By Ian Hodson

Something doesn’t add up.

We are told Britain has a problem with youth unemployment. Young people need experience, training and help becoming ‘work-ready’.

So Sainsbury’s and the Government announce thousands of work experience and employability opportunities and we are expected to applaud.

At the same time, the State Pension age is rising from 66 to 67.

At one end of working life, young people struggle to get started. At the other, people who have worked for forty or fifty years are being told they must carry on longer.

Surely the question should be whether there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we organise work.

An opportunity isn’t a job

There is nothing wrong with genuine work experience. But 10,000 ‘opportunities’ sounds much better than asking how many actual jobs are being created.

How many come with decent wages? Guaranteed hours? Permanent employment? The ability to earn enough to leave home and build a life?

If somebody is carrying out productive work, the principle should be simple. Pay them.

We have been down the welfare-to-work road before. The last Labour Government introduced the New Deal for Young People, with compulsory participation for many and benefit sanctions for refusal.

Today, benefit conditionality remains part of the system surrounding the Government’s Youth and Jobs Guarantees.

That doesn’t mean we can simply call every Sainsbury’s placement compulsory workfare. But unions should be asking now: can anybody lose benefits for refusing a placement? Will productive work always be paid? Can placements replace genuine vacancies? And where is the permanent job at the end?

Perhaps young people aren’t the problem

We constantly hear about making young people ‘work-ready’. Perhaps we should make work ready for young people.

They didn’t invent zero-hours contracts, unaffordable housing, low wages or insecure employment. Yet somehow they’re the ones who need fixing.

Then consider retirement. An older worker retiring doesn’t automatically create a job for a younger worker. But retirement creates movement, people progress, vacancies appear and new workers enter.

So why, in an economy transformed by technology and productivity, are younger people struggling to establish themselves while older workers are expected to work longer?

Where is the benefit of all this progress going?

Follow the money

That brings us to political influence.

David Sainsbury has provided substantial financial backing to Andy Burnham’s political operation. That doesn’t prove Sainsbury’s supermarket bought this policy, and we shouldn’t suggest it does.

The bigger question is why extraordinarily wealthy individuals can give politicians sums ordinary workers could never contemplate.

It doesn’t matter which politician or party receives it.

Workers get a ballot paper. Wealth gets a cheque book as well.

Big money should be taken out of politics.

Because underneath all of these issues is the same question, who has power?

Corporations organise. Employers organise. Landlords and the wealthy organise to defend their economic interests.

Yet workers organising around our shared economic interests is somehow regarded as old-fashioned.

Class isn’t an old slogan. It is who has security and who doesn’t. Who makes the decisions and who lives with them. Who creates the wealth and who receives it.

Our movement needs to demand more

Trade unions need to look at ourselves too.

Too often success is measured by access, a ministerial meeting, a consultation, an invitation into the room.

Those things can be useful. But access isn’t power.

Our movement wasn’t created simply to get a better hearing from politicians. It was built to give workers enough collective strength that politicians and employers couldn’t ignore them.

And our unions belong to their members.

Rank-and-file workers should expect our leadership to hold politicians to account, including politicians we regard as friends.

We need to stop judging announcements against how bad things might have been and start judging them against what workers actually need.

A crumb doesn’t become a feast because we negotiated for it.

Why aren’t young workers seeing us as the answer?

Millions of young people know the system isn’t working for them. If they don’t see trade unions as their natural home, we have to ask ourselves why.

We cannot offer slightly better insecurity and expect a generation to be inspired. And if we don’t provide an answer to their anger, others will.

The far right tells people the system is broken, then gives them the wrong people to blame: migrants, refugees, people on benefits.

But a migrant worker didn’t introduce your zero-hours contract. A refugee didn’t raise your rent. Somebody on Universal Credit didn’t suppress your wages.

Turning worker against worker doesn’t challenge exploitation. It protects it.

While workers fight each other for the crumbs, nobody asks who owns the bakery.

Give people something worth fighting for

This is bigger than Sainsbury’s.

Young people need secure jobs, decent wages, affordable homes and hope. Older workers deserve a pension at an age when they can enjoy it.

We need secure hours, collective bargaining, proper apprenticeships, council housing, strong public services and shorter working time as productivity increases.

Above all, we need a trade union movement confident enough to demand these things.

Our movement wasn’t built by people who accepted what they were given. It was built by people who organised for what they deserved.

Workers don’t need to fight each other over what is left. We need to organise together and demand more.

This isn’t about returning to the politics of the past. It’s about remembering something we should never have forgotten: everything workers have ever won, we won because somebody was prepared to demand more.

It’s time we started demanding again.

Ian Hodson is President of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union.

Image:https://www.flickr.com/photos/41202510@N00/313608149 “Supermarket” by Simon Shek is licensed under CC BY 2.0.