Million Jobs is a campaign group in the United Kingdom that aims to tackle youth unemployment. The group's name comes from the statistic that at the height of the post-2008 global recession over 1,000,000 people under the age of 25 were unemployed in the United Kingdom. The campaign is led by Lottie Dexter, a former Comms Officer at the Centre for Social Justice. They have hosted a roundtable discussion at 10 Downing Street with the Prime Minister, and they also head a debate in the House of Lords.
More recently the group have supported an introduction of coding lessons in schools to replace an outdated I.T./computing curriculum.
Most criticisms of the campaign allege a pro-conservative bias evident in policies such as support for workfare, opposition to increases in the minimum wage and opposition to wage subsidy schemes such as Labour's job guarantee. The New Statesman have criticised the group's links to the Conservative Party and the centre-right think tank the Centre for Social Justice.[2] The New Statesman also object to the groups support for workfare whereby unemployed people are made to work for their unemployment benefits rather than a wage. The Political Scrap blog have criticised the group as an "astroturfing operation which purports to “represent” the young unemployed while advocating for tax cuts and the watering down of equality legislation".[3]