Employment and the Millenials

8/10/2019 Employment and the Millenials

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Demography 101A quarterly roundup of facts and gures from the world you live in

Employment and the Millenials

BY SHEILA ALLISON

Id never worked at a permanent job until I

came to Australia, and, looking back, I was

still a child. Its unemployment that stunts

your growth more than accepting benefts,

and thats why I say I didnt grow up.

Anyone curious about the participation

of so many young people in the UK street

celebrations of Margaret Thatchers death

this year would have been gently enlightened

bySydney Morning Heraldcolumnist Mark

DapinsLiving under the rule of the Iron Lady.

Dapin grew up, or tried to, in Thatchers

Britain. She was prime minister from before

I left school at 17 until after I left England

at 26. He writes that her government grew

unemployment from one million to three million.

He was on the dole and says, When youve

never worked, you begin to believe you could

never work, and thats only a short step from

concluding that you cant do anything at all.

Unemployment is a universal handicap to

maturity and independence. You dont grow

up until youve got a job, and that applies to

each generation. Dapin is from Gen X, and

his unemployment experience was tied to

the political and economic circumstances of

where he was in his youth. Other people of

his generation in other parts of the world

had dierent experiences, good and bad, as

Gen Ys or Millennials are having now.

Had Dapin, as a young Briton, arrived in

Australia now, he would have encountered a

youth unemployment rate roughly the same

as it was in 1991, around 18%. While this is

not good, in other parts of the world (see

below) it is much worse. The implications of

this too-long period of unemployment and

underemployment for youth are complex. It is

not just the quantity of work that matters, but

the quality as well. This point is made in the 2012

ILO report, The youth unemployment crisis: Time

for action, which states that lower quality jobs,

low pay, and informality impede opportunities

to advance and contribute to productivity.

Rather than acting as steppingstones to the

formal economy, temporary employment and

short-term contracts may simply continue to

entrench workers in the informal economy, with

serious implications for the rest of their lives.

The unluckiest generation?This ongoing disadvantage holds true even

in the developed world, as described by

Derek Thompson in the Washington DC

NationalJournal. In his articleMillennials

are the unluckiest generation, Thompson

puts the case that the Gen Ys, the 3.7m

Americans born in 1982, are, in the eyes of

demographers categorically dierent from

the 3.6m Americans born in 1981. They are the

largest generation in American history, and

Youth Studies Australia .VOLUME 32 NUMBER 2 2013
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/living-under-the-rule-of-the-iron-lady-20130412-2hqut.htmlhttp://www.theage.com.au/comment/living-under-the-rule-of-the-iron-lady-20130412-2hqut.htmlhttp://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/---ed_emp_msu/documents/publication/wcms_181269.pdfhttp://www.nationaljournal.com/next-economy/solutions-bank/millennials-are-the-unluckiest-generation-20130425http://www.nationaljournal.com/next-economy/solutions-bank/millennials-are-the-unluckiest-generation-20130425http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/---ed_emp_msu/documents/publication/wcms_181269.pdfhttp://www.theage.com.au/comment/living-under-the-rule-of-the-iron-lady-20130412-2hqut.htmlhttp://www.theage.com.au/comment/living-under-the-rule-of-the-iron-lady-20130412-2hqut.html


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they landed in the cradle during an awful

recession, learned to walk during the Reagan

recovery, came of age in the booming 1990s,

and entered the labor market after the Sept. 11

attacks and before the Great Recession The

aftereects of the economic sledgehammer

that followed the collapse of the housing

market in 200708, says Thompson, may

dog them for the rest of their working lives.

Gen Y is the most educated in American history,

and they willingly took on their university

education debts, which doubled in cost between

1996 and 2006, because they assumed they would

get jobs to pay them o; instead they foundthemselves stranded in the worst economy

in 80 years. As Thompson says, It costs a

lot to be a grown-up, at least if you do it the

traditional way. But this generation is doing it

dierently, postponing the traditional actions

of moving out of home, buying a car, getting

married, having children. Sadly, Millennials

have been scorned as perma-children, forever

postponing adulthood, or labeled with that most

un-American of character aws: helplessness.

But this bad timing is not their fault, anymore

than Dapin was at fault for being 17 in Thatchers

Britain. While this generation can make

and is making sensible postponements and

adjustments to accommodate their situation,

the long-term lag in income generation is

there in the gures. A 2013 report by the Urban

Instituteshows that while average householdincome nearly doubled between 1983 and 2010,

the average for those born after 1970 was 7%

below the 1983 average. Interestingly, this

group was falling behind even before the Great

Recession: They were on the losing side of

stagnant wages and weak job opportunities,

negating the long-observed pattern that, as our

society gets wealthier, each generation gains

relative to the previous one at any given age.

There is a more recent generation term:

Gen C. Thats C for connected; it is not

entirely age-specic, but hovers around the

ages of 18 to 34, the young adults who are

digital natives or who are at ease connecting

with each other and their cultural world

digitally. Gen C is international and they

may have more in common with fellow Gen

Cs across borders, than with their fellow

countrymen across generations. In the world of

unemployment, they have much in common.

Around the world of youthunemployment

Stagnant wages are not exclusive to the US. Inearly 2013, the UK reported the lowest growth

in pay rises since 2001, and the unemployment

rate for 16- to 24-year-olds rose to 21.1%,

nearly one million young people. (General

unemployment rose to 7.9%.) But, as UK

economist Howard Archer pointed out, had

the growth in earnings risen, there may have

been more purchasing power for consumers,

but also higher unemployment gures.

Another factor is ination. A gap between pay

rises and ination will cause a reduction in

consumer spending. The key is overall economic

growth, which is not happening in much of

Europe, and the Guardianreported in April

that the UK was just one quarter of negative

growth away from a triple-dip recession.

In November 2012, the COAG (Council of

Australian Governments) Reform Councilreported that the proportion of Australian 18- to

24-year-olds neither studying nor working had

risen from 23.7% in 2008 to 27.5% in 2011. (This

is dierent from the lower statistical gure of

youth unemployment, which is the percentage

of the total labor force aged 15 to 24 unemployed

during a specied year; in 2012 Australia, this

was 11.6%. The general unemployment rate

in March 2013 was 5.6%.) On that 27.5% gure,

The Ages Lenore Taylor says, Thats 620,000

young Australians doing not very much in those

http://www.urban.org/publications/904574.htmlhttp://www.urban.org/publications/904574.htmlhttp://hereisthecity.com/2013/04/18/uk-unemployment-rise-adds-to-pressure-on-osbornes-austerity-stra/http://hereisthecity.com/2013/04/18/uk-unemployment-rise-adds-to-pressure-on-osbornes-austerity-stra/http://www.indexmundi.com/australia/youth_ages_15-24_unemployment.htmlhttp://www.indexmundi.com/australia/youth_ages_15-24_unemployment.htmlhttp://hereisthecity.com/2013/04/18/uk-unemployment-rise-adds-to-pressure-on-osbornes-austerity-stra/http://hereisthecity.com/2013/04/18/uk-unemployment-rise-adds-to-pressure-on-osbornes-austerity-stra/http://www.urban.org/publications/904574.htmlhttp://www.urban.org/publications/904574.html


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years when they need to be doing a lot to start

a successful working life and achieving the

nancial security and personal stability that goes

with it. The Council was unable to explain the

rogue statistic, but the gure was also backed

by a Foundation for Young Australians report.

The global nancial crisis was mentioned by

the Australian Industry Group as a contributing

factor to that number: Young workers are the

rst to get sacked or to miss out on jobs and

their careers dont catch up in the recovery.

The OECDs term for these young people is

NEETS: not in employment, education or

training. A comprehensive feature, GenerationJobless, in theEconomistcalculates (from ILO,

OECD and World Bank gures) that around the

world there are almost 300m 15- to 24-year-old

NEETs, or almost a quarter of the planets

youth. Some of the points about other parts

of the world made by theEconomistinclude:

Emerging economies have the largest and

fastest-growing youth populations and

also the worst-run labour markets. Almosthalf of the worlds young people live in

South Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and

these regions also have the highest share of

young people out of work or in the informal

sector. The youth population (1524) in

Africa is expected to reach 275m by 2025.

Japans youth unemployment has remained

high even after the early 1990s nancial crisis,

and now a large class ofhikikomori(reclusive

adolescents) live with their parents, rarely go

out and have withdrawn from the workforce.

There is less data from China, but one large

Harvard/Tsinghua University study suggests

any impact of joblessness on young Chinese

earnings disappears after three years.

Indonesias 1997 nancial crisis caused job

losses among young people who may still beout of the workforce or in informal jobs.

In India big factories and rms are

handicapped by having to grapple

with around 200 state and federal

laws governing work and pay.

Spain, France, Italy and Greece have someof the highest rates of youth unemployment

in the rich world. Morocco, Egypt and other

north African and Middle Eastern countries

have among the worst rates in the emerging

world attributed to employments main

curses: low growth, clogged labour markets

and a mismatch between education and work.

It is in that mismatch between education and

work that theEconomistsees some hope for

change if countries would adopt policies and

practices that better align young people with

the jobs that already exist, transforming

unemployment systems from safety nets

to spring boards, providing retraining and

job placement. The Nordic countries, for

example, have introduced youth guarantees,

personalised plans to provide every young

person with training or a job. Germany, too, haslow youth unemployment and a long tradition

of high-quality vocational education and

apprenticeships; while next door in France, few

high school leavers have any real experience of

work. South Korea is even employing a German

word, meister, meaning master craftsman,

in their 2010 initiative setting up vocational

meister schools to reduce the countrys

shortage of machine operators and plumbers.

Technology is a good part of the reason why

so many entry-level jobs have disappeared,

but it can also be a positive in providing

opportunities for low-cost training that can

be undertaken at home or in regional areas.

It can also, as theEconomistsays, provide

young people with a chance to gain virtual

experience at minimum cost. Perhaps we can

nd additional ways of positively exploitingthe digital connectedness of this generation.

http://www.fya.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/FULL_DIGITAL_HYPAF2012.pdfhttp://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21576663-number-young-people-out-work-globally-nearly-big-population-unitedhttp://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21576663-number-young-people-out-work-globally-nearly-big-population-unitedhttp://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21576663-number-young-people-out-work-globally-nearly-big-population-unitedhttp://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21576663-number-young-people-out-work-globally-nearly-big-population-unitedhttp://www.fya.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/FULL_DIGITAL_HYPAF2012.pdf


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The value of paid employment in the

development of people, communities, societies,

nations and the planet is undisputed. There is

also a time in our lives when this opportunity is

most benecial in setting the groundwork for

our futures. Mark Dapin said he almost cried

when he heard Margaret Thatcher had died. For

him, she represented that lost opportunity. To

not have had a proper job between the ages of

17 and 26 is something we would not wish on

our worst enemy, let alone on 300 million of the

generation of people who will soon be in charge.

Author

Sheila Allison is a senior editor with

ACYS Publishing and a former editor

of Youth Studies Australia.


Employment and the Millenials

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