McBrown Praises McJobs and McEducation...

[conspiracy analyst]

On the day the Brown government announced the equivalence of A Levels to flipping burgers McDonalds has got agreement from the Qualifications Authority to have a permanent pool of ...slave labour.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2248136,00.html

Under the guise of training in Management they will have a pool of youth labour whose unemployment in the crucial years of 18-24 is astronomic.

By 'coincidence' as if that exists by the paid hirelings of corporate brainwashing, ie the media, the Guardian today had a profile on McDonalds and how it is on the up again.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2247919,00.html

It fails to add that its sales have only increased primarily due to mass immigration as it isn't as widespread in Eastern Europe. It presents McDonalds on the up when in reality only using state aid does it survive in the form of tax rebates, students who are indebted, and new immigrants.

These are the clowns who have filled the tv with 'healthy eating' choices allegedly and then they promote this. Logical if you think of it.

Whats the point of any education if all you have to look forward to is slave labour, a mass media of lies distortions and half truths? Creating semi-literate people with a paper stating they have a degree becomes the purpose.

[Caz]

I'm just wondering if it's the taxpayer who, or will, pay for the studying. If you 'trap them young and train them cheap' even better if they are trained under the state funded 'education'.

[conspiracy analyst]

mcJobs and mcEducation being driven by the NWO corporate agenda...

This is a chance to reverse casualisation and insecurity


The abuse of agency workers is fuelling racism and exploitation. MPs should use their power to give them equal rights

Seumas Milne
Thursday January 31, 2008
The Guardian

This has not been a good time for those who imagined that Gordon Brown would ditch the market mania of the Blair government and adopt a more hard-headed approach to rampant corporate power. They have, it turns out, been misinformed. Undeterred by the gathering economic crisis, Brown took advantage of his visit to the high priests of global capitalism in Davos last Friday to reaffirm an undying faith in free markets and labour flexibility. That followed his decision to give the job of work and pensions secretary to the Blairite ultra James Purnell, who promptly hailed the prime minister as the true heir to Blair and announced plans to put private companies in charge of getting the unemployed back to work. He and Brown topped that on Monday with the revelation that private corporations such as McDonald's will now be able to brand their in-house training schemes as publicly-endorsed skills qualifications. No part of public life, it seems, is to be denied the corporate embrace.

Article continues
All this follows last week's cave-in to corporate lobbying over capital gains tax, and the extraordinary new guarantees offered to private bidders such as Richard Branson - at the expense of taxpayers - to avoid the nationalisation of Northern Rock. The relaunch of an apparently rudderless administration turns out to be a return to the neoliberal certainties of Blairism, just at the point when the failure of global financial markets is cutting the ground from beneath them. So perhaps it hardly comes as a shock to discover that Brown's government is now trying to derail an attempt by Labour MPs to win equal rights for the 1.4 million agency and temporary workers, whose growing exploitation goes to the heart of the casualisation and insecurity of Britain's labour force.

But it should be shocking. Across the country, workers are increasingly being signed up by employment agencies to take the place of directly employed staff, on worse pay and conditions - from basic wages and overtime to sickness benefits, holidays, maternity rights and pensions. In parts of London and the east coast, the Midlands and the north-west, trade unions report an epidemic of undercutting agency employment. In catering, private security and construction, agency working is becoming the norm: in factories such as BMW's Hams Hall engine plant in Birmingham, agency workers make up the majority. In food processing, call centres, hotels and social care - including in the public sector - agency labour is being used to create a two-tier workforce.

Add to this the fact that the sharpest end of the agency labour market is dominated by migrants, and the dangers - as well as the injustice - of what is taking place should be obvious. These are the most vulnerable workers, often bogusly classed as self-employed, who have hidden costs deducted for housing, transport and administration, and work on zero-hours contracts, with no guaranteed employment. When employers use migrant, often east European, agency labour to undercut directly employed British workers, they are fanning the flames of xenophobia and racism in the workplace and beyond.

But for the past five years, New Labour has set its face against a European Union directive to give equal rights to temporary and agency workers, resisting attempts by the majority of states that want to halt the race to the bottom of hire-and-fire employment. Only last month, British ministers blocked a Portuguese draft which would have required equal treatment of agency workers after six weeks. John Hutton, the business secretary, explained that the need for efficiency and competitiveness trumped the demands for job security: "We will not accept a deal that undermines essential labour market flexibility." The manoeuvring in Brussels to sink the directive took the prime minister's adoption of the British National party slogan "British jobs for British workers" beyond shamelessness. As Tony Woodley, joint leader of Unite, the union spearheading the campaign for agency workers' rights, put it: "All we want is decent jobs for all workers in our country, no matter where they come from."

Standing behind Brown and Hutton, of course, has been the employers' organisation, the CBI, which insists that protection for agency workers would make it far more difficult for companies to cope with business peaks and troughs and - in a reprise of its scaremongering before the introduction of the minimum wage a decade ago - put 250,000 temporary jobs at risk. The government, meanwhile, argues that agency work offers the unemployed a leg-up into work and anyway accounts for only 6% of the labour force. But of course equal rights for agency staff would in no way interfere with genuine temporary work, and the impact of exploited agency workers is felt far beyond their ranks, as the downward pull on wages and conditions for directly employed workers makes itself felt.

For the trade unions, the protection of agency workers is now a totemic issue, as it is becoming for Labour MPs who see the impact agency-working is having in working class communities and know how the influx of migrant workers is being exploited by the far right. On top of that, the government's refusal either to support a European directive or legislate at home is seen as a flagrant breach of its 2004 Warwick agreement with the unions. Fed by disappointment over the direction taken by the Brown government, and a realisation that unless it starts to deliver to its core supporters the future is bleak, a welcome head of steam has been building up on the back benches which now threatens a full-scale parliamentary rebellion.

The main focus is on the Labour MP Andrew Miller's private member's bill next month, which needs 100 MPs to force it through to the committee stage. MPs are also planning amendments to a minor employment bill and even the European treaty legislation. So alarmed has the government become by the agitation among its usually docile troops, that ministers and advisers have been sent this week to buy off Miller and his supporters with warm words of compromise over qualifying periods and commissions of inquiry. If Labour MPs roll over, they won't be doing themselves, let alone an increasingly casualised and divided workforce, any favours. Political self-preservation, the dangers of ethnic tensions and the need to challenge the government's continuing corporate cringe all demand that this battle be won.