Figures released by the TUC this week highlight the shocking extent of long-term youth unemployment. In the last year alone, the amount of young people unemployed for a period of 12 months or more has gone up by 264 per cent and although youth unemployment rose rapidly after the financial crisis, their analysis shows it was creeping up on us long before then. In fact, since 2000 the number of young people out of work for more than a year has increased by 874 per cent, from 6,260 to 60,955. To put that into perspective, across all working age groups, long-term unemployment has increased by only 50 per cent since 2000. It is undoubtedly clear that young people are the collateral damage of a collapsing labour market.
Increasing unemployment rates for young people are becoming a permanent social reality and these early experiences of joblessness are not the short term inevitability of a recession that can be shaken off once the market ‘picks up’; early experiences of unemployment scar young people for the rest of their lives. They become more susceptible to physical and mental ill health, they continue to be less employable by never developing the skills that businesses need, and they suffer a higher risk of low income and poverty as result. In short, a reduction in life chances.
The difficulties of entering the labour market is having an impact at all levels; graduates are struggling to find jobs that require a degree level qualification and those young people with very few qualifications are struggling to find any permanent work at all. Of those young people who are long-term unemployed they are more likely to be men and are more likely to be black. Notably, almost a third of young people who are unemployed are also not claiming unemployment benefit, making it even harder for them to access services or support that would help them gain a foothold on the labour market.
It is the lack of contact with public services that I find the most alarming. I was recently made aware of the exceptional ethnographic research of Dr Lisa McKenzie at the University of Nottingham. Over the last 8 years she has studied and interviewed residents of the St Anne’s estate in Nottingham. Not through focus groups or surveys but by living there, understanding the area, listening. Her findings have contributed to her paper on the alienation of working class men in urban areas. On the estate there is high unemployment, particularly amongst young black and mixed-race men. Many of the men feel severely disconnected from the rest of society, most have had very little formal education.
Locally the estate is known as a potentially dangerous neighbourhood, one which should be avoided. Although this was not the view point of those who lived there, particularly for women who saw it as a sanctuary from racist or prejudicial attitudes outside the estate, this has had a substantial affect on how the residents see themselves. Dr McKenzie describes how palpably absent men feel from life on the estate; they are not at community meetings, at the school gates, in the home. Very few ever visit a doctor and have no contact with any ‘formal’ service or institution. She describes how the men are conscious of being powerless and the ideology they turn to in order to rationalise this. As a reaction to their incapability they rely on Google and internet ‘conspiracy theories’ most predominantly an American website called ‘Freeman’ which uses a right wing survivalist thesis of not paying taxes and having the right to bear arms because this is something that ‘feels right to them’.
During her research Dr McKenzie has seen how the funding and initiatives that once kept the estate together as a community have been cut off by the coalition government. As local services such as sure start centres, one-stop-shops, and youth inclusion programmes are moved out of the area, the only representatives of the state that are left are the police. Where there used to be opportunities for voluntary positions that could lead to a job in the community as a youth worker or social worker, this has now gone. Young people who used to want to stay in the community and make it a better place now think that they are just not wanted; they are a ‘problem’.
This is not a phenomenon that is localised to one estate in Nottingham but an alienation that is felt by the young unemployed across Europe, a disconnect from any civil, social or economic activity. We are effectively culling the political engagement of a future generation of citizens.
In a report released this week by the Work Foundation ‘Short term Crisis, long term problem’ they called for a ‘Youth Employment Unit’ and a ‘minister’ for youth employment to solve the problem. Although there is certainly compelling argument for both, particularly in coordinating joined up services we have to move beyond the language of ‘units’ and ‘task forces’ for ‘stakeholders’. It’s not the nineties anymore. When you look at the devastating findings from the St Anne’s estate, the deep and structural inequality, mistrust and anger why provide another ‘unit’ or ‘scheme’ that will fail to meet ‘bench line targets’….again.
This is where trade unions should be making the difference. Urban estates such as St Anne’s should be natural trade union territory and we are walking away from them and picking political battles elsewhere. Despite the work of the TUC’s organising academy in developing community unionism and Unite’s new Community membership scheme, we seem to be leaving the campaigning to others. We cannot bemoan falling membership and influence whilst people are growing up, looking for employment and training opportunities and do not know what a trade union is or what it does. It’s not their fault that trade unions aren’t visible. Organising and activism around core community facilities such as health care and child care should be our imperative. We need to be working with employers to negotiate local employment objectives and in sectors of precarious and transient work where young people are predominant, and often exploited, we need to be securing better training and better contracts.
So whilst the government continues its hand wringing, deciding if perhaps O-levels, or Polytechnics or Transvision Vamp will fix youth unemployment, the union movement needs to wake up to how it can limit the damage and provide an alternative.
—————————————————————————————
Jenny Simms is director of Unions21 and writes the Union Matters column for Progress
Unions21 with Dr Melanie Simms will be publishing a debate piece on young people and the economic crisis at the end of August.
—————————————————————————————
Photo: J@ck!