Max McGee, Youth Fight for Jobs
Irregular hours, stress and overwork, rogue managers, unpaid overtime, pay not keeping up with prices… sound familiar? For young workers, poor wages and working conditions are all too common. From retail to hospitality, warehouses to social care, we make up large parts of the lowest-paid, most precarious sectors. Youth Fight for Jobs wants to help young workers to get organised and fight back – for a high-quality job and a future to look forward to.
The bosses won’t just hand this to us. They want to keep our wages as low as possible, on ‘flexible’ contracts that suit them, in order to maximise their profits. While we struggle to afford rent, bills, fuel and groceries, shareholders make millions. To force the bosses to pay up, workers have to direct our anger through the trade unions, which allow our side – the working class – to mobilise our strength in numbers in a co-ordinated way, for a shared set of demands.
Workers’ victories have shown that fighting through a trade union works. Unite the Union has won over £350 million in improved pay for its members in the past two years. In hospitality, where young workers are particularly concentrated, there have been strikes over tip theft in restaurant chains TGI Fridays and Pizza Express. And following spontaneous walkouts in protest against a pathetic 50p-an-hour pay increase last summer, hundreds of workers at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry have now joined the GMB union to fight for a £15-an-hour wage.
Workers at the Coventry warehouse have already forced an offer of a £500 one-off payment. This shows that striking works. But we say that workers need hourly recognition of our worth, in the form of permanent contracts with at least a £15-an-hour minimum wage, which rises in line with inflation. That’s why we fight for the scrapping of zero-hour contracts, which give the bosses flexibility while we get instability.
These are the kinds of demands that young workers can fight for now in our unions, starting with getting active in the unions’ youth sections. Youth Fight for Jobs campaigns for the building of democratic, fighting youth sections in every trade union, to channel young workers’ collective energy into transforming the unions into vehicles for mass struggle against the bosses and their political representatives.
The current economic system, capitalism, means crisis. From the economy to the climate, young people can see that the world as it’s currently organised is not working for the vast majority. That’s why Youth Fight for Jobs links our struggle for better living standards under capitalism to the need to fundamentally transform society along socialist lines – for democratic public ownership of major industry and the banks, with resources used in a planned way to meet the needs of all, for good.
