Tom Porter-Brown, Leicester Socialist Party
We went to Leicester’s Riverside Festival to campaign on the youth unemployment crisis – with over a million young people currently not in employment, education, or training.
Keir Starmer’s Labour government would have working-class people doing jobs for no pay, instead working for their benefits. That won’t resonate with young working-class people, as demonstrated by their reaction to our Socialist Party campaign stall.
The fact that over a million young people can’t find a job is frustrating enough. But the conditions we’re forced to accept on the chance we do get employed are hardly reassuring.
Zero-hour contracts, insufficient minimum wage, and lack of job security. Capitalist political parties think they can get away with offering us meagre compensation.
On the stall, our members called for a £15-an-hour minimum wage – regardless of age or nationality – for education to be funded by big businesses at no cost to the students, and made the argument that understaffed workplaces should be employing more workers, using the influx to reduce the hours everyone has to work, with no loss of pay.
If young people want to win a better future, where they’re guaranteed a job and are not living paycheque to paycheque, they should join the Socialist Party.
