Second in our series of grassroots bloggers is Sue Doughty.  Sue has been an active contributor to the comments thread on both this site and TBB’s Facebook page.  She is incredibly sharp, perceptive and always has a valuable insight into latest issues.  It is therefore a real pleasure that she has provided this blogpiece today.  Thanks Sue. 

The world of work is fading away or changed by Sue Doughty
 
It used to be that people over 60 for women and 65 for men were not allowed to be employed. This was brought in to make way for school leavers to get jobs (because there had been a Labour government who had destroyed all the jobs as is their way) but before that people had the right to work for as long as they wanted to. Now we see people of pensionable age working to be able to eat and pay mortgages and school fees, tuition fees etc, while young people are finding avenues to employment blocked. What to do? It would be wrong to bring back the unemployment in older years because people are healthier now and their pensions and savings have gone.

There has to be a way of encouraging the creation of starter jobs.
 
At present unemployed young people with only ten GCSEs and 2 A levels have to settle for cleaning council buildings, flats and offices, care homes; or working shelf stacking or on the checkout in shops. But those shops will close as shopping trips make way for internet and phone shopping in the face of the flu epidemic.

Apprenticeships made way for Modern Apprenticeships, which were seen as not worth doing because you get pocket money pay and no qualifications to put in your CV. They were actually detrimental to your CV.

There are proper apprenticeships on offer now but few and far between. They are hard to find and getting to the assessment venue is a challenge of initiative and parents disposable income for transport – again in a trading estate with no usable, same day, public transport access.

So this government has again tilted the playing field in favour of the middle classes, that is to say those young people with caring parents, while penalising those families fiscally tooth and nail.

We need this country to be creating jobs in manufacturing. It is time the old Labour mantra that we don’t need to make things any more because we can import whatever we want went by the board. They said that we don’t need to have food production in these islands because it is cheaper to import but now we know they meant only from the EU. I note that coffee; tea, oranges, mangoes, springcrop potatoes, bananas, rice and many other basic foodstuffs do not come from within the EU but from the Commonwealth.

We are seeing an end to crop picking gangs advertising vacancies only in the language of the gangmaster and often only in the country of the gangmaster but the end is not complete and not good enough.

We need old people to be allowed to keep earning, and we need them to pass on their skills and ethics. We also need job vacancies to open up for this lost generation. We need to be able to compete with China. To achieve this a whole load of working regulations need to be weeded out of our statute book so that it is easier to employ people in this country.