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1 Global laborscapes of youth unemployment
Introduction
Tamar Mayer, Sujata Moorti, and Jamie K. McCallum
āYouāre fired!ā During the early 2000s this was an oft-repeated phrase around the world as a long-term economic recession and high unemployment rates began to define the new millennium. It was also the catchphrase from the hit reality television show The Apprentice (on NBC from 2004 to 2015), which crassly used the prevalent fear of downsizing to draw audiences. The weekly ritual of seeing an apprentice being fired in an executive boardroom offered a glamorized image of scenes that everyday workers were encountering in their own lives. The show aired successfully in a number of global markets, and its adaptations were hits in at least 15 countries.1 Its success can be attributed to its ability to capture an emergent structure of feeling, as Raymond Williams (1977) frames it. The Apprentice franchise and other pop-culture products tracked the changes in knowledge, expertise, and values characteristic of 21st-century post-industrial economies.
The Apprentice, as numerous cultural critics have noted, was the crucible that transformed Donald J. Trump from āa disgraced huckster who had trashed Atlantic City; a tabloid pariah to whom no bank would lend,ā into someone electable as president of the United States (Nussbaum 2017). While the show may have offered an image makeover for Trump, it and other reality TV shows of its ilk unmasked the logic of the prevalent vulture capitalism and the attendant anxieties about employment. The showās conceit was that, notwithstanding the persistent patterns of unemployment, meritocracy still defined Wall Street. Trumpās ability to recast himself away from his role in failed business enterprises was a model lesson for how a country and its population could overcome the recession and fears of downsizing. More significantly, the show helped to restage key lessons on gender, race, and employment. Even as it gave voice to the precariousness and contingency of work patterns in neoliberal societies, the series foregrounded a social Darwinism: only the fittest survive. In broad brush strokes the series captured the key features of a risk society that the sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992 has theorized. The experience of unemployment itself is erased and the idea of being fired is presented as a ānaturalā outcome of competition.
The Apprentice tapped into a cultural zeitgeist. During the same period as the seriesā popularity, soaring unemployment rates were a characteristic feature in many parts of the world. Economists, policymakers, and cultural critics concurred that what distinguished the millennial economic crisis was the disproportionate representation of young adults in the category of the unemployed, sometimes by as much as a factor of three.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that over 65 million young people were unemployed in 2018,2 an addition of about one million young people since 2014. Who belonged to this category of unemployed and what unemployment meant, however, varied from region to region and from country to country; as did the understanding of what age group defined the āyouthā category. This definitional variability is one of the ideas foregrounded in The Crisis of Global Youth Unemployment. Together, the chapters chart the dominant and shared features of unemployment experienced around the world. Separately, each one points to particular ways in which individuals and countries have experienced the economic crisis.
The chapters in this anthology do not focus only on the economic dimensions of youth unemployment. Instead, they map out how persistent patterns of joblessness and precarity have reshaped cultures and individual subjectivities, and the ways in which people inhabit space. Policy responses to the economic crisis are also a key aspect of this cartography. As we write this introduction, economies around the world appear to have stabilized, but the number of unemployed remains striking. When we add to official unemployed statistics the numbers to account for young people who are not in school and are not actively in search of work, this figure (for 2017) is a staggering 676.6 million. The chapters collected in The Crisis of Global Youth Unemployment home in on this phenomenon in order to conceptualize its social, cultural, and political consequences. Through giving such simultaneous attention to the global and the local, and to the economic and cultural policies and social formations, The Crisis in Youth Global Unemployment examines the laborscapes of the new millennium.
Global laborscapes
To capture the radically disparate effects of globalization, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996) coined five terms: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes, finanscapes, and technoscapes. Building on this formulation, our use of the term ālaborscapeā captures the variegated effects of youth unemployment, including the new cultural and political formations that have come into being as a result. Intrinsically, laborscape recognizes that youth unemployment is not experienced similarly across the world; nor is the response to it similar. Rather, the term is designed to appreciate the heterogeneity of experiences associated with youth unemployment and the resultant sense of precarity that seems to have become a relentless feature of global society. Although the contributors to this volume do not use the term ālaborscape,ā we understand their contributions provide the contours necessary for theorizing this concept.
For Appadurai, the suffix -scape suggests a vantage point from which to view the world and make connections between what seem like discrete phenomena. In a book like ours, it might be tempting to see so many varied perspectives from across the globe as no more than isolated ātakesā on the problem. But a laborscape of global youth unemployment allows us to account for the disjuncture among the political, economic, geographic, and cultural dimensions of the crisis, forging a coherent theory out of different contexts. The popularity and longevity of The Apprentice is but one dimension of such a laborscape. In what follows we map the contours of this laborscape and how this collection addresses it: who is included and who is not, central categories and definitions, key stakeholders and actors, and the cultural and political ramifications of youth unemployment.
Contours of global unemployment
In Capital, Karl Marx (1976) posits that capitalism demands more youthful workers and fewer adult workers. The contemporary era of neoliberal capitalism seems to belie this assessment. The number of jobs available to young people has shrunk at an alarming rate since 2007. While young people constitute about 17% of the worldās population, they represent 40% of its unemployed, including those who are looking for work, those who are not in school, and those who are not actively in search of work. Reports issued by the United Nations Office of the Secretary-Generalās Envoy on Youth echo these findings that youth unemployment is still at 13.1%, and this rate continued to be three times the adult unemployment rate in 2015.3 The reason for the increase in global unemployment rates varies by place and over time, but the common thread appears to be neoliberal policies, privatization, and shrinking employment opportunities as well as an increase in young populations, especially in the non-Western world. Young people (aged 15ā24) now make up close to one-fifth of the worldās population and are the overwhelming majority (over 90%) in the developing world (Idris 2016: 2). With close to one billion young people expected to enter the labor market in the next decade, around 600 million new jobs will have to be created just āto keep unemployment rates constantā (Idris 2016: 2).
There is great variability within these statistics, however. For example, demographers characterize India as experiencing a youth bulge with nearly two-thirds of its population below the age of 35, but at present the jobless rate for male young people is at 10.3%; while in Greece, Spain, and the Palestinian Territories it is a vertiginously high 42.8%, 44.0%, and 41.7%, respectively.4 In the United States, the unemployment rate among people aged 16ā24 is at 9.5%, which is more than two and a half times the unemployment rate for those of all ages. In the European Union (EU), the youth unemployment rate ranges from 6.4% in Germany to the aforementioned 42.8% in Greece; and the overall rates of unemployment among young people in the EU are more than twice as high as they are among older generations.
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where 60% of the Arab population is under the age of 30, and over one-third of themāmore than 100 millionāare aged 15ā29 (ASDAāA Burson-Marsteller 2017), about one-quarter of the economically active young people are unemployed (25% in the Arab states and 30% in North Africa, in 2015). These rates are projected to increase in all MENA countries in the near future. In Africa as a whole, and particularly in southern parts of the continent, youth unemployment currently stands at above 30%, with South Africa at 57.4%, for example. But these rates do not tell the whole story, since many young people in Africa are underemployed and find their livelihood in the informal economy. Youth unemployment rates in Africa are particularly high in urban areas and affect mostly young people with at least secondary education (Baah-Boateng 2016).
These raw numbers are alarming but are complicated by other factors, among them: educational attainment, gender, race/ethnicity, ability, and religion. For instance, although gender differentials in youth unemployment rates are small at the global level, some regional differences are striking. In the advanced economies and East Asia, unemployment rates are lower for young women than for young men. But in the Middle East, South Asia, North Africa, southern Africa, and to a lesser extent Latin America and the Caribbean, the reverse is true. This is the case for all young women, but, paradoxically, the situation is more severe for young women with higher levels of education. In Turkey, for example, members of this demographic are three times more likely to be unemployed, and eight times more in Saudi Arabia. In South Asia, on the other hand, educated young women tend to be relegated to āvolunteerā work while paid labor is reserved for men (see Chapter 4 in this volume).
Similarly, race and ethnicity play a significant role in youth employment prospects. In the United States, the jobless rate among African American and Hispanic young people is much higher than it is among white members of this age cohort. This is illustrated best by the solidity of the school-to-prison pipeline, which has produced the social landscape that Michelle Alexander (2012) terms the New Jim Crow. In Europe and Africa, discrimination against national minorities and migrants has increased exponentially. These conditions in turn have revitalized nascent nationalism sentiments,5 which have radically destabilized existing global arrangements such as the EU and the African Union. While there are significant variations in how youth unemployment manifests itself across the world, all the resultant laborscapes signal a dramatic shift that needs to be understood and theorized as a coherent problem.
The statistics we have enumerated are worrisome on multiple counts. In almost every instance, the state is retrenching under a regime of economic austerity, and young people are increasingly forced to depend on families or a woefully inadequate patchwork of private charities. Existing patterns of disenfranchisement based on gender, class, and ethnicity are exacerbated in countries experiencing high levels of youth unemployment. Scholars posit provocative links between joblessness and increases in crime, political unrest, mental health problems, violence, and social exclusion. In addition, persistent youth unemployment is a harbinger of new political formations.
High rates of youth unemployment are more than just an economic concern; the ensuing poverty poses major social, political, and economic challenges, particularly to countries whose economies remain relatively weak. The combination of youth bulges and poor economic performance is particularly worrisome in countries where youth unemployment is high or rapidly rising. In such countries, this combination has led to instability, violence, social unrest, and a threat to national security (NordƄs and Davenport 2013; Osakwe 2013). The Arab Spring that began in 2011 in Tunisia and spread to the rest of the Arab world, which resulted in political changes, social unrest, and even civil war, is a case in point.
In other words, high youth unemployment is a matter of national and global concern and requires immediate attention. The magnitude of this problem demands that we answer a critical question: How does the phenomenon of mass global youth unemployment impact the world today? From this general question, many others emerge:The authors of The Crisis of Global Youth Unemployment, writing from global and interdisciplinary perspectives, have made significant contributions to the cartography of this evolving laborscape.
- Are there differences in the experiences of unemployed young people in different countries?
- What are the effects of long-term youth unemployment on national culture, national identity, economic growth, and global labor flows?
- What is the relationship, if any, between educational attainment and youth unemployment?
- In what ways does the challenge of youth unemployment shape the experiences and rhythm of everyday life?
- What are the policy responses that address the concerns of long-term unemployed young people, especially their precarious conditions?
This volume on youth unemployment addresses four central themes in the laborscape: precarity, flexibility, migration, and policy. Each theme provides a window through which to view a different aspect of this crisis. Hardly any chapter, however, is contained neatly within one theme. Rather, the intersecting natures of these contributions mirror the complexity of the problem.
Precarity
Social scientists in the last decade have undertaken a critical study of precarity, yet the quantitative explosion of this research threatens to broaden the concept beyond usefulness. The word itself has become shorthand for what seems increasingly like a terminal state in which social lives are unraveled by a breakdown in the welfare state, restricting access to good jobs and wages together with...
