Tesco recently announced that they employ 9,000 people in Northern Ireland alone. Not to mention a massive profit of £1.15 billion in the first six months of 2006. Socialist Youth’s Fight Back! Campaign is campaigning against the discrimination against young workers who get paid less, yet are doing the same amount of work as older workers.

Paddy Meehan of Socialist Youth spoke to a young Tesco worker in North Belfast. We are not publishing his name in case of victimisation.

Asked how much he earned, he replied; "I am paid £4.63 an hour because I am under 18 but if you are over 18 you would get £5.85 an hour.  It isn’t based on the work we do. There are about 500 people who work in our store and it is one of the biggest in Northern Ireland and about 60% of people in there are young people."

Do Tesco hire young people because they can pay them less? "I think it does increase their profits by hiring people under 18. I have been there since August and of the 17 people I started with the oldest was 21.  A lot of them were under 18. Most of these people were also working part time as well."

There is a need for the unions to conduct a massive campaign that could include industrial action to force Tesco to scrap the youth exemptions entirely. However there is scepticism among workers, based on their experience of what the unions have done, about whether joining and getting active in a union will achieve anything.

The young Tesco worker spoke about the approaches made by USDAW in his store: "When I first started working in Tesco we got a talk from a guy from USDAW (a retail workers’ union). He asked us to join and most of us did but since then we haven’t seen anyone from the union again. The union seems to go along with Tesco and don’t really do anything.

"I think we need a more aggressive union that is more active around the store. A lot of people gave up on the union, but if they are in trouble like with their hours they ring up the union for help. If our store was leafleted about equal pay it would get some people angry and they would try to fight for it."

Socialist Youth agree. The Fight!Back Campaign has been outside Tesco stores and has had a very good response from workers. We will continue to publicly hightlight Tesco’s refusal to grant equal pay to young workers. We are encouraging Tesco workers to join a union – but also to join the Fight!Back campaign and help us force Tesco to pay young workers the proper rate for the job they do.

Student top-up fees are one of the great scandals of this so-called Labour government. Considering that that this government has also implemented school closures, privatisation of public services and water-charges - not to mention the war on Iraq - that really is saying something.

£1,000 a year, now £3,000 a year in tuition fees - there is growing pressure on the government from the universities themselves for the cap on fees to be put up to £10,000. This neo-liberal offensive within education will continue until a united campaign of students and staff is built that says: "enough is enough, we want a properly funded, public third level education system".

The evidence since top-up fees were introduced is that they are putting more young people off going to university. Within Northern Ireland there has been a drop in applications for university of 17%, UCAS has claimed this is attributable to the introduction of top-up fees.

What's more, the government claimed top-up fees would "trickle down" in better pay for staff. But lecturers across the university system have had to take strike action to try to win a pay rise. We must be clear; the fat cat vice chancellors who, on average, get paid £154,000 a year are not on our side - they are presiding over systematic attacks against students and lecturers.

Education is a right not a privilege; however, in today's ultra-capitalist society everything is up for sale. The public services working men and women fought for in the past century are and have been fundamentally undermined. Fellow students in France, Chile and Greece have shown us, through mass strikes and occupations, what can be done. We have to fight tooth and nail to defend our education, otherwise it is going to get worse, much worse!

A national day of action has been called against top-up fees for 22 February. The Socialist Party and Socialist Societies are calling on all students to take part and build for this action. A sustained and militant campaign must be created. The first step is to take part in this national day of action. After this the Student Unions, NUS, USI, must be forced to take this campaign seriously. The only way this will happen is if students across the education system get organised. We must rely on our own mass strength to defeat fees.