Worthless - Agnes Török

Poem by Agnes Török on the news of a new Conservative budget. Subtitles in English, Greek and Hungarian available via the settings/subtitle button. More translations to follow. More info below:
Based on experiences of living in Britain under austerity as a young, queer, unemployed, female immigrant student - and not taking it any more.

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New video up now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHIFYF9L5uU

Filmed and edited by Perry Jonsson
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Part of Loud Poets collective
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Full Poetry Collections on
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Music:
"What I see" by Robbero, remixed by Perry Jonsson and used in accordance with it's Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) CC Licence.
http://ccmixter.org/files/Robbero/50733

Thank you to everyone who has been part of crowd sourced translation of the poem!
Subtitles:
Greek by Eleni P.
Hungarian by Kincses István
French by Christina Intrator
Dutch by Magali Bosmans
Québécois French by Sylvie Gabrielle Robert
Swedish by Carina Persson

Give me a student (any student)
give me only one definition of success and

only one way to make it
give me academic excellence

give me full-time extracurriculars
give me part-time job to pay the bills

give me internship followed by internship
followed by internship followed by internship

give me a lifetime of debt
then tell me I am worthless

tell me my labour is not worth paying for
tell me its a favour to hire me

for free
go on

tell me I am worthless
when in this country

millions of people compete for thousands of
jobs

call it their own personal failure
when they don't all get one

when the young and the old and the sick have
no way into a labour market

ever contracting
ever decreasing

when you take money out of their opportunities for
education and health

call it their fault
call them lazy

call them benefit scroungers
call it a “culture of dependency”

go on
tell us we are worthless

say it's not political
say it's “just the way it is”

that food banks can be cut
but banks need be bailed out

that the minimum wage can stagnate and benefits
be chucked off entirely

but when the 1% made more off of the first
year of the financial crisis

than they had for the 30 years before

call it austerity
go on

tell us we are worthless
rebrand public failure into personal competition

rebrand it filling your CV
rebrand it increasing your skill sets

rebrand it exposure and networking
as we rebrand it increasing your skill sets

rebrand it exposure and networking
as we volunteer and intern

volunteer and intern
digging ourselves ever deeper into debt

ever deeper into despair
go on tell us we are worthless

tell me unemployment levels skyrocketing have
nothing to do with it

tell me being more likely to end up on the
street than in a graduate job has nothing

to do with it
go on

tell me we're all middle class now
call call centre workers and shelf stackers

garbage handlers and cleaners
call one out of five working for less than

the minimum wage
which is less than the living wage

“just middle class in the making”?

Go on
tell us we are worthless

occupy my body
as if it were some resource you could use to

raise the GDP
broken back from all the heavy lifting

crumbling knees from those hours standing
depression and stress from the worry

how will I pay rent this month
how will she support kids

how will he pay the medical bills
go on

tell us we are worthless
tell us the only thing not working about this

system
is us