Stop #stigmatising the #unemployed @Number10gov: the problem is the lack of decent #jobs from @natalieben - #share Natalie Bennett - Green Party Leader calls for an end to the #demonisation agenda towards #claimants. Both a minister in Conservatives and a shadow minister The Labour Party have this week made the latest in a long line of deeply worrying, stigmatising comments about the unemployed that show a profound failure to understand the nature of our job market, what young people in particular have to offer, and what employers are failing to offer workers. It implies that #Labour believes, as the #Tories clearly do, that #unemployment is an individual failing, not a reflection of the state and nature of the #economy. The fact that we now have a level of long-term youth unemployment matching that of John Major’s time doesn’t reflect on our young people – it reflects on the failure of our job market to provide appropriate employment. While young people with parents who can afford to support them do years of unpaid #internships in search of the elusive professional jobs, those without that backing are forced to take what they can get – damned to professing passionate devotion to serving coffee when they’re qualified to be filling professional roles. And as workers with PhDs, master’s degrees and bachelors degrees fill coffee-serving jobs, those with A-levels struggle, and those without are pushed into hopelessness. And what’s to become of people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, who find themselves pushed out of jobs and in desperate need of new ones? We need to transform our economy so it works for us, rather than us slaving away for the untaxed profits of giant #multinationals, and to pay for the recklessness of the fraud-ridden, and still unreformed, financial sector. To create the varied, skilled range of jobs we need, the government should follow the re-shoring trend and adopt policies to bring manufacturing and food production back to Britain. It needs to be forcing multinational companies to pay taxes, and provide decent pay and conditions, which will widen the opportunities for small #business and #cooperatives to thrive, and create strong local economies that see money circulating within towns and cities, rather than swooshing out of them to London or the most convenient tax haven. And in the meantime, we should stop blaming the unemployed for the fact that our #society has failed to provide them with decent paying, reasonably secure jobs that they can build a life on.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 21:32:20 +0000
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