March is a big month; Lent begins on Wednesday, Cheltenham
races the week after, and the scramble for three birthday presents in between
will occupy a lot of my time. However, if I can distract you briefly from your
studying form in the Racing Post or daily Holy Hour, there is a brilliant
initiative running for the full 31 days – Young Workers’ Month.
Set up by active, young trades union members (from the
grassroots, no astro-turf here), the idea is to stop hand-wringing over the
problems faced by young workers and start meaningful, innovative organising to
fight back and get over them. Of course, much of the effort will be about young
people talking, engaging and organising together, and using our shared
generational experience to point out the rough deal young workers are getting
under this Liberal/Tory government and in the increasingly unchecked free
market.
However, let’s remember that the intention of the current
government is to set worker against worker, and nowhere is that more obvious
than in the generational divide. Tory talk about ‘gold plated pensions’, the
tuition fee betrayal of the Lib Dems, the spectre of removing benefits so as to
deny independent living from young people on the basis of their age alone can make
it feel that the government reserves a special hate for youth. But we can’t have
this distract us – it’s past generations who built our NHS, older workers who
struggle to find support for training to keep them up-to-date and employable,
and older people who are under-represented on our screens and in popular
culture. The feeling that your age group’s voice is marginalised and your skills
side-lined is one that’s held below 30, over 50 and everywhere in-between.
Young Workers’ Month is our opportunity to reply with one
voice to this strategy of division. Young
workers don’t get a rough deal because they’re young – they get a rough deal
because they’re workers. Young Workers’ Month is as much about building
solidarity between all working people, regardless of age, as it is about young
people standing together.
In my work as a full-time trade union official I’ve seen
this policy of unity pay dividends. In the steelworks, take-up of pension
schemes was so much higher among young people in departments where the
workforce was divers in age. Here, older workers spoke with younger workers as
peers, not parents, about the complexity of financial security as life
unfolded. The ability of older workers to engage with lifelong learning, and have
access to high quality training at work, through the employer, was so much
higher in the Olympic village. Here, younger workers led the way in making use
of the acclaimed learning centre, speaking with older colleagues as comrades,
not kids, about how training helped them navigate the 21st century
jobs market as much more than a tick-box.
Most impressively, the necessity of mixed-age casts in
theatre is, I believe, the backbone of Equity’s strong and growing membership.
For every bad story about the closed shop, there’s a young person talking about
the union’s support for them on the fringe or a student film. For every complacent
graduate, questioning what the union can do for them, there’s a story about the
fight to get rehearsal time paid or the hard fight to win subsistence payments
for touring shows. It’s workers talking as equals, across age barriers, that
keeps the union relevant and strong.
It’s crucial that public policy supports such workplaces and
doesn’t undermine them. The age-specific national minimum wage is a key example
of where it’s been undermined in the past - legislation that expects an
apprentice to feed their family on the promise of higher pay tomorrow. Where
youth job offers and guarantees are made, it must not be at the cost of ghettoising
workers of certain ages into certain sectors. The flipside of the strength of
mixed workplaces on the stage and in the steelworks can be seen in
call-centres, with banks of young people, self-conscious and scared, are
manipulated into Dickensian systems of working; regulated toilet breaks, zero
hours contracts, no union recognition, and unable to speak to a peer with much
more than a few years’ experience of working life for reassurance about whether
they have to put up with it.
What’s exciting about this Young Workers’ Month is the call
to older workers to spend time speaking to younger colleagues – and I’d call on
younger colleagues to do the same. It’s right that we have a special time to
focus on the marginalising of young people, and the contempt for them held by
employers and the government. But let the outcome be not a desire to take from
older workers things that they do not possess – from job security to pensions –
but instead heed YWM’s call for solidarity. Let’s build a system that treats
all working people, the real wealth creators, as equals.
Solidarity to all at Young Workers’ Month!
