We’re facing a crisis in employment that’s hitting the developed world the hardest and it’s not just the result of the banking crisis. With a combination of cheap credit financing the purchase of low cost imports, we now have significant numbers of people in debt in most of the Western world. Here in the UK, the problem has been compounded by necessary cuts in public sector spending (forecast to lead to 300,000 job losses and more recently, a shortage of 200,000 university places for school leavers) to reduce our balance of payments deficit.

This webinar is being held on Monday 17th January 7.30pm, London UK time & will be covering a number of topics in the general economic and jobs contexts: To RSVP for this webinar

* The causes – credit.v.productivity, globalisation and debt financed imports, back office automation and the Internet, lack of credit
* The symptoms – the lost generation / unpaid internships, part and short time working, exploitation and low pay, the balance of payments deficit
* The symptoms – the lost generation / unpaid internships, part and short time working, exploitation and low pay, the balance of payments deficit
* Winners and the losers of each approach – old/young, rich/poor, 1st/3rd world countries, industry sectors, job roles.

Our objective is to try and work through the different approaches and get feedback on ways to deal with the issues.

Senake Atureliya will lead this webinar. He started Pie Finance and has piloted a solution (international patents pending) that enables individuals to create their own top jobs and leap over the idea-2-financable gap to start their own businesses. Also joining us will be Ben Lyons who started Intern Aware which is a campaign focusing on promoting fair access to the internship system. According to their website and Facebook group, a major study into the causes of inequality, internships were found to be an increasingly important “rung on the ladder to success”. But there is a major issue with this: graduates need to demonstrate experience in unpaid work in order to get paid work. The majority of graduates cannot afford to work for months on end unpaid. And so they lose out on job opportunities to people who have been lucky.

To put this in the context of the Future Work seminar, our platform enables the commercial value of the input generated by interns to be quantified and then enables them to be rewarded – albeit on an initial paid-out-of-revenue basis if funds are not available to pay them up front. More importantly, it allows students to create their own jobs by helping a company start up or grow, thereby redressing the balance in supply and demand that enables the exploitation of students at times of high unemployment.