Solving bosses' problems

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"In short the YTS offers a fresh start to our young, and at the same time is attractive financially to employers. You now have the opportunity to take on young men or women, train them and let them work for you almost entirely at our expense, and then decide whether or not to employ them. I know that we will soon start to have bette trained, better motivated young people coming into David Young, director of the Manpower Services ComSocialist Organiser and Class Fighter supporters have had a special campaign against compulsion: organising pickets, leafleting vulnerable youth, and supporting careers officers in NALGO who refuse to report YTS refusers' to the Department of Employment to have their benefit cut.

Many trainees will spend time at a Further Education (FE) college, and the National Union of Students is ensuring that the MSC does pay trainees' student union fees. In some better organised FEs trainees have their own union committees and officers on the Executive, and are trying to work out their own grievance procedures.

But while a lot of local work is going on, and activists have grouped together for rallies and working conferences, there is no well-integrated national campaign able, for instance, to give weight to the demand that the TUC withdraws its backing for YTS and pulls out of the MSC.

Over 80% of trainees are in non-union workplaces. hey are at the mercy of unscrupulous employers, backed up by the MSC, which does not even visit all proposed schemes to check out their safety and suitability before they start.

This rank exploitation of youth must stop, and socialYOPs"

Published in Time Out (May 20 1983), dential government Think Tank report. øzy™ (Times Educational Supplement, March 4 demands are:

*A guaranteed job at end, *No job substitution.

*Employee status for trainees.

*Training to beadone in local authority colleges and to lead to recognised qualifications. Dual membership of trade unions and the National Union of Students. All trainees to take up their rights of student union membership.

* All trainees to receive a card stating their rights. (This is supposed to be an MSC rule).

*More than the minimum 18 days holiday.

*Positive discrimination for women and blacks.

* All schemes to be vetted by qualified safety inspectors before they start.

WERE GOING TO TRAIN YOU TO LIVE ON TWENTY FIVE POUNDS A WEEK scesta. ONE quarter of the youth who started on the Youth Training Scheme this year, YTS's first year, have dropped out.

Youthaid, a campaigning charity which specialises in youth employment, expects only 350,000 people to go on schemes - 110,000 short of the Manpower Services Commission's (MSC's) target of 460,000 for this year.

Part of the reason is that the whole scheme went ahead before the bureaucracy and details were worked out.

But the more basic reason is that YTS is a con, and young • people and trade unionists working with youth know that. So do workers in other unions, like the NUJ and the NUM, which have stopped any schemes in their industries.

YTS is a con because in most cases it does not provide a real training, and a con because it is based around and justified by two great lies.

Firstly, that youth have priced themselves out of a job.

And secondly, that YTS will give youth skills to get jobs.

YTS came out of YOPs, the Youth Opportunities Programme.

YOPs had been opposed by the unions. It was highly dangerous, and about 30% of YOP 'trainees' were directly substituting for workers on normal wages.

YTS was unveiled in a White Paper in December 1981 - just a few months after the summer riots which had put the fear of god into the government. Unemployed youth on the streets meant trouble, and the government needed to put a stop to it.

Norman Tebbit proposed that trainees be paid an *allowance' of £14.40 a week. (The average 16-year-old wage was £47.50 a week).

Tebbit proposed that Training Year should be compulsory, and provide a permanent bridge between school and work.

Negotiations with the TUC raised the wages to £25 a week, and - temporarily, as it turned out - ensured that YTS should be a voluntary scheme.

So YTS went ahead and the TUC cheered it along, with union leaders appearing in advertisements urging employers to take on trainees and young people themselves to go on a scheme. The TUC said that the education and training component of YTS justified it. - The government's aim is to provide the bosses with cheap and non-unionised labour.

As for real training: the Tonish do been the tothe trial Training Boards (only seven out of 17 still exist). And YTS doesn't generally provide a skill.

What it does do is train youth to accept the discipline of working life. It also trains them to expect less - less money, less security and less union protection.

The 'profiles' employers fill in for trainees leaving schemes don't concentrate on the person's skills but on his/ her good behaviour and willingness to take orders. In fact, there is no adequate supervision of schemes to ensure that trainees are learning skills.

YTS pits young worker against young worker. On the Mode A schemes, which are on employers' premises, youth compete for the few promised jobs at the end of the year.

There are far fewer Mode A schemes than the government would like to see, and Mode BI schemes - the ones run in workshops or colleges - are now under attack.

The MSC encouraging the schemes which directly and immediately benefit an employer and/or the private training organisations.

The government wanted 70% of all YTS to be genuinely employer-led Mode A schemes. But in the Birmingham area, for example, only 12% of all YTS schemes are genuinely employer-led.

YTS contains an element of off-the-job training. It was presumed that this training was to be in state-run colleges of further education. But it isn't happening quite like that.

Some of the private training agencies, often set up and supervised by people who have no teaching qualifications, no experience and not even a track record in successful management (yes, you too can be a managing agent) are doing the off-the-job training themselves, and so are some of the other sorts of schemes.

Further education colleges like Exeter budgeted for and arranged courses for vast numbers • of trainees who never materialised. That college was in danger of bankruptcy.

A new grade of lecturer was created, undercutting the rate for the job and with insecure contracts of employ. ment.

The further education colleges are being drawn into this mopping-up of unemployed youth. And as a result the academic freedom of tutors has been restricted.

industry".

mission, in 'The Director', October 1982. Politics and discussion about social problems are not allowed on a YTS course!

Because the government and its monster, the MSC, are in the business of giving youth new moral standards, standards which will fit in with their plans for a new sort of industrial Britain, with its free trade zones, shackled unions, and de-skilled low paid workers, they are following up YTS with a raid on schools.

The Technical and Vocational Educational Initiative (TVEI) selects a band or stream of school students from 14 onwards and prepares them for work by sending them to employers' premises and gearing part of the curriculum around work.

Who's in this "technical stream' varies from area to area, depending on the needs of local industry. So, for instance, if you live in a mining area the stream might be connected with the pits.

Neither YTS nor its junior partner, TVEI, offers an answer to the problems young unemployed people face, but they may provide an answer to the bosses' problems of wages, unions and self-respecting workers.

They are also intended to provide an answer to the government's problem what to do with potentially rebellious youth, otherwise unbroken by work discipline and what to do with the soaring unemployment figures.

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