YOUNG people today are under full scale attack from the Tory-led coalition. They are now fighting back.
The Young Socialists are marching from the TUC HQ in London today to the TUC Congress in Liverpool to demand that it calls a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government.
Youth have had the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA ) taken off them by the Tory-led coalition. This allowance allowed hundreds of thousands of youth to take up further college education.
They have also had £9,000 university tuition fees imposed onto them – fees that they will be paying back into their middle and old age, if they manage to leave university and get an occupation that pays wages.
Many graduates are being forced into unpaid occupation, becoming interns, who work for nothing, to try and get some ‘work experience’, at the end of which they hope that some employer will give them work that pays wages.
It is a matter of fact that graduates are being targeted by bosses for zero hours contract jobs. These contracts put them at the disposal of the boss. They have no fixed working week, no holiday pay or pensions. They work as and when the boss requires.
This is the system of exploitation that the bosses historically began with. On the docks especially, they had the ‘pens’ that workers were herded into every morning, and then the overseer came along and selected those who would work for a day or even an hour, with those that had a rebellious streak left workless until they learnt that even an element of defiance did not pay!
Today, the mobile phone has taken the place of the pen. The young person is told to ring every morning or every three hours to see whether there is any work for them.
The capitalist class want to reduce youth to being ‘helpless individuals’, who are fearful of offending the employing class.
For youth, there is also the big issue of where to live, since there is no council housing left and there is no housing benefit for the under 25s and a slashed housing benefit for the 25-35 year olds.
This has reduced young people who have jobs, to becoming additional burdens on their parents. These days many young people are forced to stay with their parents till their mid-30s! This is the life of young workers.
For the unemployed youth, there is an additional dose of ‘living hell’. They are treated as the undeserving poor who have to be disciplined or ‘sanctioned’ until their spirit is broken!
First of all, they have to qualify for the Jobseekers Allowance and prove that they are looking for employment 24 hours a day.
They often have to report every day to the Job Centre, with no prospect of getting a job. A failure to satisfy their ‘advisors’ results in being sanctioned, losing the jobseekers allowance for a number of weeks and then permanently, so they have no alternative except to live on the streets.
This is the life that working class and middle class youth are forced to live. No wonder youth are angry. No wonder that they hate capitalism and the plans of the bosses to eliminate all of the great gains of the working class, from the NHS to the Welfare State, and to slaughter peoples that are in revolt against imperialism such as the Palestinian people.
Millions of workers and youth have had enough of capitalism and want to lead the working class in a great revolution to bring it down.
This is why the Young Socialists have organised their march from the TUC headquarters at 10 am today to the TUC Congress in Liverpool.
They intend to mobilise the working class for a massive demonstration and lobby of the TUC Congress on Sunday September 7 to demand that the TUC calls an indefinite general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government and socialism.
The Young Socialists want to see socialism in the UK and want to see the oppressed nations such as the Palestinians have their own state, and bankrupt crisis ridden capitalism replaced by world socialism.
Join the YS march at 10am today.
