1. Underemployment, insecurity and
downward mobility:
the new condition of youth?
Prof. Robert MacDonald
Social Futures Institute
Teesside University, UK
R.MacDonald@tees.ac.uk
@RFMacDonald (twitter)

2. Themes/ questions/ plan
Some context: unemployment in Europe
 How and why the problem is more than
unemployment...
 Underemployment & the ‘excluded many’:



Underemployment & ‘the at risk most’:


labour market churning & the Teesside Studies
graduate underemployment & the myth of the high skills
economy
The new condition of youth? A new generation,
downward mobility & the Precariat...

3. Hard times for European youth!

Youth – in transition to labour market – worst hit by
2008+ global economic crisis

5.7 million young people
unemployed (November 2013): 23.6%
Twice overall rate in EU28 (of
10.9%) (Eurostat 2014)
Youth unemployment costs EU
€150b pa (Reuters, 2013)
Spain 57.7% v. Germany 7.5%
[UK 20.5%, Denmark 12.5%]





5. The return of the ‘lost generation’
UK youth unemployment/ ‘NEET’


Reflecting age-old fears of ‘youth in/ as
trouble’
c. £160k life-time cost to economy for
every person NEET i.e. c. £34 billion for
those people NEET in 2008! (Coles et al,
2010)


Still c. 1 million 16-24s ‘NEET’
‘NEET’ problem = rare example of
‘impact’ of youth research on social/
youth policy (e.g. New Labour’s
Connexions Service)

6. BUT 3 problems with policy focus on youth
unemployment/ NEET...



1. Sees employment/ unemployment
as static categories (ignoring the
increased dynamism, complexity &
insecurity of youth transitions)
2. Presumes ‘including’ young adults
in education, training or
employment, moving from ‘welfare
to work’, ‘solves’ exclusion &
unemployment
3. Ignores problem & extent of
underemployment

7. Underemployment?



Underemployment: various definitions/ meanings
 Over-qualification for job
 Involuntary part-time work
 Insecure/ sporadic employment
When defined as in part-time work but wanting full-time
job = approx 17% in EU (for all age groups), i.e. in addition
to those counted as unemployed
‘Unemployment rate captures only about two-thirds of
the extent of European underemployment’ (Watt, 2013).

8. Youth underemployment in Europe (Gallup, 2013)

9. 




4 long-term studies of youth transitions & social exclusion
(fieldwork 1998-2003 – and then 2008/9): ESRC & JRF
In some of poorest neighbourhoods in England (Teesside)
186 white, working-class ‘hard to reach’ young adults
Qualitative, in-depth, wide-ranging interviews
 education & labour market ‘careers’
 housing & family ‘careers’
 leisure, criminal, drug using ‘careers’
(Quasi)/longitudinal, following (some) same individuals teens
to 30s

10. Underemployment as job insecurity:
the Teesside studies




Unemployment = common & recurrent for all…
…but so was employment
Long-term post-school transitions, into 30s =
insecure & non-progressive
age 16-18: School-youth trainingunemployment-job…/ age 18-26: job
unemployment-FE -unemployment-New
Deal…/ age 26-36: unemployment-jobunemployment-New Deal-unemployment...
Not labour market exclusion (or idle
underclass) - but long-term churning
underemployment & economic marginality

11. Poverty & insecurity: in & out of work


This pattern persisted through 20s
& 30s - not just a youth
phenomenon; captures many older
workers too
Jobs were low-paid/ low or no
skilled/ insecure
factory workers, bar/ fast food staff,
care assistants, security guards,
labourers, shop assistants


Easily hired into, & fired from, the
casualised, ‘poor work’ at the
bottom of the labour market
Getting a job did not stop poverty

12. Underemployment & labour market
churning in UK

Populations in/ out of work & in/ out poverty are not
static (Aldridge et al, 2012: 1)



1 in 6 (in UK) live in poverty at any one time, but around 1
in 3 has had a spell in poverty over a 4 year period
1.6 million currently claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance (main
out of work welfare benefit), but 4.8 million have claimed
JSA at least once in the last two years
42 % of new JSA claims (early 2012) were made within 6
months of a previous claim.

13. An example: Richard, 30

‘I just want something with a bit of job security - where
maybes I can buy me own house in the future rather
than just where you’ve got to be on a wing and a prayer
type thing… just a job that I can call me own, you know
what I mean? Rather than just looking for one all the
time or just jumping from job to job’.
Since age 16:
 15 episodes of unemployment
 5 training schemes
 9 jobs (longest 18 months), now via emp. agencies
 highest pay £7.50 ph, usually £5.50 ph.
 poor & deeply in debt – accrued whilst ‘signed off’ doing
short-term agency jobs (loss of benefits)

14. ‘The dog that didn’t bark’: policy ignorance



Virtually no policy attention to underemployment and
low-pay, no-pay cycle in the UK (or EU)
Instead, the NEET/ youth unemployment problem
preoccupies governments
Government (& academic?) orthodoxy =
 Youth unemployment ← low aspiration & low skill
 ‘NEET’ solved by ‘up-skilling’
 Numbers of low-skilled jobs will decline drastically
 More high skilled workers (graduates) needed for the
current/ coming ‘high-skill, information economy’

15. Some problems with government
orthodoxy
‘NEETs’ = ‘fast-track transitions’ = ‘unsuccessful’
 Rest = ‘slow-track transitions’ = ‘successful’
 BUT Is extended education through FE-HE really the
high road to ‘success’?


16. Non-university post-16 education often =
‘vague’, ‘muddled’, ‘little value’ (Wolf, 2011: 82)

‘Young people.. are being deceived’

‘…The staple offer for between a
quarter and a third of the post-16
cohort is a diet of low-level vocational
qualifications, most of which have
little to no labour market value.
Among 16 to 19 year olds… at least
350,000 get little to no benefit from
the post-16 education system’
(Wolf, 2011: 7)

17. Higher education: success story?

1980s – 2010s: an important difference!
‘In the 1980s there were still very few graduates. Only 8
or 10% went to university…they usually got [ a job] in the
end…now 45% are graduates with high expectations.
This is the first recession in the era of a mass higher
education system. It’s not clear, when the upturn comes,
whether the right jobs will be available. They may well
be the lost generation of this recession’
Nigel Meager (Institute for Employment Studies, The Times, August
13th, 2009)

18. But structural, not just recession problem:
un(der)employment

Have we disguised youth unemployment?



…by pushing it up the age range
(to 18 via ‘warehousing’ in YTS in 1980s
to 21 via ‘warehousing’ in HE in 2000s?)
… in underemployment
(e.g. part-time/ temporary work/
churning/ over qualification for job)
… by qualification inflation &
pretending there are sufficient
‘graduate jobs’…

19. Un(der)employment & the ‘skills economy’
myth




Government said numbers of jobs requiring no/ low
qualifications in 2020 = 600,000
"Of the 3.4 million unskilled jobs today, we will need only
600,000 by 2020" (Gordon Brown, Budget Speech, 2006)
BUT this is
“a fundamental government misunderstanding of
employers' demand for qualifications among young
people” (Mansell, 2010)

20. Un(der)employment & the ‘skills economy’
myth

Leitch Report (2006) says numbers of people in UK with
no/ low qualifications in 2020 = 600,000 BUT…

Numbers of jobs requiring no qualifications will remain
at around 7.4 million in 2020 (IPPR, 2010)

Supply of better skilled workers is set to increase
markedly (with massive expansion of HE)
No equivalent increase in demand from employers for
skilled/ graduate workers


21. The Hour-Glass Economy:
‘lovely jobs’ & ‘lousy jobs’

growth in ‘lovely’ and in ‘lousy
jobs’ - but hollowing out of middle
(Sissons, 2012: 30)
‘..at the low-wage end of the
labour market elementary jobs
have also begun to increase since
the recession for both men and
women. This may be important
because although the economy
has begun creating jobs, a
significant number of these are in
the low-wage occupations’.

22. Un(der)employment & the ‘skills economy’
myth: weak demand
‘Up-skilling’ as the solution to unemployment or lowpaid working ignores...
 ‘the scale and persistence of low-paid employment
within the UK economy’ (Keep and Mayhew, 2010: 569-70)
 Number of jobs requiring little or no qualification
appears to be growing not shrinking
 Employers have ‘little difficulty in filling vacancies’
for low skilled jobs & show ‘little demand for a more
skilled workforce’...
 SO...


23. UK Graduate Underemployment 2013 (ONS, 2013)


47% of ‘recent graduates’ in non-graduate jobs (37% in
2001)
34% of graduates in non-graduate jobs – even 5+ years
after graduating! (29% in 2001)

24. Some UK news headlines (all November 2013)

25. What can we make of all this? The new
condition of youth? Research questions?

26. The global… underemployment as the new
youth condition
‘Underemployment is now a global phenomenon… In
the West it is usually seen as a sign that young people
need to catch up with the demands of the new
knowledge economy. In Eastern Europe it is typically
construed as a sign that the countries’ transitions into
properly functioning market economies are still
incomplete...
Not so: underemployment is the 21st century global
normality for youth in the labour market’
(Ken Roberts, 2009: 4, Youth in Transition: Eastern Europe and the West)

27. A new generation? (cf. K. Roberts, 2011)



...facing a new set of social/ economic
circumstances...
‘Those facing descent outnumber those
facing ascent’
Will not do as well as their parents, the
‘baby boomer generation’ (full employment,
welfare state, economic growth, expansion - rather
than hollowing out - of MC employment)


UK government Child Poverty & Social
Mobility Report (October 2013):
‘Many low and middle-income children
face being "worse off" than their parents
because of falling earnings & rising prices...’

28. The ^ insecure ‘middle-mass’
The social order of post-industrial capitalism (Byrne, 1999)

‘The excluding few’: the affluent, the super-class; owners of
capital & the higher service class; not completely closed, can be
accessed/ bought by very high levels of educational achievement

‘The at risk most’: the insecure middle mass; massively more
insecure than under Fordism.
‘all that is on offer for most children who achieve even at the
level of degree is white collar or semi-professional work which
at best offers something like the remuneration and stability of
skilled manual employment in the Fordist era’ (p142).
Significant movement between this and...

‘The excluded many’: residualised social housing spaces, churning
between welfare & insecure low paid jobs (Teesside Studies)

29. Guy Standing (2011) The Precariat


Neo-liberal, flexible labour
markets give rise to new global
class defined by their insecurity of
work & life conditions
Mass, diverse membership, with
youth at the core of the Precariat
(career-less graduates, migrants,
unemployed, the working poor, &
insecurely employed)

30. The Precariat: ‘old working class’ AND
‘middle mass’ youth

31. What next for the new generation?
Underemployment not shared by
‘the affluent’, the ‘excluding few’
 Tighter class closure?/ ‘The Great
Reversal’ (Ainley and Allen, 2013)
 Worsening conditions?
Adaptation? Growing resistance?
 Standing speculates between rightwing ‘Politics of the Inferno’ or
progressive ‘Politics of Utopia’?
 ‘Golden Dawn’ or ‘Occupy’?


32. ? Conclusion/ Research questions/ Politics



The ‘excluding few’ will still do as they ever do, but…
Current youth generation facing drastically worsened
opportunities (not just recessionary) – and not restricted to
the most disadvantaged, nor working-class
Precarité & underemployment = defining conditions for
youth

33. References









Allen, M. and Ainley, P., (2013) The Great Reversal: Young People, Education and
Employment in a Declining Economy, London: Radicaled.
Aldridge, H., Peter Kenway, P., MacInnes, T., and Parekh, A. (2012). Monitoring Poverty and
Social Exclusion: Findings, York: JRF.
Brown, G. (2006). Budget Speech. Retrieved from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/mar/22/budget2006.budget
Coles, B., et al (2010) Estimating the life-time cost of NEET: 16-18 year olds not in Education,
Employment or Training, http://www.york.ac.uk/spsw/research/neet/
Eurostat (2014) ‘Euro area unemployment rate’,
epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/...08012014.../3-08012014-BP-EN.PDF
Gallup (2013, 5th December) http://www.gallup.com/poll/165935/nearly-half-youngersouthern-europeans-underemployed.aspx
IPPR (2010) New analysis reveals record numbers unable to find full-time work. Press
Release, London: IPPR. Retrieved from http://www.ippr.org/pressreleases/?id=3994
Johnston, L., MacDonald, R., Mason, P., Ridley, L. and Webster, C., (2000). Snakes & Ladders,
York: JRF.
Keep, E., and Mayhew, K. (2010). Moving beyond skills as a social and economic panacea.
Work, Employment and Society, 24, 3: 565-577.

34. References






The Leitch Report (2006). Prosperity for all in the global economy – world class skills,
Norwich: HMSO.
MacDonald, R. (2013) Underemployment and precarité: The new condition of youth?, Lifelong Learning in Europe, Issue 1,
http://www.lline.fi/en/article/research/20132/underemployment-and-precarit-the-newcondition-of-youth
MacDonald, R. and Marsh, J. (2005). Disconnected Youth? Growing up in Britain’s poor
neighbourhoods, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Mansell, W. (2010). A failure to do the maths? In The Guardian, 2 February. Retrieved from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/02/youth-unemployment-governmentstatistics
ONS (2013) Graduates in the UK Labour Market,
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lmac/graduates-in-the-labour-market/2013/sty-graduatesin-the-labour-market.html
Reuters (2013). EU plans "lost generation" fund to fight youth unemployment, 6th February
2013. Retrieved from http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/eu-plans-lost-generation-fund155049076.html

35. References







Roberts, K. (2009). Youth in Transition: Eastern Europe and the West, London: Palgrave.
Roberts, K. (2012). The end of the long baby-boomer generation. In Journal of Youth Studies,
15, 4: 479-498.
Shildrick, T., MacDonald, R., Webster, C., and Garthwaite, K. (2012.) Poverty and Insecurity:
life in low-pay, no-pay Britain, Bristol: Policy Press.
Sissons, P. (2011). The Hourglass and the Escalator: Labour market change and mobility,
London: The Work Foundation.
Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury.
Watt, A. (2013) ‘Europe’s Unemployment Problem – Perhaps Half As Big Again’, in Social
Europe Journal, 25th April 2013 http://www.social-europe.eu/2013/04/europesunemployment-problem-perhaps-half-as-big-again/
Webster, C., Simpson, D., MacDonald, R., Abbas, A., Cieslik, M., Shildrick, T., and Simpson, M.
(2004). Poor Transitions: young adults & social exclusion, Bristol: Policy Press/ JRF.
Wolf, A . (2011) The Wolf Report: Review of Vocational Education,
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-vocational-education-the-wolfreport