Tories Drive Down Wages Cor Voi

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Under a new scheme called, believe it or not, the 'young workers' scheme' • the Tories have launched a massive attack on the wages of young workers. Every employer who pays young workers . under £40 a week will get a £15 a head allowance from the Tories; every employer who . pays under £45 will get a £7.50 bonus.

ISTRUC BE Youth don't have to sit back and be ripped off on a YOP scheme. There are many things that we can do to fight back.

Not going on a scheme is not much of a choice: it costs you £90 in lost benefits or more.

But events around the country have proved that we can fight back and we can force concessions from the MSC and the management.

The factory that 1 worked at was a so-called 'Training Workshop" in Leicester called M.W. Hamptons. It employed 80 'trainees' and about ten 'supervisors'. They had the right to suspend or sack youth without consulting the management and they often used to fine us on stupid pretexts.

Victimisations :

The work we did was hardly socially useful, we were making horse boxes, trailers and case bolts for the docks by the thousand. The idea that you get 'training' on YOP is a myth. We spent three weeks learning how to drill a As the average wage of a young worker is over £45 a week this move means that many employers will now wait for the Toriesf to put up the allowance before they put up the wages of young workers.

This puts the Tories in the position of controlling the wages of young workers indirectly and also enables them to undermine the unions AS FOR YOUTH - JOL even more by making across-the-board rises impossible.

The new scheme will erase thousands of 16-18 year olds from the unemployed register: but in real terms it will increase unemployment, since no employer in their right mind would pay a proper wage to a 16-18 year old worker when they can get one virtually free of charge. 35 FOR ALL