Burger flipping 'not apprenticeship', says Emily Thornberry

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34385871

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The government is selling young people short by promoting "burger-flipping" jobs as apprenticeships, Emily Thornberry has said.

Labour's shadow work and pensions secretary said the young should be learning a proper trade.

She was speaking at a Youth Zone fringe meeting at Labour's annual conference in Brighton.

Burger giant McDonald's is one of the UK's biggest providers of private apprenticeships.

The company insists it offers training that is equivalent to five GCSEs at grade C or above, including "CV-boosting skills in English, Maths and ICT".

Its 12 month course was given a "good" rating by Ofsted in 2010, 18 months after it was launched.

Asked after the fringe meeting what she had against training for a career in catering, Ms Thornberry said: "I am not saying there is anything wrong with flipping burgers.

"What I am saying is wrong is to say you can get an apprenticeship for flipping burgers. You could get a couple of weeks training but that's not the same as an apprenticeship.

"It's undermining the value of apprenticeships. Because having been an apprentice used to be something you could sell."

She added: "Being a child of the seventies I think of as an apprenticeship as being an older person taking a younger person under their wing and training them for a period of time, giving them skills which are really saleable and actually there are quite a lot employers who just repackage things as apprenticeships and really they are not learning a great deal."

Ms Thornberry was sacked from Labour's frontbench by previous leader Ed Miliband after being accused of snobbery for tweeting a picture of a terraced house with three England flags, and a white van parked outside, something she apologised for.

She is now spearheading the party's efforts to connect with young people, which it sees as key to its campaign to win back power in 2020.

'Stolen all the cakes'

"We can't just be the generation that sucks up everything and does everything and eats everything, that takes all the pension funds, takes all the jobs," she told BBC News.

We have an absolute duty to give youngsters a chance."

She added: "A good Labour Party ought to be able to reflect the views of youngsters as well."

Former Labour minister John Denham, speaking at another fringe meeting, on Tuesday evening, offered a different view.

"It became very fashionable in certain quarters in the last five years to say the biggest single problem we had was that the Baby Boomer generation - I'm a signed-up member - had stolen all the cakes and had taken it off the young people."

He said the issue never came up on the doorstep at the general election.

"They all thought the people who had worked all their lives, if they were enjoying a decent retirement - good luck to them and they deserved it.

"And that was a very good example of how the intellectual fashion amongst people who weren't rooted in communities and lives and families actually distorted the thinking of a political party."