{"id":1097,"date":"2010-08-10T14:53:41","date_gmt":"2010-08-10T14:53:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/?p=1097"},"modified":"2015-02-25T14:55:25","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T14:55:25","slug":"right-to-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/?p=1097","title":{"rendered":"Right to Work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Monday 16<sup>th<\/sup> August 2010<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>RIGHT TO WORK <\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A great man may have passed away this week but the values he fought for have never been more important.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I was fortunate enough to spend time with Jimmy Reid and as a young shop steward in the shipyards he was an inspiration.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">He believed that decent hard-working people had the right to work and was prepared to take on &#8211; and beat &#8211; those at the very top to make this point.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The stand that he and the other workers took saved thousands of jobs and gave hundreds of young people who followed opportunities into work.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Times have changed since then but many of the challenges remain the same.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Just this week, figures by the STUC revealed that the number of young people claiming Job Seeker\u2019s Allowance has increased by a third.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Government cuts here in Scotland mean that just one in 10 probationary teachers are being offered full-time jobs.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In our hospitals, newly-qualified nurses and midwives are being frozen out of their chosen profession due to cuts already being made to the health budget.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The Futures Job Fund \u2013 a job creation scheme that has given opportunities to more than 200 young people here in Inverclyde \u2013 is to be axed next year with nothing in its place.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Even those hoping to go on to university have found that places all taken up, particularly for those who didn\u2019t get the results they were expecting.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Despite the best of efforts of men like Jimmy Reid in taking on the Tory goverment, the shipyards and other big employers did close and consigned a generation of young people to the unemployment scrapheap.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">It caused serious damage to communities like ours but we came through the other side.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Yet again, we face tough economic times and it is vital that we don\u2019t repeat the mistakes of the past.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">That means creating opportunities for the young people of Inverclyde and Scotland and ensuring they don\u2019t pay the price for the actions of greedy bankers.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Monday 16th Augu<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Monday 16th August 2010 RIGHT TO WORK A great man may have passed away this week but the values he fought for have never been more important. I was fortunate enough to spend time with Jimmy Reid and as a young shop steward in the shipyards he was an inspiration. He believed that decent hard-working [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holyrood-message"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1097"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1099,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097\/revisions\/1099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}