When Cait Reilly refused to work for free at Poundland, the tabloids had a field day. How lazy and idealist are the youth of today! Fancy being on the dole and turning down work! Wasn’t like she had anything better to do, she just couldn’t be arsed… Dossing about, expecting handouts from the state and giving nothing in return, good god, in my day we would have had her belted. Worse than the damn foreigners these young people.
Etc. Etc., you know the script.
Cait’s refusal was not out of a snobbery for Poundland, the retail sector, or those who work in retail. It was out of disdain for a system that thinks young people’s labour is worth less than other people’s, and which has now deemed it worthless. The government’s compulsory ‘work experience’ schemes, in which young people on unemployment benefit are ordered to give their labour to large corporations for free, are becoming the status-quo and have massive swathes of public support behind them. The more well-meaning of these misguided supporters think the government are doing us a favour, making us more employable. These tend to be the same people who believe that if you want a job, you will get one, and if you don;t have one, it must be due to laziness and unwillingness to work. Today’s news tells us that of the 231,000 people currently unemployed in Scotland, over 88,000 are aged 18 to 24. So 38% of Scots on the dole are youth (and these figures don’t even take the 16-17 group into consideration).
It is simply untrue that young people do not want to work. In Scotland, many young people have part-time jobs while still in high school, and rely on part-time work to see them through university. Tuition fees might remain free for Scots studying in their home countries, but rent and food are not. The student who does nothing but party is an archaic stereotype, and a myth. The student who must fit in classes around part time jobs – in many cases students have more than one of these – is an increasing commonality, especially in the case of lower-paid working-class families who simply cannot afford to support their children while they are away at university. Graduates who are unable to find jobs in their sector due to ‘lack of experience’ or a simple lack of jobs are being turned away from lower-paid jobs on the grounds that they are ‘over-qualified’, creating a widing graduate employment gulf. And young people who do not go to university, preferring to leave education in order to make a wage sooner, are increasingly finding that there are no jobs for them. Where even minimum-wage jobs demand extensive ‘experience’, school-leavers increasingly find themselves at a loose end in a system that refuses to accomodate them. Clearly the factors leading to youth unemployment are much more multifarious than unwillingness to work or idealist attitudes.
So is this huge number, this 38% of Scotland’s unemployed being youth, a crazy coincidence? Or is it symptomatic of a system that consistently works against the interests of young people?
Either way, free labour presents no solution, and it works against everyone’s interests, not just those of the youth. Why would a company employ someone to do labour for them when they could have a young person do it for free? The Tories are notorious for acting in the interests of big business and ‘the city’ rather in the interests of the people, and no more so than here. In a Britain where young people’s labour is worthless, unemployment increases for every age category, since the workforce is increasingly made up of unpaid people on unemployment benefit. This scheme does not make young people more employable, it makes them work for dole – and even if we are to see unemployment benefit as a substitute for the wages they would otherwise earn from this labour (which it categorically isn’t, but humour me for a second) – we are still expecting young people to work for a fraction of the minimum wage – a fraction of what an employee would be paid to do the same job. And this fraction of the minimum wage is paid for by the taxpayer, rather than by the company that gets the benefit of this virtually free labour.
As usual, we can find some guidance here in Marx. The theory of surplus value tells us that profit is created from workers being paid the lowest possible wage for their labour – necessarily this must be less than the products of their labour are worth to a buyer. The lower the wage, the higher the profit margin. Free labour – or, at best, dole-priced labour – results in a widespread acceptance of the assumption that labour isn’t worth wages, thus devaluing everyone’s labour. People are paid less as a result, thus company profiits go up, and the unemployment statistics are worse than ever due to unemployed people being used as virtual slaves. This is a super-capitalist plot devised to increase company profit using the poorest members of our society, relying on the prejudice many have for young people in order to quell any resistance to a scheme that devalues everyone’s labour, and makes the unemployment problem worse. Classic Tory strategy, whereby the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Cait Reilly simply refused to be a dole slave. The system demands she works. She demands it gives her a job. She demands her labour – and by extension everyone’s – be worth at least minimum wage.
Talk of deficits, massive debt and brutal public spending cuts are pretty much in the British news 24/7 these days, so if you’ve noticed the recent debt crisis in the USA you’ll have noticed some of the same terms being thrown about, but if you paid close attention you might have noticed that unlike the UK there’s been a standoff between the two main political parties in how to handle the debt crisis.
This crisis started when the US Treasury requested an increase in the amount of money it was able to borrow -- but this amount, known as the debt ceiling has to achieve backing for the US Congress. Unfortunately for Democratic President Barack Obama, the Congress is currently in the control of the Republican Party. Ouch. And many of these Republican Congressmen and women are members of the Tea Party, a political movement that was formed in opposition to public spending and incurring any more government debt. Double ouch.
This standoff between the Republicans -- who wanted no tax increases but massive public spending cuts and the Democrats, who wanted some tax increases, but still some massive cuts as well -- went on for weeks with angry Americans venting their frustration on twitter, as pundits warned that the most powerful superpower in human history was about to follow in the footsteps of Hearts of Midlothian FC. Fortunately, after days of wrangling the politicians managed to sort it all out -- a compromise was reached, and the USA can go back to hopey changey goodness under President Obama -- right?
Unfortunately not -- the Democrats led a full scale surrender to the most extreme Republican demands in Congress. In exchange for extending the debt ceiling, there will be spending cuts of a whopping $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years, made in the very, very limited welfare net of the USA. Just to clarify, $2.5 trillion is how much money you would need to pay Bill Gates for him to shit himself in public with his mum and dad watching. These cuts come a few months after Republican hardliners -- many of them from the Tea Party -- refused to ditch Bush era tax cuts, designed to help the richest 2% of Americans. At the same time as these cuts are made, there will be no new taxes to raise revenue -- not even on the super rich in the USA, who have seen their personal wealth skyrocket in the past 30 years.
“I’ve spent all my money bombing the middle east and bailing out the worst bankers in history, at a time of capitalism in collapse. Can I get credit? AYE!”
The Republicans have pushed for these cuts supposedly to stop “out of control” Government spending, but the reality is that the US debt has been incurred largely due to the bailout of multiple US banks and corporations and maintaining the most powerful army in mankind’s history (currently at war in three countries, with dozens of bases dotted across the globe). The picture painted by Republicans of a Socialist Obama borrowing money recklessly to give to the poor is a complete fantasy . Like in the UK, the political establishment in the USA, both Democrat and Republican, supported massive bail outs of failed private enterprises with virtually no control or direction on how US taxpayers money should be spent.
This combination of no new taxes on the super rich, but also a desire to maintain a massively expensive military industrial complex is a contradiction that the credit ratings agencies of the USA haven’t ignored -- as noted by the US Darpa’s continued research into rocket planes in the same couple of weeks that Bright House came to the White House asking for their telly back. In a historic first these credit agencies downgraded the United State’s credit rating from AAA to AA+. It may not sound so bad -- if you came home with a AA+ mark in a Maths exam you’d probably be quite chuffed -- but when the self-described leader of the free world, the victor of the Cold War and the world’s only Hyperpower has a credit rating lower than those cheese eating surrender monkeys in France, you can see why a lot of the miniature American flag brigade are worried.
This supposed threat of bankruptcy in the USA has been grist to the mill of the Tea Party movement, an organisation which is known internationally for their hilarious placards and obsession with long form birth certificates. The Tea Party came to prominence in the wake of the massive bail out of US Banks at the start of the economic crisis a few years ago, alongside the election of President Barack Obama. Their raison detre is opposition to the US Government incurring any more debt and “big government”. Don’t try to point out to them that the Republican Party also voted for the bail out of Wall Street or that part and parcel of “big government” is the ability to bomb foreign people half the world away with missiles wi cameras attached so you can upload it to your you tube account. You’ll probably just get screamed at that you’re an IslamoMarxist as well.
As hilarious as many of these nutters are, they are dangerous not just to millions of the poorest Americans, but to the billions of people in the world who are intertwined with the USA through it’s domination of finance capital and military power. Right wingers in the USA often go a bit funny when a Democrat gets in, exaggerating things somewhat -- like believing Bill Clinton is a Marxist NWO member cos of Waco, or calling JFK a traitor and arranging for him to drive in an open top car at 5mph through Dallas. But the Tea Party are something special.
The Tea Party are a movement of white, upper middle class wealthy Americans fearful of the world economic crisis and it’s threat to their privilege. Regular slogans at Tea Party rallies and protests talk about how they want to “take back America” -- a declaration that the Tea Party don’t think the votes of African Americans and poor whites should determine who occupies the White House, but rather the organised block vote of Christian Evangelicals across the USA. As well as demanding massive public spending cuts, the Tea Party also gives a platform to racists angry at the first Black President in the USA -- Tea Party placards in Washington declared “The Zoo has an African Lion and the White House has a Lyin’ African”. This is alongside their ongoing campaign to demand Obama’s birth records, to prove he is a Kenyan and not an American citizen.
Mad as a bag of cats
The Tea Party’s biggest prejudice is their naked class hatred towards the poorest in the USA. The Tea Party live in a fantasy world where the unemployed, immigrant, low paid, Hispanic and African American population of the USA live a life of luxury off the back of their tax dollars in free healthcare and benefits. One Tea Party supporter, South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer (no relation to Jack we presume said)
This was in reference to a program in his state that allowed students to receive subsided lunches. Tea Party supporters quite literally look upon the working class in the USA like they’re animals. They’re the worst kind of right-wing libertarians who don’t ever stop to consider the link between a massive pool of cheap exploited labour and their personal wealth. Nowhere do the Tea Party try to hold accountable the billionaires in the USA who wrecked the economy with their own rampant greed -- probably because despite the mom and pop apple pie image, the Tea Party are funded by billionaires, happy to have an astroturfed campaign to defend their right to be filthy rich.
Unfortunately there’s been little sustained attack from the Left against the Tea Party. With the exception of the heroic struggle against Republican union-busters in Wisconsin, most of the Left in the USA has fallen back to defending Obama, despite the fact he’s been totally unable to harness the millions involved in his election campaign to push forward a halfway progressive agenda in the states. This means that it’s by no means certain Barack Obama will be re-elected in next years Presidential elections -- and that the door is open for a Republican President influenced and supported by the Tea Party’s ideas.
Perry’s already made moves to court the nutter vote, by saying the Chairman of the federal reserve would be guilty of treason if he printed more money before the 2012 election -- a pretty harsh statement, given treason is more usually associated with trying to undermine or overthrow the democratic process -- possibly by systematically lying about a country’s threat in the build up to a war for example. While opposing any tax increases on the rich, Perry decries that only half of Americans pay tax -- posing towards Tea Party supporters and backing their assertions that they are the dynamic, wealth producing section of American society that keep the country afloat. In reality, in Texas the poorest 20% pay 6% of their income on sales tax while the richest 20% pay only 1.3% -- “Texas is not a low-tax state if you’re low-income” one analyst correctly noted. This is in line with other right-wing “low tax” regimes, like Thatcher in the 80’s -- where the poor ended up paying more in tax, through an increase in regressive taxes and the Poll Tax.
As well as backing Tea Party tax policy, Perry has also called for the use of (unarmed) predator drones to patrol the border between Mexico and the USA. This anti-immigrant rhetoric is justified by the ongoing “War on Drugs” across the border in Mexico, as the cartels and the Mexican Government destroy both each other and Mexican society in the crossfire. Perhaps some slack should be cut for Perry -- he identified the Mexican city of Juarez as the most dangerous city in America. Oops.
Geography lessons for Perry
If Perry’s geography skills are a bit shite his scientific knowledge isn’t better. Perry supports the teaching of intelligent design ie creationism in schools, and also believes global warming is a myth. So far this is all pretty standard fare Evangelical Christian stuff; alongside support for creationism, Perry also responded to a drought in his state with the same policy plan as the ancient babylonians -- with a three day designated “Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas”. Unfortunately, in a shocking victory for athiests in the Republican state, praying for rain did not work and the drought got worse. This might scupper some future Perry Whitehouse initiatives, such as “Praying nobody trades oil in euros instead of dollars week”, “national month of deficit reduction mass” or “Praying the Chinese never want all that money back”.
As well as being fond of the old Christianity a bit much, Perry’s also controversially hinted at support for the secession of Texas from the Union -- a risky policy gambit not tried in a Whitehouse race since pre-Civil War America. Perry said to journalists after a Tea Party rally that, ”Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that… My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.” It’s a pretty bold statement from someone who a) wants to be President of the USA and b) is happy to accuse folk of treason for pursuing different economic policies than his.
Rick Perry supports the use of B-52 bombers to defend the unborn foetus.
It’s easy just to put the blame for extreme right-wingers in the USA like the Tea Partiers and Perry down to stupid Americans voting for mad people with crazy ideas. The problem is that in one sense the Tea Partiers are right -- they are getting support because the USA is in the middle of a crisis, just not the one they think it’s in. The USA is a superpower whose economic power is dependent on a massive military industrial complex -- one big enough to stop anyone trading oil in anything other than dollars, for example -- but free market fundamentalists in the USA are unwilling to call for even slight tax increases on the super rich to fund this military power. This contradiction is what’s forced credit agencies to downgrade the credit rating of the USA, in an attempt to force the political class in the USA to get it’s act together, and run the most powerful capitalist superpower with responsibility to the needs of finance and bankers. Because this system is international -- the US debt crisis has had negative effects on the world’s stock markets -- the far-right in the USA’s total support for complete free market capitalism could help plunge the world into a second recession. Forget George Bush dragging us into Iraq -- the American empire might yet bring the world into a much greater economic disaster if we don’t find a way to declare independence from the mad, mad world of the stock market.
After last weeks multiple days of consecutive rioting, there’s a chance now for some calm, measured discussion on the upheaval that saw the capital and several English cities burn, high streets looted and alleged gangster Mark Duggan shot dead -- with three others killed defending their property. The key word being “chance”, the same way there’s a chance you’ll win the lottery or Michael Bay will decide to stop making movies -- what’s predictably actually happened is talking heads, politicians and newspaper editors have demanded martial law/the death penalty/the return of Maggie Thatcher/Saddam Hussein to crush the thousands of young people who live in the shadows among us waiting to strike again like a Tottenham based Vietcong.
One Newspaper has demanded the return of national service, safe in the knowledge that teaching thousands of young rioters basic firearms skills would have no possible down sides. Other newspaper polls have asked if Blackberry messager should be banned -- following in the footsteps of other strongmen leaders who thought cracking down on people communicating would solve all their problems. If the responses on how to stop the riots again have been a bit daft it’s nothing compared to what some folk have blamed the riots on. David Cameron predictably said the riots were down to “sheer criminality” -- but why didn’t all these criminals strike earlier if their only motive was theft? Looters obviously took advantage of clashes with the police to go out and get a new telly, but what was it they took advantage of? More on that later. Historian David Starkey has blamed the riots on rap music and black culture in general, saying white folk have become black, like Michael Jackson in reverse with less moonwalking and more firebombing. The BBC have obviously went straight for the insider voices into why urban black youth in London might riot, by asking the 66 year old Royal Family historian from Kendal his views. Continuing this new line of reporting, BBC Four have asked Tinchy Strider to front a 4 part series on the Tudors.
But the BBC didn’t just ask old bigots like Starkey why the riots started -- they did ask a black man as well, fulfilling their broadcasting guidelines. Except when they interviewed Darcus Howe about why the riots started, and he gave a response that didn’t blame BBM/Jeremy Kyle/Welfare State/Ali G In Da House, but said people might be angry cos a man was shot dead and the police lied about the circumstances the interviewer didn’t like it too much and accused him of being a rioter. It’s all part of a concerted effort by the press and politicians to make people stop thinking, and instead accept that people rioted because they’re animals -- literally “feral youth” as the BBC described them.
So how did the riots start? On the 5th of August Mark Duggan was followed in a taxi cab by armed members of the Metropolitan Police. After what was claimed to be a shoot out, Duggan was shot dead by the Met. After his death his family and friends started a protest demanding answers about his killing. When a 16 year old girl approached police lines, in accordance with the Met’s community engagement agenda, she was beaten with batons. The combination of Duggan’s killing and police thuggery at the demo sparked an uprising from young people in different parts of London against the police. Outnumbered and caught by surprise, the police were forced to retreat and leave parts of the city in the hands of rioters. Like any spontaneous riot, unlike a planned insurrection once you force the police out people take advantage of having no authority at all. That can range from drinking in the street, to stealing new pairs of trainers, to mugging folk. And if you’ve grown up on the broo with no hope of employment -- 54 people chase every job going in Hackney -- getting all the consumer kicks you’re supposed to have is much easier to do when there’s no polis around.
More information then came out about Duggan’s death -- that the bullet in a police radio was in fact “police issue”, and that the IPCC “may have misled” the public about how he was killed, stating there was no evidence he fired a weapon the police claimed they found at the scene. By the time this information came out the riots were in full swing and it probably would not have made much more of a difference -- but it did confirm the unaired suspicions of thousands of black and asian youth in London, that the police had lied about the circumstances of Duggan’s death. The bullet in the police radio is especially fishy -- while Met police have an itchy trigger finger, they’re just about clever enough to avoid shooting each other. Could the Met have killed Duggan illegally, and then put a bullet into a radio to make it look like he had responded? It’s a very cynical thought, almost like believing they’d be in cahoots with a major newspaper to cover up massive phone hacking scandals.
After three days of consecutive rioting -- which had spread from London to Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Liverpool, Manchester, Salford -- the combined weight of thousands of extra polis/nothing good left to loot brought the riots to an end. After a rather unpleasant shock, the legal system has responded with draconian sentences against rioters -- one guy was sent to jail for 6 months, for stealing bottled water. Another woman was sentenced to 5 months for accepting goods that were stolen, not actually stealing them herself (better avoid that guy round the Barras with the new Planet of the Apes DVD eh?). Under any other circumstances these people would be let off with a caution for shoplifting, or at worst a fine. Now they stand to face jail time and a criminal record for petty crimes which did far less damage to society than what the legal system is doing to them and their families. Alongside these sentences for theft others have even got jail time for just for swearing at the police -- and one guy’s even been sent down for four years just for a facebook event.
The reason there’s been such a massive crackdown is that the establishment is desperate to ensure a riot on the scale of last week never happens again. But they’re at a permanent disadvantage in that they don’t know why the riots started, and they don’t want to know why -- that’s why the media has asked everyone from aging home counties historians to Tory cabinet ministers about why they think people are rioting -- people they have about as much knowledge of or link to as they do with martians. Nowhere has the media tried the most simple and obvious way of determining why people rioted -- actually asking the young folk in these cities. Where the BBC have done it, it’s been at best a soundbite -- but it’s a soundbite that’s worth more than the endless hours of droning from talking heads. Two young girls from London spelled things out pretty clearly -- folk rioted because they wanted to show the police and the rich they could do what they want. No one in the media or the political establishment is prepared to engage with that argument because they live in a bubble where they can’t fathom why people would be angry at the rich or the police -- so they create lots of alternative explanations like blaming rap or BBM for rioting.
actual reason folk rioted above
There’s plenty of poor areas in the UK that didn’t riot though -- Alex Salmond has been at pains to remind the BBC these riots aren’t UK wide, there was no looting anywhere in Scotland despite the Scottish Polis’ efforts to invent some. And some of the poorest constituencies in the whole UK are in Scotland. So are riots just down to poverty? The answer is no, riots don’t just happen when communities are poor -- they happen when they’re poor and are under attack, or have suffered an injustice. In Britain and the USA this injustice is generally police brutality motivated by racism -- like the Rodney King case, the murder of a grandmother that sparked the 1981 riots and now the police killing of Mark Duggan. This -- and not black or “gangster” culture -- is why riots have taken off.
These riots are also happening at the biggest pillars of authority in British society are collapsing -- the banks have stolen from everyone and are now getting paid off, with the wages of nurses, teachers, carers and the benefit claims of the disabled. Instead of being prosecuted bankers still receive bonuses larger than most young people will earn in their entire lifetime. The MP’s who are calling for strict prosecution of the rioters are thieves that make last weeks looters look like angels in comparison -- Tory Minister Michael Gove, who lost his temper when Harriet Harman argued cuts were behind the riots, has stolen £7k from the public purse to do up his house. When he was caught out, he simply repaid the money. Will folk who say they want to riot on facebook get let off if they delete the page? No, they’ll get four years. The forces trying to crush the riots -- the Met -- have also been exposed as massively corrupt, with backhanders taken from News International in exchange for covering up phone hacking. This is as well as being able to kill with impunity -- there’s been over 300 police deaths in custody, but not one single conviction.
That’s the problem with saying all that’s necessary to stop the riots is law and order -- there’s virtually no law or order when it comes to regulating the abuses and crimes of those at the top of society. The corrupt political establishment don’t care about the communities that rioted, either because they think they’ll always vote for them no matter what (Labour) or because they’ll never vote for them (Tories). During the boom years of British capitalism, these poor areas of London were left to rot because the rich demanded cheap labour. Now that the same rich have destroyed the economy these areas which have nothing are being asked to pay up with money they don’t have -- weeks before the riots, massive cuts to Haringey’s youth budget was announced. People who say the riots are mindless have got it massively wrong -- people are now at least talking about why these areas have been abandoned. A few weeks ago they’d never make the headlines. Riots are the one desperate way to grab attention from people who have access to no other means of political power. If you want to avoid riots in the future you can’t keep demanding “order” but have no order in the economy, society, or politics which allows 50% of young people in many parts of London to be unemployed -- otherwise people will find their own ways of striking back whether you think it’s healthy or not.
Yesterday something unusual occured in the historic City of Stirling -- a large march and rally though its town centre. The purpose was to protest job cuts at the University -- specifically, 17 compulsory redundancies being made in the Institute of Aquaculture at the University of Stirling: Scotland’s only Instutute of Aquaculture, which enjoys an international reputation for world-reading research. The opportunity was also taken to celebrate free education in Scotland, and to continue the fight to protect our education system from cuts. On the same day staff across departments at the University were striking in protest at the redundancies.
Stirling Students Rally Against Job Cuts
The march was made up of 450 of Stirling’s staff and students, organised by UCU in collaboration with Stirling University’s Student Union. Starting at the university, the march wound it’s way through Causewayhead, over Stirling Bridge and through the historic town centre, ending with speeches at the public dais at the junction of King Street and Port Street -- bang in the city centre where the rally was supported and joined by locals, shoppers, and various other onlookers. Chants heard during the march included the classics ‘No Ifs! No Buts! No Education Cuts!’, and ‘When they say Cut Back we say Fight Back’. Some of these were chanted back at us enthusiastically by the school students we passed on the way (the march went past Wallace High School). The candidates for the Stirling constituency in the Scottish Election were present (except, obviously, for the Conservative), as well as local and national media.
Students and staff at the University of Stirling are -- like their counterparts across the country -- worried for the future of their jobs, their courses and their institutions. It is widely believed that these compulsory redundancies in the Instutite of Aquaculture will not be the last compulsory redundancies made at the University. The Institute of Aquaculture itself is well worth defending: as this article outlines, it does important humanitarian and conservation work in Bangladesh, teaching the local people how to conserve one of their most vital food sources, and running a night school for local children (which receives no funding and survives entirely on donations). Surely a department with such credentials deserves investment, rather than cuts? People in Bangladesh certainly think so, as can be seen both here and in the video below, where they stage their own protest against the redundancies at Stirling:
The Institute of Aquaculture have put people before profit, and in doing so have created jobs, run a school, and helped people in Bangladesh obtain the resources they need to preserve their environment and optimise a major food source. The institute literally educates the illiterate and feeds the hungry -- what further credentials can it possibly require in order to avoid attack by University management?
We must continue to fight for the future of education -- not only for our students and staff, but for the wider and international community, and all the people who benefit from what universities do. The Institute of Aquaculture at Stirling is a prime example of what education and research can achieve, and provides all the evidence needed in the case for the defense of our universities in the face of cuts.
As part of the growing army of the unemployed created by the biggest crisis of the capitalist economic system since the Great Depression of the 1930s (and soon to be compounded by the onslaught of the Con-Dem government’s ‘austerity’ measures), I think it’s about time someone brought up one of the less talked about aspects of how shite it is being on the dole: constant job applications.
While most jobs under capitalism involve more than their fair share of boring, repetitive and socially unproductive tasks, few can compete with the demoralising process of filling out application form after application form, in full knowledge that with the vast majority of them, you are wasting your time. For young people especially, with dozens and even hundreds of people going after every available job, chances are someone with more experience is going after each and every job you apply for. Of course we’ve little option but to keep on plugging away, doing searches, filling out forms, writing covering letters, editing CVs, changing the focus to what we think each particular employer wants – much like a really dull office job but without the compensation of actually getting paid a wage for it. This situation isn’t helped by the sheer irrationality of the job application methods used by many employers, most of which seem deliberately designed to produce an experience more frustrating than watching Nick Clegg on the news.
What follows is a list of some of the worst, most irritating features of contemporary job application procedures, compiled from my own experiences over the last few months. The list is far from comprehensive – please add some of your own in the comments section below. Consider this article as advice to employers (though I doubt they will take any notice), or as a guide for ‘what *definitely* not to do’ in organising work in a post-capitalist society; but for the most part treat it as some light entertainment for those of you (and I know there are plenty) who know exactly what I mean, having encountered exactly the same things yourself. For those lucky enough to not yet have experienced that depressing trip to your local Jobcentre Plus, to be condescended to and checked up on in return for a meagre £51.85 a week (£65.45 for over 25s – lucky for some!), consider it a sample of the kind of crap you’ve got to look forward to, especially if the planned government spending cuts are allowed to go ahead.
Attention all prospective employers:
If you don’t have a specific reason –e.g. genuinely unique (non-bullshit) questions – then you don’t need an application form. Consider the amount of time people have to spend copying out the exact same information (education, work history, other skills and experience, blah, blah, blah…) into whatever poorly formatted word processor document you’ve thrown together with little thought. Does it really help you all that much to have all applications fitting your arbitrarily defined layout, with 4 year degrees squeezed into one thin column of a table, and a big block of empty space to describe some crappy temp job, just because it happened to be the most recent? Could you not just have mentioned what information you want a CV to include and save us all a fuckload of time and wasted effort?
If you do require a huge, complex, 15-page application form, maybe keep that for a second stage of the application process, for people already being seriously considered. Spending 1-2 hours filling out a massive form only to never even receive a reply is just taking the piss. To any employer who has ever done this (and that’s the majority of them): fuck you.
If you don’t know how to format a Word document so that blank fields work as blank fields, then don’t do it. Please do not just put blocks of underscores in the same way you would for a printed document. This does not work.
Stop asking stupid questions. You know the sort of thing I mean. “Give an example of a time you have succeeded in doing x” or “Explain how you have dealt with a situation where y”. These are more common at job interviews, but appear in some application forms as well. They are essentially designed to test the applicant’s ability to bullshit. In interviews they test your ability to bullshit on the spot. Generally there are two types – questions far too vague to provide any real insight beyond “can this person think of something relevant/make something up that sounds like what (we think) we want to hear” (examples include “Give an example of a situation where you’ve had to solve a problem”), and those that are far too specific, seemingly designed to test whether you already have the particular knowledge or skills that you could only really acquire by doing the job that you’re being interviewed for! (Advice: don’t attempt to subtly point out how stupid a question is during an interview. This doesn’t go down well, it seems).
Online (web-based) forms are great, if:
- they can be saved half-way through, or are short and to the point
- they can be used for multiple applications
- they work properly (most are buggy, poorly designed, and end up covering all the same information you have to submit in separate CV upload anyway)
Don’t make us repeat ourselves. Stop making us say the same thing more than once. If you base application form questions on the structure of a job description, be careful not to put very similar things in different parts of the job description. Clue: using the same word or word groups in slightly different ways (‘organisational/organising/well organised’) does not mean you’ve written a new question or have created a new type of skill.
Send a reply, regardless of the outcome. If you’ve got an email template ready it takes a couple of seconds per applicant. It’s not hard.
Offer feedback if possible – if someone’s making the same mistake in all their applications and you don’t tell them about it, you are a dick.
This one’s for recruitment websites – if your website is just going to convert my Word file to text, while fucking up the formatting, CV upload services are pretty much worthless. I can copy and paste text myself.
I don’t know what I’ll be doing in two years time. Nor in five years time. This is at least in small part because I don’t know if you’re going to give me this job or not. Be realistic – nobody only applies for one type of job. If you ask me this question, you are essentially testing my ability to lie convincingly. Apparently I’m not that good.
Maybe, just maybe, it might be nice to let people know by when they can expect a reply. And then stick to it. Y’know, like actually reply. Especially if they’ve already made the effort to travel across the country for an interview. kthxbye
It has emerged that youth unemployment has risen to it’s highest levels since 1992. Officially 20.5% young people are unemployed in the UK as a whole. That’s just over 1 in 5 of us! Not only is this statistic worrying for young people it is the blunt, grotesque truth that young socialists have known for years; Capitalism is oppressing the youth. These statistics have been released as part of the
The full stats showing under-24s being the worst hit age group.
overall statistics on unemployment in the three months to December which shows a rise in the number of people unemployed to 2.5 million (there was a minor decrease of people unemployed in Scotland). These stats do not paint a great picture for our future or the next generation’s future. The only way to change these stats is by changing the way in which we run our economy and it must start now!
For years we (the youth) have been told that we are a bunch of scroungers, we’re a spoilt generation and if we’re not in employment its all our own fault. That view is flawed and has been for years but now we have updated evidence to prove the knobheads who hold that view wrong. There is a reason why this current generation will be the first ever to become poorer than their parents’ generation. Unfortunately we are not going to have a public sector (becoming a bit of a luxury in the western world now!) by the time we become middle aged the way the current regime of cuts that are being forced upon us by the Tories and Lib Dems. These cuts are attacking those who are most vulnerable in society and the youth (in particular the working class youth) are being attacked by these cuts. The public sector cut-backs are being justified as being “necessary” as we are all in this together the government believe that we shouldn’t punish the bankers who caused this crisis. As a result of these public sector cuts we have all been reassured by David Cameron and co. that the private sector will employ everyone! Well one look at these stats will show that the private sector ain’t doing what Cameron wants them to do. Cameron was so distraught about the announcement of youth employment he couldn’t hold back his tears when he said “(youth employment was) a matter of great regret”. Can you feel his genuine concern for the youth of this country? I fucking can’t!
The message from the government, even though there's no jobs!
In response to this report the government somehow claimed that it showed evidence of unemployment starting to “stabilise”. By stabilising they mean its going to get to a level so unbearably high it cannot go down or rise further thus “stabilising”, I guess. I cannot understand (well I can actually) how anyone in government are not in any sort of panic over the high youth unemployment rate. The simple fact of the matter is the government is run by middle aged millionaires who do not care about investing in the future, they only look at what money they can make for themselves and people in a similar situation. That is why capitalism is exploiting the youth. Its not only this country that faces this problem. Its every capitalist country in the world. The people who are running the countries around the world are rather selfishly living for today. That’s not how govern. That’s a recipe for disaster, if you want to know how to sell out an entire generation look no further than the British governments from 1992 onwards. Although in that time we have had minimum wage act passed. This in principle is good for the youth of this country ending many years of relative slave labour for the youth but ironically the minimum wage is one of the most anti-youth acts right now (however its better than nothing.) . It is disgusting that the wage you receive is based on your age, that’s called discrimination but they get let off with it. If I was to get a job tomorrow which paid minimum wage I would receive £3.56 an hour (minimum wage for a 16-17 year old) but someone doing the same job as me but aged 21+ they would recieve £5.53 an hour (which is very poor anyway), an sad but true fact that shows how you are punished in employment if you are young, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
The campaign against youth discrimination must continue. That’s why come election we must put across our policies for a higher minimum wage (without age discrimination) for those young people lucky enough to have a job. The voting age should be lowered
Home from home for young people.
to 16 so those who are being screwed over by this government can at least vote against them (after all at 16 you are allowed to fight in illegal wars and deemed fit to be a parent). This article may be about youth unemployment but it is just one factor in this society that is run by people who are determined to increase their bank balance whilst blaming the youth for their own and society’s shortcomings and its time this attitude ends before its too late.
An explosion of popular protest has broken out in North Africa over the past few weeks, with anti-government demonstrations and riots continuing in both Tunisia and Algeria.
Localised unrest first began in Tunisia in mid-December, sparked by the attempted suicide of 26-year old graduate Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself alight outside a government building in protest at the police seizure of his fruit and vegetable stall, reportedly for selling without a permit.
Protests in Tunisia – a repressive, western-backed de-facto dictatorship – are rare, but Bouazizi’s action brought issues which have been simmering for years to a head and proved to be the catalyst for nationwide demonstrations. While he has since died in hospital, the rioting and protests have continued.
A number of factors lie behind the unrest – high graduate and youth unemployment, endemic corruption among the elites and government officials, and rampant inequality. On top of this, global food prices are at crisis point, reaching a record high last month.
What started as a rebellion of urban youth has now developed into a much broader front against the repressive government of Ben Ali, who’s been president for 23 years. Thousands of lawyers have been on strike and in the streets, demanding an end to the brutal repression of the protests, of which the death toll is continuing to mount. Trade unions have held mass rallies against unemployment, which have also been attacked by security forces. However, clear reports of what’s happening on the ground are hard to come by – foreign journalists are banned from the country, meaning almost all reports abroad are relying on agency copy. Inside Tunisia, journalists are being banned from towns in which protests are going on, and the government have come down heavy on social media and internet reportage.
Indeed, it’s interesting to compare the media coverage the Tunisian uprising has had with the much-feted, not dissimilar, protests in Iran in 2009/10, in that case over a disputed election result. While the ‘Green Revolution’ dominated headlines for weeks, the Tunisian protests have hardly merited a passing mention on mainstream news broadcasts, and the angle taken has been noticeably different. Whereas with Iran, media outlets played up the pro-democracy, pro-human rights youthful activists WITH TWITTER vs. repressive government aspect of it, this has been virtually absent from what little has been said about Tunisia. As one commentator over at Al Jazeera has asked, could the reason be that the Tunisian government – ranked alongside North Korea in terms of its internet censorship – is an ally of the west, and thus doesn’t fit the familiar, easy to understand narrative of nasty baddie Arab regime vs. secular, democratic western opposition? Indeed, while the US and other governments regularly condemn the Iranian government for their crackdowns on dissent, we’ve yet to see any similar pronouncements regarding Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia. Apart from in secret, that is, with one leaked US embassy cable describing the country as a “police-state”, and laying bare the reality of the regime. Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that Tunisia uses American technology to enforce its strict internet censorship policy, and recieves millions of dollars of US military aid every year as an ally in the ‘war on terror’. Hmm.
In neighbouring Algeria, protests broke out last week, sparked by rapidly rising food prices, with the cost of some commodities up 20-30 percent in recent days, coupled with massive youth unemployment. Like in Tunisia, rioting and demonstrations have spread rapidly across the country. The Algerian Socialist Workers Party (no relation lol) have said in a statement that I’ve badly interpreted from Google Translate:
For several months the discontent has been bubbling.In fighting for the elusive bag of milk, in search of a bakery open, the rage at those billions stolen in front of them: princely gifts made to the Gulf emirs, the lords, or the Algerian kings of Europe, all exempt of tax.
The origin of the explosion, increasing the price of sugar, oil and groceries.The sight of the legitimate revolt of young people of Tunisia, of course, inspired the protests.The distribution of social housing has rekindled the hatred of corruption.We are asked to wait, but we see the fortunes ride without waiting.
Wage increases achieved in the public sector after years of struggle, strikes, repression, are ridiculous for working classes, that is to say for the majority.And these increases are not yet implemented everywhere, and are already eaten by higher prices.
The final outcome of the revolts in both countries remains to be seen, but what’s become clear from the protests is the huge level of discontent at high unemployment, lack of opportunity and the rising cost of living, which is continuing to mount. Mass arrests, repression, censorship and state murders have so far failed to quell protests in either country: while Algeria is accustomed to demonstrations of this kind, Tunisia is not, raising the possibility that they could spread throughout the region.
Pour les libertés d’expression, d’organisation, de manifestation et de grève !
After the recent student rebellion against the ConDem attacks on education, the anti-cuts movement is now recognised as a force to be reckoned with. This site has led the way in reports and analysis of this new movement, which I consider to be as significant as 2003’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq. As recently argued by Aidan Kerr, we must generalise the struggle, opposing all cuts and establishing solidarity networks between all sections of the working class.
The Scottish student movement can be proud of its contribution to opposing Westminster’s reactionary ‘reforms’, with peaceful sit-ins at the universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh, Strathclyde and Glasgow. This will worry the high-heid-yins of the SNP and Scottish Labour, who will be imposing an austerity program in this country, starting with the forthcoming March Scottish Budget. Our recent mobilisations are an indicator that fierce resistance will meet any party attempting to undermine the principle of free education for all.
A key difference between this struggle and the anti-war movement of 2003, is that there is unlikely to be any moment where people think “this is happening now and we can’t stop it”. After troops had been mobilised and entered Iraqi territory, it became difficult to sustain the same momentum on the peace marches – many thought there was nothing they could do and numbers slowly dwindled. However, despite the Lib Dem leadership’s belief that this moment of public displeasure will pass, we are actually just at the beginning of what will be a massive and enduring fight. It feels like it has really started now, and it will end with the toppling of this Government.
HANDS UP IF UR A BAM
Remember back in May, when Clegg and Cameron’s new partnership was formally announced, all the talk was “Can the Coalition last the full 5-year term?” At the time, what everyone meant was “Can the Tories and Liberals get along with each other?” There may be rumblings within the Lib Dems, but their leader’s plans have them tied into blocking an early election and denying voters a say until May 2015. It would seem that party is unprincipled enough to drink the neoliberal cup down to its dregs.
But the Government’s ability to stay in power will be challenged. Again, we ask ”Can the Coalition last the full 5-year term?” not as a result of a potential tiff between Nick n’ Dave, but because there is a prospect that the country could become ungovernable for them. I’m not daft enough to say there is an inevitable impending revolution at this moment. But no-one saw the student rebellion coming. It shows that a new generation has entered the fray, with few illusions in mainstream parties or the parliamentary system. Volatile times are ahead and we must be ambitious.
A key skill we will have to learn is multi-tasking. I am part of the camp that says free education can still be won, despite last week’s vote in the Commons. We must of course continue this campaign. But we must also be alert to the bullshit policies being prepared for other aspects of our lives. Everyone can now see through the media’s discourse about lazy students and diddy degrees, but the Press has reserved even more venom for another embattled section of our class – people on state benefit payments. Similar to their colleagues in Ireland, our pro-capitalist regime has plans afoot to slash the welfare bill, which will cause a spike in ill healh, homelessness and child poverty.
Right-wing politicians like to talk tough on ‘benefit fraud’, but they are clearly making scapegoats of millions of people, mainly relatively poor, doing nothing more than claiming what they’re entitled to. The rich want to dismantle every aspect of the Welfare State, which was won by the workers movement through mass campaigns in the first half of the 20th Century, which the ruling class capitulated to as they feared the prospect of Revolution. The ‘progressive’ Coalition is trying to return us to the Victorian era, with the “undeserving poor” effectively forced into slave labour through modern Workfare.
For several years now, right-wing papers such as the Daily Mail have been whipping up a climate of hysteria around the issue of disability benefits. To read that paper’s glorious pages, you’d think that half the nation was faking depression or kidding on they have whiplash, just for a few extra pounds per week. Of course it’s propaganda, the point of which is to justify a real terms decrease in the amount of money the Government gives sick people to live on.
Sorry to deviate into anecdotes, but I have several friends who have experienced depression and been unfit for work. It is a very common and very serious illness. A civilised society provides help to people like that, folk who need it. But here, under sucessive governments, their standard of living has been on the slide for a long time, with the biggest ever attack currently happening. Shame on the callous politicians who are going through with this.
In the last few months our friends in the press have been asking the tough questions about how much housing benefit costs us and whether we can afford it in the current economic climate. I don’t know when it happened, but they seem to have succeeded in eliminating from the debate the fact that people need somewhere to live, and some way to pay for that. The result will be another of our en vogue emulations of the USA – thousands will be forced to sleep in cars, on the floors of extended family members, or out on the streets. Affordable housing is already rare in many parts of the UK due to Thatcher’s decision to sell off council houses and refuse to build new ones (a policy maintained by Labour). Broken families and ruined lives are sure to be caused by this particular ‘efficiency’. Many will receive only part of what their rent is, meaning taking money from their already meagre benefits.
It is worth putting things in perspective. Benefit fraud costs the economy around £1 billion per year. Legalised tax-dodging has cost us £120 billion in recent times. The bailout of the banks and resulting financial stimulus cost around £1 trillion. You do not wreck a system which is relied upon by millions of people just because a small minority abuse it. We must ignore the media’s attempts to divide the working class on the basis of Worker vs. Claimant. With record levels of employees in poverty, and unemployment rates that would make Thatcher blush, the need for unity is obvious.
Raising the flag to defend welfare, this Wednesday has been named as ‘National Day of Protest Against Welfare & Housing Benefit Cuts’. There’s a facebook event here with some useful info. Sadly, at the moment of writing there’s few details of any Scottish events, but some bright spark has come up with an excellent idea that we can all participate in. Check out National Troll A Tory Day! where the group say:
For all those unable to attend the National Day of Action Against Benefit Cuts we are pleased to present the first National Troll A Tory Day* on December 15th 2010.
*Tory can also be taken to mean Lib Dem, as we can longer see any difference between them.
Spend the day online firing out as many passionate, mischievous, heartfelt or just down and dirty rude messages to the Tory press, Tory or Libdem bloggers and Tory/Lib Dem MPs wh…erever they may skulk.
For too long the media have portrayed benefit claimants as scroungers, lazy or fraudulent. This is our chance to tell the truth about life on benefits and how these cuts will affect us all.
The obvious candidates are the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and The Sun. All allow comments and in the Mail’s case these comments are sometimes unmoderated. Find a recent story about benefit claimants, or just dive in an interrupt the latest chat about X Factor.
In the event comments are removed or strictly moderated then why not switch to Tory/Lib Dem bloggers. Government supporting website Guido Fawkes and MP Iain Dale are two of the most prominent. Again comment moderation may be turned on, but don’t let that put you off, make them work for their living for a change. Should you tire of these, then Iain Dale has a handy list of the top 100 Conservative blogs to get your teeth into. There’s a similar list of Lib Dem blogs on Libdemvoice.
Facebookers might want to pay a visit to the facebook pages of David Cameron, Nick Clegg or Vince Cable. Conservative Home, and conservatives.com also have the facility to leave comments. Lots of Tory councillors and MPs have blogs, use google to find them and give them a piece of your mind. If you have a blog yourself why not write a post about the upcoming benefit cuts or use facebook, twitter or any of the new fangled devices available to show your contempt.
You can write to your MP via theyworkforyou.com. Or how about a letter to your local paper explaining to them how the vicious benefit cuts are likely to impact on you or your family.
The internet gives us unprecedented opportunity to tell this spineless Government exactly what we think of them. Let’s come out in force on the 15th December and start the fight back against the welfare and housing benefit cuts set to devastate so many lives.
Please feel free to leave more links to Tory and Libdem scumbag’s sites in the comments.
Among the many things to make your blood boil coming out of the comprehensive shafting we all received at the hands of the government on Wednesday was the really crap plan to make us all work longer.
By 2018 (2 years earlier than previously planned) the retirement age will be equalised for men and women, and then by 2020 everyone will have to work on until they’re 66.
You’ve probably heard the argument from right wing tosspots about why this needs to happen: we’re all living longer than we did in the past. As a result of socialist ideas like the NHS people don’t always drop down dead in late middle age any more. The problem with this argument is that it treats retirement as if it was something in isolation from the rest of the universe, and decisions that need to be taken about retirement as being completely unaffected by anything else the government does.
By saying that because people are living longer they will therefore have to work longer, the government isn’t stating a fact, it’s making a choice. And that choice is to make workers pay more for their right to a decent life in old age, and to let the super rich and big companies get away with paying fuck all.
The retirement age is a promise that we as a society made to working people as they got older. That promise was: pay in to the social security pot by national insurance coming out of your pay. In return, you’ll get to retire at 60 or 65 and have an income to live on. People have worked their whole lives based on this promise. Now the government wants to break that promise, to betray workers and make them get less out of retirement, and work closer to the age at which they’ll die.
They’d rather do this than by putting very moderate taxes on the rich and big business. They’d rather finance the ongoing bloodbath of the Afghanistan occupation than let us have a decent old age. These are the choices being made, the priorities exposed.
The other problem, as most reading this will already know, with the “we’re all living longer” argument is that the average life expectancy is just that, an average. It includes the high end of the rich who will live in healthy conditions all their life and have access to the very best healthcare at all times. And it includes the low end, the people who do hard, physically demanding work, can’t afford to eat well and live in polluted communities, who die much younger. In fact, research published this year found that health inequality is worse now than during the Great Depression, and life expectancy for poorer people might actually start to fall. Health and wealth are easily proven to be directly related, and the more the government encourages the rich to hoard it, the sicker the majority will become.
That’s why it’s particularly unfair that those who need to be least worried about the attack on the right to retire, because they can afford private pensions, are likely to live longer than those who this will directly affect. Work in a capitalist society is hard and alienating, especially since the economy has moved from one where people made things to one where they answered phones or other less socially useful service businesses. Brutally put, hard work can kill you, and the effect is obviously going to be more serious for those who work harder. And hard work isn’t restricted to manual labour; even working class desk jobs are still stressful enough to have a serious impact on your health.
School students in Bordeaux fight back against raising the retirement age
That’s why society has for about 100 years recognised that there reaches a point in your life where you should get to retire. Older people have earned this right, more than that they’ve paid for it all their working lives. Why should the right of the rich to hold on to the majority of wealth in our society be prioritised over this right?
But it’s not just unfair on older people today and in the future. Raising the retirement age is also a disaster for young people right now. Youth across the UK are suffering disproportionately from the economic crisis, with way higher than average unemployment rates. It’s not hard to work out why – if we can get a job it’s likely to be insecure with little rights or conditions, i.e. the people that get the sack first if a business is making less money.
In a context where young people desperately need jobs, raising the retirement age is the opposite of solving the problem, because you are forcing people to stay on in jobs they could have retired from and opened up for someone else. The government wants to do this to save money that they would be paying out in pensions, but they’ll have to be giving it out in dole money again from people that could have got that job.
Raising the retirement age is the issue that’s driving the brilliant mass movements of strikes and protests France, that has seen school students and unemployed youth linking up with workers. High schools across France have been shut down by their pupils. French youth understand raising the retirement age is an attack on them, not just older people.
GET BACK TO WORK YOU LAZY BASTARD
And as if that wasn’t all enough, let’s not forget about the hidden contribution of retired people that has been completely ignored. Think of how much Grans and Grandads do for their families in terms of unpaid babysitting – if they’re still stuck at work it’s going to make it all the harder for younger parents. Then there’s all the unpaid voluntary and community work contributed by pensioners. The National Pensioner’s Convention says that there’s well over £30 billion worth of work done by these voluntary contributions. The government are taking that away exactly at the same time as they’re cutting back public services that people rely on, which will make life more difficult for everyone.
In fact, if we were looking at the situation properly, as a society what we would do would be to lower the retirement age. The only real solution to the economic crisis is to have massive investment in things we as a society need – public services and ecological restoration to prepare for and try and prevent climate change. This could employ most of the people desperate for a job. At the same time, we should be reducing working time, so that people can retire when they want to and have to work less of the week, while raising the minimum wage to a liveable level. This would create loads of work, and leave everyone healthier, happier and able to do more things with their lives than just working all time. It’s a great idea, but the Tories and Lib Dems will never even discuss it, because they’re a government for themselves, for the rich.
Socialism is about us all having a decent life, where the work that we do is meaningful and is something we want to be doing. To be able to build a decent and better society, as a first step we need to reduce the amount of work those who are working too hard are doing. Defending the right to retire is defending the rights of everyone.
Gettin handouts can be so frustratin Get in line son there’s five million waitin’ The Proclaimers, Cap in Hand
Dole queue under the Tories.
As a central part of actualising Dave Cameron’s glorious vision of The Big Society, the Con-Dem coalition has promised to sweep away the “cycle of dependency” that afflicts Britain’s “pockets of worklessness”. Announcing his new welfare strategy last week, Iain Duncan Smith decried the fact that a majority of benefit claimants have been claiming for nine of the past ten years, that in many areas some families have not worked in three generations and that 1 in 6 children in the UK are growing up in a household in which no one is working.
And you know what? Sitting in the midst of the largest of these “pockets of worklessness” – a barren tundra called Scotland – I agree with him. It is an absolute disgrace that across our land there are families in which three generations have never worked. It is disgusting not just because of the economic waste, but because of the inevitable social problems that arise from mass unemployment; a community in which there are ‘spongers’ will soon spawn an according number of ‘alchies’ and ‘junkies’. All of this amounts to a tragedy for our nation. But it is a tragedy that the Tories, for all their talk, have absolutely no intention of ending.
This may seem a curious assertion to make given that the Tories have only been in power for a few months. However, the following article will go on to show why the Tories were responsible for creating the very ‘underclass’ that they decry. Furthermore, I will also show how this group of hypocrites ideologically depend on the existence of long-term unemployment and that they are the least likely group of people to get the unemployed back into work. In short, this article will show why the Tories knowingly create the very ‘spongers’ that they spend so much time demonising. Read the rest of this entry »
As part of the growing army of the 
In neighbouring Algeria, protests broke out last week, sparked by rapidly rising food prices, with the cost of some commodities up 20-30 percent in recent days, coupled with massive youth unemployment. Like in Tunisia, rioting and demonstrations have spread rapidly across the country. The Algerian Socialist Workers Party (no relation lol) have said in 
Among the many things to make your blood boil coming out of the comprehensive shafting we all received at the hands of the government on Wednesday was the really crap plan to make us all work longer.
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