unemployment
Work release scheme proposed for French prisons
The creaking prison system in France unveils a new post-release labour scheme.
Under the terms of the "Les Clés de l’avenir" agreement signed earlier this year prisoners can have their sentences reduced if they pass a selection process and are found work with one of the partnership firms. The following four areas will be open to prisoners: catering, cleaning, building and logistics.
Regeneration, but not for miners
Funding for the coalfields has been lauded by the government as a stunning transformation of old mining communities through free-market activity allied with government nous. But buried in amongst the back-slapping are figures which show the ex-miners themselves have been left in the cold while the wealthy profit around them
Despite massive investment in mining communities damaged by Thatcher’s victory in 1984 and with winding down of coal mining in the 1990s, the money has gone not to local workers but to regeneration groups and businesses, according to a new report.
What recession means for us
An analysis of the likely impact of the coming recession on workers' lives and a rallying call for collective action to mitigate that impact.
The recession is here. We're told to tighten our belts and brace ourselves for redundancies, wage and service cuts. Politicians and business leaders are united in saying we should pay for a crisis not of our making [see box for a brief history of the crisis]. A recession is simply when the economy shrinks for 6 months in a row.
Benefits could be suspended for jobless
Jobless people should "spend nine to five" looking for work or doing community service, or face losing their benefits according to a new government-commissioned report.
This would add to recent proposals to end secure tenancies for the long-term unemployed unless they can prove they have been job-hunting.
Workfare comes to Britain
The Green Paper, No-One is Written Off: Reforming Welfare to Reward Responsibility was published in July. Its aim is to ensure everyone has to “fulfil their responsibilities to prepare for, look for, and take up work.”
By changing the system it plans to get more than a million on Incapacity Benefit into employment in the coming years, help 300,000 lone parents get jobs and to have a million older workers more. Future employment levels are targeted at 80% of the working-age population.
Lernia Correctional Facility: a story from a Swedish unemployment programme
A short 'militant investigation' about struggles at a Swedish unemployment programme. by Kim Müller, Kämpa tillsammans!
I have spent about two years in different unemployment programmes in a mid-size Swedish town and this is my story about that experience. For most of the time I was training to become a cook in the Lernia programme (nicknamed "Lernia Correctional Facility" by its inmates).
France: Areva strikers issued with summonses
31 striking workers have been issued with summonses for 'restricting the freedom to work'
80 of the 89 workers at the Montrouge site have been on strike since January 10th over plans to close the factory down. Workers have also occupied and blockaded the buildings in protest. There has been no explanation of why the 31 employees targetted were chosen.
France: organisation amongst the homeless
The treatment of the homeless, especially those who are immigrants the attitude of the French government, as does the resitance organised against it.
A familiar sight to many Parisians are the rows of people living in tents along the banks of the canal St Martin. They are homeless, mostly immigrants, mostly illegal. The tents are supplied by les enfants de Don Quichotte, an organisation that battles for the rights of homeless people.
After ten years of GEAR: COSATU, the Zuma trial and the dead end of alliance politics
An analysis from the ZACF journal Zabalaza #7 of the African National Congress (ANC)'s neo-liberal Growth Employment And Redistribution (GEAR) policy and its relation to the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP).
Lost in Transit
Unemployed recalcitrance and welfare restructuring in the UK today - Aufheben (UK)
1. Introduction In recent years, unemployment and similar welfare benefits - the dole - have become a focus of struggle in the UK. The small group which produces Aufheben has been involved in this struggle.
Physiotherapy students protest against unemployment
Hundreds of physiotherapy students and graduates have converged on Holyrood to lobby MSPs over their "limited chances" of finding employment.
A Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) poll found that four months after graduating, 81% of physiotherapists were still looking for their first job. The CSP claimed that 28,000 patients were currently on a waiting list to see a physiotherapist. The Scottish Executive said a number of recruitment initiatives were under way.
One in four youth unemployment figure disputed
Our interview with economist and European labour trends specialist Florence Lefresne about the CPE.
In the interview Lefresne, of the Institute of Economic and Social Research, questions the widely reported one in four youth unemployment figures that have been used repeatedly as a justification for the CPE.
Mining communities, unemployment and incapacity benefits
As the government prepares to slash incapacity benefits, Rob Ray looks at a report brought out last year which is amongst the starkest examples of how incapacity has been used in recent years to hide much of the country's unemployment problems.
'20 Years on: Has the economy of the coalfields recovered?' examined communities where over 10% of the population had been employed in the mines before the mass closures.
The report, brought out by the Centre for regional and social economic research at Sheffield Hallam university, said:
Class struggle in the unemployment capital of Europe, Lower Andalucia, 1995-96
This article deals with a number of specific episodes of class struggle in Lower Andalucia[1] in the recent period.









