Zombie Blairites can’t fix the youth unemployment crisis

Labour continues to fail young working-class people in jobs and education yet shifts the blame on to them. SEAN O’NEILL suggests the trade union movement needs to champion their cause by promoting investment in infrastructure jobs

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LATER this month, the Milburn review will examine why a million young people in Britain are classed as NEETs (not in employment, education or training). A hangover from the Starmer government, the inquiry into youth unemployment is authored by New Labour relic Alan Milburn. It will identify the NEETs crisis as a mental health crisis.

The sick irony here is that Milburn, as health secretary under Tony Blair, was the chief architect of health privatisation before today’s NEETs were even born. Milburn and politicians like him made the decisions that created the mental health crisis and locked generations of working-class youth out of their own futures.

Along with deeper NHS privatisation and wider attacks on the welfare state, they oversaw a shift away from unemployment benefit as a social safety net, towards a punitive system for jobseekers.

By the time I was attending the job centre about a decade ago, the job hunt had itself become a full-time job. You signed a claimant commitment and had to prove to a work coach you had spent 35 hours since your last appointment applying for jobs, or you would face sanctions.

Instead of creating more decent job opportunities for kids from working-class areas, it created a culture of surveillance, paranoia and fear.

The findings of Milburn’s inquiry will be used as the pretext for an even harsher benefits regime that targets the most vulnerable people in our communities, people who genuinely cannot work. The interim report includes plans to cut the overall cash benefit payment in order to fund youth employment schemes, creating a false dichotomy between investing in the day-to-day existence of disabled people and the futures of young people.

Another of Milburn’s proposals is for children from the poorest areas to be identified as economic failures from pre-school age. This will only extend the stigmatisation of vulnerable groups. In addition, the idea that young mothers should be classed in the data as economically inactive or unproductive is blind to the fact that unpaid social reproductive labour is the backbone of the economy.

Decades of austerity have shown you can’t cut your way out of a crisis. The New Labour tribute act in Westminster isn’t up to the task of solving the youth unemployment crisis.

But the same failed political orthodoxy and tendency to demonise working-class youth is shared by the political class north of the border. Never forget Scottish First Minister John Swinney’s betrayal of young people in 2020. As education secretary, he was responsible for the scandal of the exam results postcode lottery in which thousands of young people had their academic results downgraded based on the fact they came from working-class schemes.

And you only need to look at the Scottish government’s continued underfunding of its own flagship youth employment programme, Developing the Young Workforce, to see that the youth unemployment crisis is perpetuated in Holyrood.

Years of systemic failure on youth joblessness were summed up in a BBC Scotland headline last week, which highlighted one young person’s experience of the job centre over four years: “A thousand job applications, five interviews and still no job.”

Is it any wonder that more young people are asking themselves: “If the system doesn’t work, why should I?”

The scandal of a million young people out of work doesn’t even begin to address the wage scarring that follows you when you do enter the labour market, and the levels of under-employment and working poverty concentrated within the young workforce.

A real issue is that the more decent employers tend to have fewer opportunities. City Building in Glasgow, for example, take on about 60 craft trade apprentices every year. Thousands of young people have no option but to compete for a miniscule number of apprenticeships.

Yet it is now a mainstream view that massive infrastructure projects are required, such as a national council house-building revolution, which would see the creation of thousands of jobs in Scotland. Added to that, the deep retrofit of existing housing stock would create thousands more unionised jobs in the public sector.

Decent work can be expanded right across our communities. The trade union movement has won the argument. The challenge now is raising the level of class consciousness and bringing about a political situation that will force the hand of governments.

Sean O’Neill is a young workforce co-ordinator in Glasgow City Council and convener for GMB Glasgow Branch 28

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