvious that education is about jobs, it continues to perpetuate the illusion that education is something separate from jobs something that makes us human and rational.
Of course this whole competitive hell which goes on day after day is in fact one of the most inhuman and irrational experiences we will ever have to go through. And of course the very nature of this experience means that it is by no means the most "brainy" who come out on top.
Many who are equally or more intelligent simply (and naturally) react against the whole system-against its values, against the way problems are set, against the organised terror of the school, against the fact that they have no say in "their" education. Because they don't fit in, they too are discarded so that they don't disrupt the system. Most teachers want us to answer their questions, not ask our own.
Of course, it would be some kind of solution if the teachers and the state decided to try and make the size of classes smaller, to lessen the degree of competition, to abolish the examinations, to respect the pupils, etc. This would indeed go a long way towards solving this mess.
But the plain fact is that they won't for as long as society is organised in the present way, in the interests of a few and their need to make profits by exploiting the rest of us. The whole purpose of the present set-up, far from "educating"
people, is to produce precisely this state of ajjairs: to produce a certain number of "successes" and a whole lot more "failures". It is designed precisely to create large numbers of people who believe themselves to be failures and a few others who believe themselves to be successes. It should be noted that this process is carefully regulated —where "too many" have passed O Levels the marking standards are adjusted to ensure that some who would have passed are failed. A "correct" number of passes is expected by the state from each region.
The kind of jobs we get are not therefore "our" choice or, "our" fault. They are deterTilled by how we tared in one of the institutions of the capitalist system. Equally, the same principle holds if we can't find a job.
As school leavers and young workers you now face growing insecurity of employment.
This applies to tens of thousands of school leavers, college leavers, and even university graduates, because the economy is going into a general recession. When profits fall, as they are doing now, workers are laid off because production is cut down. So, not only do the working class create the capitalist's profit through their labour, but they now suffer by losing their jobs when the capitalist can't maintain this profit.
The visible result of this system, where profits count for everything and social needs for nothing, is the dole queue.
But among all the unemployed it is youth. and particularly school leavers, who are destined to suffer the greatest lack of employment. The reason for this is simple, and operates over the long term. As pointed out earlier, the technological revolution has proceeded very rapidly over the last 25 years. And while the educational system has therefore thrown up more skilled workers-who are generally absorbed into employment-it has also thrown out thousands of unskilled workers who can't find jobs because the same technological revolution has destroyed many more jobs than it created (one of the advantages to the capitalist of new technology is that it cuts labour costs through redundancy). For a long period of time, this tendency to create redundancy remained "hidden"-older workers were retired earlier, women workers were laid off (they tend not to register on the dole because most are married, and so they don't appear in the unemployment figures), and retraining schemes were put into effect. But the current recession in the British capitalist economy is making the long-term trend appear very visibly: many young unskilled workers are now simply not employed in the first place.
The young unskilled worker is therefore a double victim: a victim of the school and of the technological revolution which created the competitive hell of the school in the first place. But while youth are the worst sufferers from unemployment (in terms of demoralisation and frustration as well as financially), they are at the same time the most willing to do something about it. It is with this expectation that the Spartacus League has launched its campaign on unemployed youth-help them firstly to understand the nature of their problems and the kind.
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He FROM SCHOOL TO DOLE