Down and out in London and Gloucester
MarY Morgan Unemployment is not what it was: otherlw.lse how could the government skip so 1014 over the sadness of the dole? People u° not starve, communities are not crushed; 8° even with nearly a million and a half People out of work, nobody stirs to question 2,11r acceptance of what is, after all, a High inrY principle: that Fortune cannot smile " all. And that is, is it not, surprising in a country with a Socialist government? 9f course, runs the argument, Social SecnotY is the great provider, And there is no • gss of unemployed to disturb the torpor. It Is easy to see that as we edge nearer and nearer to the Leibnitz vision of society as a r"leetion of monads, with their own prob Is, how the scattered misery of the uneniployed can be shrugged off. Whitehall c.ares, of course, but for the last three years I‘t has been fighting the wrong war; and now the arguments appear to have taken off into cinetaphysics. The Manpower Services ,Lninmission has been given nothing less "Ian a mission: to save the unemployed Yn.ung for society — to prise them from 'the PIP of unemployment' and its disastrous Plications. How? By imprinting on them tk'te work ethic. But since we cannot give "em work, we will give them 'work experience in a work setting.' For six months' work experience' the Youngster will be given an allowance of a week and the employer will be given a low-cost look at a potential e„n1Ployee.' Lurking behind the language is !tie quite sensible notion that actually workmight give the youngsters a kind of nowledge and experience which would ,Courage the employers to keep them on. this fails, they can then move on to a teen week training course which will leach them semiskills. After that, win or °se, ethical or unethical, they are on their own.
At the front of this campaign is the Youth `)PPortunities Programme. To observe the Pening moves, I went first to the Forest of :Jean before moving on to the East End of Won. In the Forest, badly hit in the ;)teat Slump when its small coal mines col'Ned, the Government has encouraged Industry. Tower Hamlets, in the East End, is Prime example of what the rich can do to Ans neighbours, and what a government can 13 to its people. Lydney on the Severn certainly has an edge on Tower Hamlets on the Thames, but .would be wrong to sentimentalise and illnlimise the plight of the jobless in an area Where the air is like wine and there's easy Work weeding, or with horses, to be had on the side. (Do you know any youngsters out Of work?' I asked a man in a bar. 'Come with me,' he said, 'I've got three working for me.') For if you've no bent for the life of the land or the 'cowboy' there's only one way out: on the one bus a day to the trading estate. If there is no work there, the waiting lists are long; and that's about it.
This summer five hundred young people in the villages of the Forest face this choice. In a rubber factory on the Lydney trading estate I listened to a young man from the Youth Opportunities Programme make an eloquent pitch to the Personnel Manager to take on some youngsters for 'work experience.' The Manager was sympathetic. He said he might take on a couple of girls to work in the office. The two he had taken on last year had worked out fine and he had, in fact, kept them on permanently. Boys? Well he had to run a factory. Untrained youngsters on the shop floor would hold up the piece rate flow and bring screams from the regular workers.
I met the two girls emerging from their weekly training class. They had, they told me, been learning 'life skills'. What are they? How to open a bank account, understand mortgages, set up house. Did I know it costs 11886 to furnish a home for two? They save most of their pay, £34 net. And, luckily for them, they get a lift to work.
The virtual non-existence of public transport is, in fact, the Commission's worse headache. Running close are the problems of deciding which employers see 'work experience' as free labour up for grabs and at the same time placating the suspicions of the Unions that it threatens the jobs of working members. The TUC might express support for the Programme but on the shop floor, good intentions cut little ice with men hardened by the work ethic.
Still, compared with Tower Hamlets, working for the Commission in the Forest of Dean is a picnic. You would need a somewhat different order of 'life skill' to survive here. The area is dying from the outflow of jobs and abler citizens voting with their feet. This summer, 2,000 school leavers will emerge from an educational system which practically guarantees a menial life (60 per cent have no qualifications at all) onto a labour market already weighed down with 5,000 unemployed, and one-third of these are under thirty. The Careers Office is advertising 900 vacancies but don't let that fool you. Most of them 'are concentrated for the most part in unpopular sectors like clothing [sweat shops?] or in the clerical sector which calls for the sort of qualifications not possessed by most of Tower Hamlets young people.'
This good news for the 60 per cent comes from an excellent Report, 'A Training Strategy for Tower Hamlets' published by the 'Tower Hamlets Committee on Jobs'. Its grisly truths would apply equally to the poorer boroughs in all our cities. While they hang on, waiting for the grand Renaissance promised by the Inner City Area Programme, the young legatees of decay are looking to earn a living where there is little work and employers are apparently obsessed with '0' levels.
Do all the jobs offered by the GLC, British Rail, The Gas Board, The National Health Service really call for '0' levels? Why, to be a gardener for the Tower Hamlets council, do you need 4 '0' levels? What in? Equally, apprenticeships are vanishing — only twenty three in the whole borough notified to the Careers Office last year. Even the Government Training schemes posit qualifications for entry, though they seem, reading the syllabuses, to teach little else but how to repair television sets and cars in the world stiff with mechanics looking for work — thirty two television engineers on the Tower Hamlets books alone.
It is in places like Tower Hamlets that the Programme is likely to come unstuck. 'Work experience', the Commission admits, has not been a success in London. It cannot hand over youngsters to be exploited by greedy capitalists and the honest men don't want to know. 'Generally they are aghast when they see the sort of kid who turns up,' said a worker in the field. The Skill Centre which has a catchment area far wider than the borough has a waiting list up to a year.
Consider the allowance of £19.50 a week. At first sight it seems a neatly judged compromise between what the public will allow and what will get the youngsters off the streets and out of petty crime. But these are not the children of the Forest. I would not care to be a Specialist Out-reach Officer having to proselytise the value of the work ethic to black boys who do not sign on the register, take his hand-outs or his 'shit jobs' . . . not for £19.50 a week.
There is a lot of money invested in this programme, £140 million. And there are a quarter of a million lives to save. The truth, which of course the government cannot admit, is that much of it is simply bribe money. That, is the reason for the gobbledy-gook. What they still cannot face up to is the admission of another truth: that we have created a generation unfit for the better jobs and unwilling to do the dirty work.
This is the second of three articles on youth unemployment
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