Doc.

Youth unemployment: The angry millions

In Britain we use the term “Neets” to describe the depressingly swelling ranks of our young
who are not in education, employment or training. In Japan they call them freeters, an
amalgamation of "freelance" and the German word for workers arbeiter. But whatever you
call them and wherever you are, the youth unemployment time bomb is ticking and in Britain
there are few signs of things getting better.
Between May to July this year, unemployment among under-24s officially stood at 973,000,
but the growing belief among some economists is that over the past three months the figures
might have risen by as much as 90,000 taking them into seven figures for the first time since
1993. For the pessimists it heralds a return to two decades ago when the young were hit
disproportionately hard and suffered for years afterwards.
The effects of long-term unemployment are often depressingly long lasting. The TUC's own
research has shown that those who were out of work for more than a year during the 1980s
were more likely to struggle during the current economic crisis and overall tended to earn less
than those who got through the decade economically unscathed.
According to the ONS, the proportion of young people out of work is edging ever closer to 20
per cent, prompting headlines this year warning that one in five under -24s are out of work.
But the reality is a little more subtle.
That's partly down to the way the ONS publishes its statistics. The figures they release give
youth unemployment as a percentage of the economically active but excludes the "inactive" –
those in education. If you include those in education, the actual unemployment figure is closer
to one in eight, rather than one in five, a number that is comparable to older age groups.
The young are naturally resilient and have fewer dependents than older generations. So does
temporary high unemployment even matter? Can they bounce back? To a degree, but one
only needs to look south and east of the Mediterranean to see what the end result of endemic
youth unemployment can be.
The revolutions that have swept the region were largely led by shabaab – self-identified youth
movements that were fed up with their lack of prospects and with unemployment which for
their age group rests at 24 per cent, according to the International Labour Organisation. Their
anger, of course, was exacerbated by the corrupt and despotic rule of their leaders. But even in
Spain and Greece, which have some of Europe's highest youth unemployment rates, protests
regularly break out and violence is never far away.
David Cameron has insisted the summer riots had nothing to do with poverty. But numerous
statistical analyses of the rioters have shown deprivation and a lack of hope played a key role.
According to one analysis, 41 per cent of suspects lived in areas in the bottom 10 per cent of
England in terms of deprivation.
Adapted from NPR, October 2011 Independent