Penelope Dawber, Lancashire Socialist Party
Andy Burnham, after a month and a half of U-turns, has now engaged in another attack on working-class and young people. After he received £164,000 in donations from Lord Sainsbury for his recent campaigns, Burnham announced a scheme with the supermarket giant Sainsbury’s, of which Lord Sainsbury has a 5.5% stake in, to create 10,000 work experience placements.
According to the Independent, this scheme will “offer younger students a combination of school-based learning and workplace experience while older participants will receive support with CV writing, interview skills, job applications and career planning”. However, despite all the honeyed words, this is nothing but unpaid labour.
The Christmas period is the busiest for supermarkets, forcing them into temporary recruitment drives to keep up with demand. It’s why I got hired at Sainsbury’s, alongside many others. These positions are intended to be temporary, but many are kept on permanently. Even for those who aren’t however, it is 2-3 months of pay they otherwise would not have. This is now gone.
Instead, this scheme, focused on young ‘NEETs’ – of which there are now nearly one million – will give them the capitalist equivalent of a pat on the back and a gold star. Work experience is unpaid labour to get high school and college students in the door. Of course, this rarely works, as getting a paying job often depends far more on nepotism than experience. Therefore, this work experience will benefit no one except the big bosses. Even workers on the shop floor, including at my own workplace, are angered by this, asking ‘Who is going to get up at 3am for work which they aren’t paid for?’
This not only shows further that the Burnham government is no friend to the working class, but that young workers are being taken advantage of by the capitalist class which treats us as tools to be used to make them a profit – including if that means expecting us to work for free! It is for these reasons that the Socialist Party calls for workers’ ownership of their workplaces through the trade unions, and a workers’ government in parliament, with all representatives subject to instant recall, so that plainly exploitative schemes like these are thrown in the bin.
