30.03.1995

Jobseekers, no jobs

LAST MONDAY I met Davey Selkirk in the Dundee Trades Club and we talked about the dispute at Timex, where he was an engineer. He said he regretted nothing about the strike except the way it ended: “At the beginning nobody would have believed that we could have achieved what we did.”

He spoke about all the years of training and retraining he had received as an engineer now being wasted, because at his age he could not find employment in his profession. “I am now getting half the pay cleaning at a garage after being unemployed for about a year.” Despite this he is not allowing bitterness to spoil his life.

He speaks for many workers, not just those at Timex, whose lives are being blighted by government employment policies. This is the reality behind, ‘Jobseekers’, “flexible labour” and retraining to meet market needs - policies introduced by the Tories, but Blair promises that they will be continued under Labour.

Mary Ward