We’re working like it’s 1975, but the jobs boom isn’t all it seems. Here’s why

an article by Larry Elliott published in the Guardian


Harold Wilson with James Callaghan at the Labour party conference in Blackpool in 1975. Photograph: Frank Barratt/Getty Images

Britain’s recent jobs record has been remarkable. The economy is chugging along but the last time the unemployment rate was as low as it is today was in the winter of 1974-75. Harold Wilson was prime minister, Derby County were on course to win the old first division, David Bowie was about to release Young Americans.

Back then things were about to take a turn for the worse. Prices were rising fast, and later in 1975 inflation would hit a postwar peak of more than 25%. Unemployment also rose, leading to the coining of a new term – stagflation. In 1976, there was the mother and father of a sterling crisis that ended with spending cuts being imposed by the International Monetary Fund.

The 1970s are still seen as the fright decade, even though they are as distant in time for today’s young adults as the early 1930s were for those who came of age when Wilson became prime minister for a second time in 1974. A regular barb aimed at Jeremy Corbyn is that he wants to return Britain to the “dark days” of the 1970s.

In some ways, attempts to draw comparisons between now and the 1970s are ridiculous. The lights have not gone out. Industry has not been put on a three-day week. Ministers no longer live in fear of the National Union of Mineworkers. An unemployment rate of 3.9% sits alongside an inflation rate below 2%, not one heading for 20%-plus. Those were the days before mobile phones and social media. Bowie fans didn’t stream Young Americans; they bought it on vinyl.

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We need a better grasp of equality to tackle inequality

an article by Joy Warmington published in New Start (June 2015)

Here’s a quick question for you. For every £100 that a man working in Birmingham earns, how much do you think a woman earns? Ninety five pounds? Ninety pounds? Maybe as low as £85?

I’ll reveal the answer at the end, so while you’re mulling that here’s another one.

The unemployment rate for white people in Birmingham is about 9%. What’s the rate for black people? If you doubled 9%, try again. The answer is actually three times higher – 26%. The unemployment rate for Pakistani and Bangladeshi residents is similarly out of kilter, currently standing at 18%.

But here’s the really interesting thing. Back in 2004 the white unemployment rate was 6% while the black rate was 18% – again three times higher. Over the course of a decade, despite all its strategies and plans, the city was unable to reduce this stark inequality.

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Underemployment and precarité: The new condition of youth?

an article by Robert MacDonald published in LLinE (Lifelong Learning in Europe) issue 1/2013

Introduction: Youth unemployment in Europe

That socio-economic prospects for young people and young adults in Europe are inauspicious is an understatement. The global economic crisis of 2008 heralded challenging conditions for all European economies with unemployment, for instance, being most keenly felt by those seeking to make transitions to, or who are recent entrants to, the labour market. The youth unemployment rate in the European Union (EU) was more than double the overall rate in 2011 (European Commission, 2012). At the third quarter of 2012, 5.8 million young people (under the age of 25) in the EU were unemployed; a rate of 23.7 % and an increase of over 300,000 on the previous year (ibid.)

Of course, there are substantial variations within the EU. Compare the relatively low rates of youth unemployment in Germany (8.1 %) and Austria (9.0 %)  with the astonishingly high levels found in Greece and Spain (57.6 % and 56.5 % respectively) (ibid.) Overall, over one in five young adults in the EU are out of work. At the time of writing, EU leaders announced they were planning a new €5 billion programme of apprenticeships and training to help “the lost generation” of young unemployed (a problem said to cost the EU €150 billion a year) (Reuters, 2013).

It is against this context that this article considers the labour market situation and prospects for young people. It takes the UK as its prime example, with occasional reference to the broader European situation (the UK’s rate of youth unemployment at the end of 2011, 22 %, stood at almost exactly the EU average, 22.1 %).

The paper argues that – whilst attention to the problem of unemployment as a consequence of global economic recession is, of course, understandable and necessary – this can distract attention from a wider and deeper problem of youth underemployment.

Two different examples are given. The first draws on empirical research from Teesside, North East England that demonstrates how some working-class young adults can be caught up in long-term churning between precarious, low quality jobs and unemployment. The second example moves up the social scale to examine evidence about the declining labour market value of university education in the UK (set in a discussion of the “myth of the high skills economy”). Although coming from less and more advantaged backgrounds, what unites these young adults’ work histories is an experience of underemployment.

Underemployment is understood here as a consequence of the lack of lasting, rewarding employment opportunities that meet the aspirations of young workers. Some contemporary theorists take the trends described in the paper as evidence of a profoundly changed set of circumstances for young people in Western industrialised countries, theorising youth as now occupying a new generation prone to downward social mobility or as part of a new global Precariat class. These ideas are discussed briefly in conclusion.

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