23.03.1995

2,365,000 too many

Vic Turner, honorary president of the Unemployed Workers Charter, gives his reaction to the unemployment figures announced last week

AMAZINGLY much of the press has welcomed the new seasonally adjusted unemployment figures which have apparently fallen by 8.5% from the previous year.

Workers on the other hand are now all too well aware of the reality behind this apparent drop. Firstly the ‘adjusting’ of the figures is now well known, with many groups disappearing from the statistics - most significantly those on Tory slave labour ‘training’ schemes.

But it is not only workers on those schemes who are working for poverty wages. The much vaunted rise in part-time work, which was supposed to hail a new era of flexibility, has unsurprisingly been only flexible for the bosses, not for workers. Part-time workers are low paid and denied basic rights.

Unemployment is not an accident for the bosses and we should not be under any illusions that they will get rid of it voluntarily, despite the popularity today of full employment rhetoric.

That is why the Unemployed Workers Charter exists. To unite employed and unemployed workers in their common fight to end both unemployment and poverty wages. The trade union movement needs to take on this struggle. Join Us!