Generation jobless: The worst youth unemployment crisis in European history should be blamed on its millionaires
At least 26 million unemployed people will be looking for work across Europe during the long, hot summer of 2013. They will not be the only ones looking. Millions of school and university leavers will join them in the search. Millions more are looking for more work than they already have – another part-time job, or a full-time job in place of part-time work. And millions of others are not registered as unemployed but are also searching for paid work to supplement their income: pensioners in need; partners of someone in work whose wage has fallen; students who are studying full-time but cannot survive without a job on the side; children who are officially too young to work but whose families need the money.
The official EU unemployment rate is now one in eight of the labour force, but many (if not most) of the other seven eligible adults do not see themselves as decently employed, as having enough paid work, or as being paid enough for what they do. Even among those who receive enough income, many do not have enough job security to feel safe. Others are working more than they would like but know they have little choice to reduce their hours. To do so would make them more vulnerable to being seen as disposable, to redundancy.
In times of mass unemployment our expectations of what is a good job diminish. The market mechanism that worked so well when we had full employment in the 1960s no longer operates. In a well-functioning labour market you tell your boss to shove it if your conditions of work, or pay, or security, are not good and you find another job Europeans old enough to remember those times are now mostly retired.
In Britain, unemployment was technically eradicated among 16- and 17-year-olds in the 1980s merely by making it illegal for jobless school leavers to claim unemployment benefit. This is now being mooted for all young people up to the age of 25. The Prime Minister began the process by talking of cutting housing benefits for “feckless” under-25s. Consequently, the UK could have the lowest youth unemployment rate in Europe. Keep moving in that direction and it could have a rate as low as the one “enjoyed” in India today, or in Britain before 1888, when there was no unemployment at all because the word had no written existence until then.
Reducing short-term unemployment by punitive action appears to work, but it is harder to get the long-term unemployed into work that way. The long-term jobless most often live in areas where there are no spare jobs at all, even of the most unsavoury kind. Last month, long-term unemployment hit a 17-year high in the UK. The poorest areas are worst affected, yet even the richest parts today have unemployment rates that the poorest areas of the early 1970s never experienced.
The number of long-term unemployed who have been out of work and claiming for more than a year in the UK is above 900,000. Fewer of these people are aged under 25, because many under that age have been enrolled on one work programme or another in the previous two years that reset the clock. The last time long-term unemployment rates were as high was under the last Conservative government in the 1990s – but back then overall unemployment rates were falling and there was not a global recession.
New Statesman
