By Peter Boyle
"It looks like it is going to be more hot air", said Resistance spokesperson Francesca Davidson about the Keating government's July 22 "Youth Jobs Summit". "Young people have been told that it is a summit about us, but we are not going to be given much of a say because they know what is good for us.
"They are not prepared to consider creating more than a few thousand temporary jobs, which won't make a dent in youth unemployment. Meanwhile employers, the Labor government and the opposition seem to have made up their minds that young workers' incomes are to be slashed under the guise of new 'youth wages' or 'youth training wages'."
Davidson attended a one-day "consultation" organised by the Youth Affairs Council of Victoria in Melbourne to put together a submission to the summit by Australian Youth Policy and Action Coalition (AYPAC), the organisation selected by Prime Minister Paul Keating to provide the official youth voice at the summit. Similar meetings were held in other major cities.
"The feeling of the representatives of youth, welfare and union organisations present at the meeting was overwhelmingly against both the Liberal and Labor proposals on lowering youth wages", said Davidson. "But we were told that our views were only part of the input to AYPAC and may or may not be reflected in its final submission to the summit."
Wendy Robertson, who also attended the "consultation", said that AYPAC was reluctant to show the participants the final draft of its submission. "They said that they want to save it for the summit."
Yvette Willoughby, a youth worker from Sunshine, in Melbourne's western suburbs, was also critical of the poor consultation with young people who, in her area, were suffering unemployment rates 15% higher than the national average. "The young unemployed don't have a voice. They are not even being given the information they need to ask questions about the various proposals."
But the young unemployed she works with were strongly against the opposition's plans to cut youth wages to $3 or $3.50 an hour, said Willoughby. "For a few dollars more than the dole, young people are expected to live and pay for the extra expenses like travel and clothing that you need if you are working. Young people are asking how they are supposed to live."
Jenea Vithoulkis, youth officer with the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC), was also annoyed about youth not being invited to the summit. She said that the ACTU's youth committee managed to pressure the government to allow it two representatives to the summit, and they would be pushing against any further lowering of young people's incomes.
"There is already a system of youth wages and youth training wages that are inadequate and unfair. Young workers are currently the lowest paid sector of the work force. This is discriminatory, and since 1989 the ACTU's policy has been to get rid of junior rates of pay", she told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly.
The ACTU youth committee's policy was that youth incomes should not go any lower and had to be at least above the poverty line, she added.
Vithoulkis will address the VTHC on July 23, where she intends to put a motion which would "reject the introduction of any scheme which sees young people's income fall to a level which does not enable them to live decently in our society" and "reject any plan by any political party [for] a lowering of the current youth wage".
She also criticised the short-term and band-aid job creation schemes being floated. "The youth jobs summit must develop programs which provide long-term employment which incorporates quality training."
Victorian commissioner for equal opportunity Moira Rayner believes that the Liberal Party's youth wage proposal would contravene the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Young workers need to be paid enough to live on, and it was wrong to assume that they can be paid less because their families will support them, she told the July 15 Melbourne Age.
Training
Rayner argued that the problem behind youth unemployment seemed to be low skill levels and inadequate training, rather than wages.
"Children have a right to a decent standard of living, and we've got to make sure that they've got proper work and proper training and proper skills. I don't think it's an answer to simply say we'll pay them three bucks an hour and assume that employers will employ them."
Vithoulkis saw some merit in the training wage concept proposed in the Carmichael Report but noted that the report was about training and not job creation; the question of what trainees would be paid was still a long way from being settled. She said that she believed that most unions would not support an income level below that which was needed to live on.
However, Francesca Davidson — who attended the Victorian government's June 25 mini-summit on youth jobs and "upstaged" Premier Joan Kirner, according to some of the media — warned that the concept of a youth training wage was being used as a cover for Labor governments to bring in a youth wage.
"The Kirner government's pilot youth trainee scheme, for example, would mean young workers receiving $144 for a week's work with on-the-job training but no guarantee of a real job after a year." In this case, "training" served as an excuse to discount youth wages even further, she said. It was also an attempt to blame young people for high unemployment. "It says young people can't get jobs because they haven't got enough skills and are not mature enough. But the truth is that there aren't the jobs out there, and there are thousands of skilled young people, some with experience, certificates and even degrees, looking for work.
"Unemployment is a result of a failure in the system and is not the fault of young people, migrants, women or any other disadvantaged group. It is a case of blame the victim and avoid the real challenge to create real jobs", she said.
"There is work that urgently needs to be done", added Davidson, who is also an activist in the Environmental Youth Alliance. "This society hasn't begun to address the environmental issue. There are recycling systems to be set up and improved, public transport to be upgraded, tree plantations to be established, renewable energy projects. Permanent, fully paid and rewarding jobs can be created from this work.
"There is no point waiting for big business to do it because it sometimes is more profitable for them to wreck the environment rather than fix it up. Governments should ditch the New Right ideology, spend the money where it is really needed and slash military spending and tax the big corporations and the super rich to pay for it."