Youth Precarity Traps

Guy Standing is co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network

Youth: urban nomads

The world's youth, more than 1 billion aged between 15 and 25, comprise the largest youth cohort in history, a majority in developing countries. The world may be ageing but there are a very large number of young people around, with much to be frustrated about. Although many other groups make up the precariat, the most common image is of young people emerging from school and college to enter a precarious existence lasting years, often made all the more frustrating because their parents’ generation had seemingly held stable jobs.

Youths have always entered the labour force in precarious positions, expecting to have to prove themselves and learn. But today's youth are not offered a reasonable bargain. Many enter temporary jobs that stretch well beyond what could be required to establish ‘employability’. A wheeze of flexibility has been to extend probationary periods, during which firms can legally pay lower wages and provide fewer benefits.

The declining probability of moving into a long-term contract builds up resentment. In France, for example, 75 per cent of all young employees start with temporary contracts and most remain in them; only those with degrees can expect to move into a ‘permanent’ position. Traditionally, youths could tolerate an initial period of being an outsider since they could look forward to being an insider eventually. Meanwhile, they lived off parents. Family solidarity alleviated the initial precariousness. But today, precariousness has been stretched while family solidarity is weaker; the family is more fragile and the older generation cannot foresee a balancing inter-generational reciprocity.

A feature of the restructuring of social income and wage flexibility has been the fall in wages and incomes of young people relative to their elders. Not only are more youth in precarious jobs, where wages are lower anyhow, but their bargaining position is weakened in accessing all jobs, while the absence of enterprise and state benefits intensifies their vulnerability to poverty.

An example is Japan, where average annual earnings of workers in their 20s fell by 14 per cent between 1997 and 2008. A report by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2010 found that 56 per cent of 16- to 34-year-old employed workers needed a second source of income to help them pay for basic living expenses.

Youths resent the insecurity and mostly want to pursue some sort of career. Yet many with a desire for a fulfilling life are unimpressed by stories of employment drudgery and stress of older generations. They reject the labourism of stable full-time jobs stretching out into the distance. In international polls, nearly two-thirds of young people say they would prefer to be ‘self-employed’, to work on their own rather than be in a job. But the flexible labour markets forged by the older generation of politicians and commercial interests condemn most youth to spending years in the precariat.

Youth make up the core of the precariat and will have to take the lead in forging a viable future for it. Youth has always been the repository of anger about the present and the harbinger of a better tomorrow. Some commentators, such as Daniel Cohen (2009: 28), see May 1968 as the point at which youth emerged as an ‘autonomous social force’. Certainly the ‘baby boomers’ fractured arrangements created by their parents’ generation. But youth has been the change agent throughout history. Rather, 1968 marked the beginning of the precariat, with its rejection of industrial society and its drab labourism. Subsequently, having railed against capitalism, the baby boomers took the pensions and other benefits, including cheap commodities from emerging market economies, and then ushered in flexibility and insecurity for their successors. One embittered jobless graduate (Hankinson, 2010) wrote, ‘Baby boomers had free education, affordable houses, fat pensions, early retirement and second homes. We've been left with education on the never-never [student debt] and a property ladder with rotten rungs. And the financial system which made our parents rich has left us choosing between crap job or no job’.

Of course, the tirade against the previous generation presents a false picture; it neglects class. Only a small minority of UK baby boomers went to university, while today half of all school leavers go on to some form of tertiary education. Many in the older generation suffered the ravages of de-industrialisation, as miners, steelworkers, dock workers, printers and so on were shunted into history. And most women had the added burden of economic marginality. The inter-generational interpretation could almost be a diversionary tactic, since it accords with a conservative view that carefully leaves out the role of globalisation (Willetts, 2010). Today's youth is not worse off than earlier generations. The predicament is just different and varies by class. Those former working-class communities had an ethos of social solidarity reproduced from generation to generation. They are now as much zones of the precariat as are the campuses and communities of what Italians call alternativi.

Their withering has created three challenges for today's youth. They have seen their parents lose status, income, pride and stability; they have no role models to emulate; and they drift into precarity traps, with low-paying jobs interspersed with spells of unemployment and enforced idleness. Within low-income neighbourhoods the ‘work ethic’ is passed down from generation to generation (Shildrick, MacDonald, Webster and Garthwaite, 2010). But the experience of a precariatised existence by one generation will also transmit attitudes and behavioural norms to the next. The first generation subject to systemic flexibility came of age in the 1980s. It is their children who are entering the labour market in the early twenty-first century. It cannot help that many expect to earn less and to have weaker careers than their parents. Remarkably, more UK youth say they belong to the working class than think their parents belong to it. There is a sense of downwardness, matched by what they see ahead of them.

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This is taken straight from Guy Standing's 'The Precariat: A New Dangerous Class'

You can find the original material here:
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/the-precariat-the-new-dangerous-class/ch3-who-enters-the-precariat?fbclid=IwAR180SPv-_jqg2_Lo-ZBjATDxSfWwhyUWBL2PgStgeKz99Hz1GYlkNM49B8