Tag Archives: Youth Unemployment Crisis

What Obama Should Have Said

4 Feb

Andrew Sum, Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University and Paul Harrington, Director, Center for Labor Markets and Policy, Drexel University, writing for the Huffington Post, offered their own version of a progressive State of the Union address that President Obama should have offered last week:

A State of the Union Address for Today’s Labor Market Realities

“Our nation’s teenagers and many young adults ages 20-29 are working at a considerably lower rate today than at any time since the end of World War Two. Absence of work experience in the teen years and early 20s prevents our youth from acquiring marketable occupational skills, solid work habits, the soft skills demanded by employers, and opportunities to interact with adults and observe the skills and behaviors needed to succeed at work. Absence of early work experience will reduce their employment, wages, and training opportunities in their mid 20s. These problems are not confined to young adults lacking college degrees. Too many of our new college graduates are left either jobless or holding jobs that do not utilize the skills and knowledge that they acquired in college, reducing the return on their human capital investments and those of society.

A variety of actions are needed to improve the employment prospects of these young workers. We will work with states and local workforce development boards to expand internship opportunities and paid employment of high school students both year round and during the summer, increase the hiring of career specialists to prepare them to make the transition from high school to the world of work, and work with the nation’s employers to expand new youth apprenticeship opportunities, and provide subsidized employment in the summer for the nation’s jobless at-risk youth. We also will experiment with employer wage subsidies to promote the full-time employment of out-of-school youth, and we shall work with colleges and universities to provide additional internships and cooperative education positions for our college students to facilitate their transition to the labor market upon graduation.”

The Epidemic of This Decade: Youth Unemployment

4 Feb

Businessweek’s cover article this week is on the global crisis of youth unemployment. With protests led by young workers demanding democracy in Egypt, what is it this generation cannot do?  And what is society loosing by derailing their opportunity to enter the labor market?

The Youth Unemployment Bomb:

From Cairo to London to Brooklyn, too many young people are jobless and disaffected. Inside the global effort to put the next generation to work

“An economy that can’t generate enough jobs to absorb its young people has created a lost generation of the disaffected, unemployed, or underemployed—including growing numbers of recent college graduates for whom the post-crash economy has little to offer. Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution was not the first time these alienated men and women have made themselves heard. Last year, British students outraged by proposed tuition increases—at a moment when a college education is no guarantee of prosperity—attacked the Conservative Party’s headquarters in London and pummeled a limousine carrying Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla Bowles. Scuffles with police have repeatedly broken out at student demonstrations across Continental Europe. And last March in Oakland, Calif., students protesting tuition hikes walked onto Interstate 880, shutting it down for an hour in both directions.

More common is the quiet desperation of a generation in “waithood,” suspended short of fully employed adulthood. At 26, Sandy Brown of Brooklyn, N.Y., is a college graduate and a mother of two who hasn’t worked in seven months. “I used to be a manager at a Duane Reade [drugstore] in Manhattan, but they laid me off. I’ve looked for work everywhere and I can’t find nothing,” she says. “It’s like I got my diploma for nothing.”

While the details differ from one nation to the next, the common element is failure—not just of young people to find a place in society, but of society itself to harness the energy, intelligence, and enthusiasm of the next generation. Here’s what makes it extra-worrisome: The world is aging. In many countries the young are being crushed by a gerontocracy of older workers who appear determined to cling to the better jobs as long as possible and then, when they do retire, demand impossibly rich private and public pensions that the younger generation will be forced to shoulder.”

So here is the main question… ignoring the frame of a choice between protecting seasoned workers or nurturing young workers… what can we do to expand job opportunities for young workers? And what can unions do to prevent a lost generation?

The end of the article returns to the standard anti-worker propaganda that minimum wage laws and unions decrease hiring. We know these to be empirically false, but if young workers are looking for institutions to blame how do we make sure this propaganda does not take off and young workers see the labor movement as part of the solution?

Youth Unemployment is Not Just An American Crisis

17 Dec

Youth unemployment is a worldwide crisis.  Many of the the rich countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) are suffering from extraordinarily high ratio of youth to adult unemployment, according to a new report, Good Start? Jobs for Youth, released yesterday.  Spain has the highest youth unemployment at 42%, while Switzerland has the lowest.

Of the 16.7 million youth who are neither working nor in school or training, 10 million have given up even trying to get into the system.  This can lead to permanent scaring for both the youth and the country.  To combat this the report suggests governments should:

  • Move towards early intervention programmes and effective job-search assistance for different groups of youth, such as in Denmark, the Netherlands and Japan.
  • Strengthen apprenticeship and other dual vocational training programmes for low-skilled youth, as traditionally done in Austria, Germany and Switzerland and scaled up in Australia and in France.
  • Encourage firms to hire youth, by offering temporary subsidies targeting low-skilled youth and those have completed their apprenticeship, as well as small and medium-sized firms.

Unions have a role to play in creating these opportunities as well.  As occurred during the summer months, locals used federal TANF dollars to create apprentice programs and share workloads.  There is no reason why with a little creativity we couldn’t figure out a way to create similar programs now or create more permanent pathways (of course having more funding from the federal government for such a program wouldn’t hurt either…).  Creating a type of structure where the union facilitates your first entrance into the labor market will pay huge dividends in the long-run as a new generation of union activists emerges.

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