30 March 2007

1. Boost our Pay

The vote was unanimously in favour of the amended motion. No abstentions.

Proposed by Ben Robinson

Young workers often face some of the worst conditions of any worker. Of 18-21 year olds who work full time, over half are on less than £6.50 an hour. Of agency workers, only 30% want to stay on working for temporary periods, the majority would like to get a permanent contract. Many workers face conditions where their rights are abused, getting paid under the too-low minimum wages, not allowed to take breaks, asked to do unpaid work before or after their usual hours, face unsafe conditions and bullying management.

Many young people are angry about the conditions they face, but aren't confident in how to turn this anger into action. The key to fighting for better pay and conditions is united action of the workforce, best organised through a trade union branch. However, trade union membership amongst young people is very low, around 1 in 10, and without the unions showing people in action their worth, this situation will not change.

ISR has long campaigned against low pay. We want to relaunch this campaign and make it the main focus of ISR's work. The main part of this campaign will be working amongst young workers, and discussing with them and helping to organise fighting for better conditions in their workplaces. This should involve leafleting workplaces, campaigning in the city centre over weekends and lunch hours, and making contact and organising discussions with these workers. Also, ISR members in workplaces themselves, and with positions in the trade unions, can play an important role in building the campaign. We also want to build the campaign within the trade unions, and fight for the unions to use their huge resources to fight for workers rights.

However, we also want to raise the ideas of ISR as a part of this campaign, and convince young people to join ISR. We should aim to build this campaign amongst as many people as possible, but also to raise with people what ISR is all about, and build ISR through the campaign.

We resolve to:

• Focus on the boost our pay campaign as a very important campaign for ISR.
• Build it amongst young people and trade unionists.
• Aim to build ISR alongside the campaign.

Amendment from Leicester ISR

The numbers of unemployed young people in Britain today are increasing. There are 702,000 people between 16 and 24 who are officially unemployed. This is 14.5% of all young people in Britain, and it is higher than when the Tories were kicked out of office in 1997. During the 1980s, the Tories forced millions of workers into unemployment, in a conscious attack on the working class. Because so many people were out of work, they were forced to compete for jobs and the strength of trade unions declined. Since coming to power, Labour's strategy for reducing youth unemployment has been to force people to work through New Deal or their benefits will be stopped. This provides big business with cheap labour, improves the Government's unemployment statistics, and forces unemployed people into work. The government proposes to increase the school leaving age to 18, at the same time as 42.9% of 16 and 17 year olds in London are out of work.

The Government is continuing a major offensive against benefit rights. There are proposals to attack the rights of single parents to claim benefits, despite single parents often being worse off in work. The right to Job Seekers' Allowance is not available for the first 26 weeks of unemployment if you voluntarily leave your job. The first 3 days of your claim is unpaid too, and when you do receive payment, it is a disgraceful £45.50 a week for under-25s. This can only be claimed after going through a humiliating process of means-testing, involving hundreds of pages of forms to fill in including having to reveal the personal and financial details of all people in a household. A further assault is planned on 2.7 million Incapacity Benefit claimants, who often suffer from conditions themselves created by capitalism, e.g. depression.

Internationally, unemployment is a major issue for young people. In France, the riots in the suburbs and the struggles over the CPE legislation which followed them last year were intrinsically linked to the deep levels of unemployment in French society. In recent years, there has been an unemployed workers' movement in Germany which has organised big demonstrations against the Hartz IV reform (or counter-reform) which forced people to work for €1 an hour.

With the growth of unemployment in Britain, it is critical that ISR campaigns on this issue, in order to give a lead on the fight for rights at work for all young people.

What we stand for:

• No to unemployment. For the right of all people to a full- or part-time job with equal trade union rates of pay and conditions from day one. For a 35-hour working week without loss of pay.
• No to attacks on the unemployed and sick. For unemployment and sickness benefits at a decent level from day one. No to means-testing. Abolish the New Deal.
• No to the scapegoating of migrant workers. For immediate public investment in English as a Second Language courses. For the right of all to free language courses and jobs from day one.
• No to charges for training schemes. For immediate public investment in work-based training schemes. For the right to training leave without loss of pay.
• No to outsourcing of production. For the immediate expropriation of companies who move production and jobs overseas.
• For a socialist economy democratically planned at a workplace, regional, national, and international level.