Unemployed Youth and Social Exclusion in Europe

Learning for Inclusion?

Susan Warner Weil, Danny Wildemeersch, Barry Percy-Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351876797
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

This book confronts readers with questions emerging from the 'gap' between EU aspirations to reduce youth unemployment without increasing social exclusion - and what is actually happening in practice. Aimed at a diverse readership, it is based on a three year European Union (EU) project into education, training, guidance and employment (ETG) programmes for young adults across six countries. Insights are grounded in the lives and stories of disadvantaged young adults, and of those who work with them, bringing to life unintended impacts of well intended interventions. The authors consider the influence of shifting political and pedagogical ideologies in the EU on local practices and young peoples' lives and choices. They also consider the impact of policy and performance management discourses 'on the ground'. This work uses rigorous yet innovative narrative forms to invite readers into a 'whole system' inquiry into these complexities. Unemployed Youth and Social Exclusion in Europe will make an important contribution to reflecting critically on current policy and practice, as well as to academic understandings of unemployed youth, and restrictive and reflexive approaches to learning for inclusion across Europe.

PART I
ENCOUNTERS

Chapter 1

Orientations

Increasing Employability and Decreasing Social Exclusion: The Defining Tension

This book considers the situation of young European citizens, aged between 18 and 25, who are unemployed. Many, whose stories we open up here, are currently labeled ‘socially excluded’. This term first came from UNESCO and the EU as an attempt to direct,

attention to the social mechanisms that produce or sustain deprivation. Some of these are new, such as the declining demand for male unskilled or semi-skilled workers. Others derive from the welfare state itself (like poverty traps) or from social engineering that went wrong. The most notable example of these are ‘estates on the edge’ – housing estates built to alleviate poverty, but which have instead become areas of social and economic desolation… Exclusion refers to circumstances that affect more or less the entire life of the individual, not just a few aspects of it (Giddens, 2002, pp. 104-105; see also Power, 1997).

At its core is an exploration of various vocational education, training, guidance and employment schemes across Europe that are meant to ‘activate’ these young adults, through their narratives as well as those of the professionals who are meant to help them. This book opens up insights into their joint and painful entanglement in a difficult – if not impossible – ‘policy-practice dance’. On the one hand, these schemes are meant to ring-fence young adults from official unemployment statistics and to keep them gainfully ‘active’, either in work or some form of preparation for work. Such schemes are also meant to ‘deliver’ on social exclusion objectives and somehow, simultaneously, contribute to the ‘integration’ of these young adults.

A myriad of paradoxes and contradictions inevitably arise for those involved in navigating – much less trying to reconcile – such a difficult cusp. Two different kinds of policy and practice objectives meet in the ‘encounter space’ of ‘activation schemes’. Yet these objectives are inherently in tension, and often in direct conflict.

This book is based on a 3-year, EU-funded research project that involved six countries. At the beginning of our study in 1998, we characterized these economically as follows:

• Denmark (a ‘post-welfare’ state).

• The Netherlands and Flanders, Belgium (where the welfare state is being redefined in the perspective of social processes of individualization).

• Germany (and particularly, the former GDR at the stage of de-industrialization).

• Portugal (at the stage of primary industrialization).

• England, the UK (a post-welfare and post-industrial market oriented society).

We began our work by acknowledging the risks of focusing policy exclusively on the economic objectives that had guided the formation of the EU. Debate has been widening to consider how to maintain economic competitiveness in a globalizing market, without sacrificing social objectives (Ferrera et al., 2000). This is generating fresh thinking across the EU about:

• What policies and strategies can help in reconciling such tensions?

• What kinds of education, training, employment, and guidance interventions could benefit unemployed young people?

• How can young adults not be made casualties in a globalizing world economy?

• What particular kinds of strategies may help reduce inequalities and positively mediate processes of social and economic empowerment?

The European commitment to ‘reconciling’ such objectives – something we applaud – is made central to this book (Ferrera et al., 2000). However, what remains little understood is how these more progressive policy directions are being enacted, experienced, and indeed exacted at local levels, and with what intended and unintended consequences?

This book provides insights into what we learned about these questions. In particular, we focus on paradoxes, tensions, and contradictions that we found to be recurring across Europe at the policy-practice interface. We show how these can be exacerbated by processes of policy funding, implementation, regulation, accountability and performance management practices, and evaluation. We consider how current processes may be impacting directly (and unnecessarily) on the lives of young people and the practitioners who work with them. Further, we will illustrate how pressures at every level of the system for greater effectiveness and efficiency in public and private services are giving rise to levels of manufactured risk that may be unsustainable – either at the level of individual lives, or in the European economy as a whole (Weil, 1998; Brine, 2001).

Rather than being a cross-country ‘comparative’ study, our intention here is to offer ‘systemic’ insights into patterns that we found to be recurring with disturbing regularity across national boundaries. Further, we explore alternatives that may engage diverse practitioners, professionals, policy makers, researchers in different forms of dialogue and systemic inquiry that might better serve ‘learning for inclusion’ at all levels of the system – and involve and empower young adults in non-tokenistic ways.

It is with the voices of these young adults – whom policy and practice related to unemployment and social exclusion is meant to serve – that we now offer some untold tales of social and economic disempowerment and empowerment across Europe.

Young People Surviving and Thriving in Europe: Opening up a Conversation

In order to set the scene initially, we bring in the voices of two very different young adults. Firstly, we hear from Jimmy. Jimmy would be labeled ‘socially excluded’ in current policy discourses and, at the time of our research, was participating in a national scheme for long-term unemployed.

It was their attitude… I mean, I’d just been made homeless and they expected me to continue doing Environmental Task Force. Put me under a lot of stress, nearly had a nervous breakdown… cuz I had to go on this option [to get my money ] rather than sort out my own life… I’ve been through this so many times it does my head in. It’s not easy to live… hard work… worst thing is just waiting for a job. I want to work. But this ETF [Environmental Task Force] – I don’t want to do it. But I’ve no choice. It’s not what I want to do. It’s nothing to do with what I want to do. They say to me, ‘It’ll give you experience and it’ll give you skills’. But it doesn’t matter because that experience ain’t going to be nothing to do with what my life’s about (Jimmy, project participant, New Deal, UK).

The other person’s voice comes from a student-produced newspaper at the University of Leuven. The writer is in his final years at university. We suggest that many concerned with ‘activating young unemployed adults’ would perceive him as having no difficulties with ‘economic and social participation’ – the terms in which the challenge was framed by the EU when we began our research:

Mobility and change, instability and lost roots are striking features of our so-called modern times. Fifty years ago it was pretty self-evident that your grave would not be dug too far away from the place where your cradle stood. It’s different nowadays. You are born one place, where you are also possibly raised, then you run off to university in another city, go abroad for Erasmus, perhaps you return, work a little, and may do a postgraduate degree in yet another place. All this before you take over an assignment with a multi-national enterprise, which basically takes you everywhere. Along with these personal displacements come intervals of cultural innovation, which just get shorter and shorter over time… We all came here with friends and a social life established back home. However, here we discovered how enriching it can be to meet new people, hear new ideas, engage in fruitful exchanges, and establish all these wonderful things in their ‘institutionalized’ form – in the relationship of a friendship (Stefan, university student, Belgium).

Many young people across Europe are struggling to survive – and thrive – in conditions of growing complexity and uncertainty. Jimmy speaks from the ‘margins’ and sees himself positioned thus. Stefan perceives himself to be firmly within ‘the mainstream’. What choices for social and economic participation are open to Jimmy, who lives in England? At the time of this writing, he would be offered the ‘choice’ of New Deal, the government-funded ‘flagship welfare to work’ scheme for unemployed young people (Behrens and Evans, 2002; Percy-Smith and Weil, 2003a, 2003b). Jimmy is faced with ‘choosing’ to be ‘activated’ -a problematic term, to say the least, in the context of his story. And not on his own terms, as he protests, but on terms defined by others who have influence and power in his life.

Activation in New Deal takes the form of advice and guidance through the Gateway – the introductory program to the scheme. This provides Jimmy with four options: full time education or training; participation in a subsidized job; work in the voluntary sector; or Environmental Task Force (ETF) (Behrens and Evans, 2002).

In the excerpt above, Jimmy makes it quite clear that he does not want the ETF option he has been given. This may have been dreamed up as a ‘sexy alternative’ by the policy formulators. But young people participating in this unemployment project have learned that this is the option to which the ‘no hopers’ get sent. Despite Jimmy saying this is not what he wants, he is being coerced to choose it. Given what he knows about who gets placed on ETF, he cannot see how this is going to help him get a job. He does not understand why this pressure is meant to keep him motivated to stay in New Deal.

The use of the word ‘choice’ in the rhetoric of New Deal can be even more confusing to the young adults involved. Jimmy is caught in a cleft stick, and knows it, as illustrated by his words. On the one hand, if Jimmy and his mates choose not to be ‘activated’ on the terms offered by his advisor, they lose access to any form of benefit. On the other hand, if Jimmy decides to follow his personal advisor’s choice, he will receive some income support, and conveniently for others, will not be a statistic on the unemployment register.

Stefan sees the notion of choice quite differently. He is eager to benefit from these changing economic and social circumstances of the 21^st century and feels certain that he and his colleagues will surely do so. For this university student, speaking here as a journalist for the student paper, fragmented life trajectories and globalization promise fulfillment, excitement, challenge, and travel. Jimmy is unlikely to move out of his ‘socially excluded’ position over the next few years, if ever. Stefan, in contrast, sees the world that awaits him as full of choice and opportunity. He is speaking as a privileged university student for whom unemployment does not even loom. Yet what Stefan does not know at this point in his life, as he navigates a cusp that he finds exciting, is that as for Jimmy, there are no guarantees of full employment ahead. Middle class, educated, and skilled people are increasingly required to make many job changes. They are likely to face redundancy at more than one point in their career, given the unpredictability of corporate behavior in the globalizing economy. They can be made unemployed in ways that seemed impossible to contemplate a decade ago (Chomsky, 1996; Sennett, 1998).

Jimmy is probably already familiar with first, second, even third generation unemployment, as a result of experience in his family and that of the community where he lives. Such unsettling yet strongly emergent possibilities do not seem to have impinged on Stefan’s life world as yet.

Jimmy and Stefan are two young adults living in the same Europe. For one, an encounter with the labor market via a scheme for unemployed youth has given rise to a narrative of entrapment; and despair. Although he voices his desire to break out of this situation and make something of his life, he is experiencing no sense of choice. He conveys a keen sense of knowing that this option is not right for him, yet he cannot risk turning down this so-called choice. Jimmy gives us an initial glimpse of how hard it can be to maintain some sense of labor identity or empowerment as he, and others in the same situation, struggles to make his way through changing social and economic circumstances, mediated by such project encounters.

In what follows, the assumptions and impact of projects for others like Jimmy across Europe will be shown to hide a far more complex and worrying picture than is often revealed by statistics and performance indicators (Percy-Smith and Weil, 2003).

Stefan’s story stands in stark contrast. It is one of eager hopefulness. He is keen to exhort his student colleagues to embrace the possibilities offered by the smorgasbord world that awaits them beyond the walls of academe. He uses the first person plural without any self-consciousness. He confidently assumes that equal opportunities await himself and his friends. They believe that they can and will construct their own biographical and social narratives of choice as they leave university and will encounter numerous chances to give these meaning through work.

Stefan’s prospective employers will be pleased. They seek young workers who can flexibly adapt to changing conditions, who will be willing to transfer from one job to another without complaint, who will work long hours and accept non-permanence as a permanent condition.

But if we stand back from these glimpses of two young people embarking on different journeys in the same world, it is possible to consider how their seemingly polarized positions are themselves collapsing under changing conditions of global capitalism. Beck (1992), in his Risk Society, argues that ‘just as modernization dissolved the structure of feudal society, modernization today is dissolving industrial society and another modernity is coming into being’ (p. 7). In such a context, we see the ‘emergence of a new perception of uncertainty on the one hand and, on the other, new means of dealing with risk’ (Nowotny et al., 2001, p. 45). Individuals and institutions are having to become more reflexive (see for example Beck, 1992; Chomsky, 1996; Sennett, 1999; Edwards and Usher, 2000; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001; Nowotny et al., 2001). By this we mean, they are having to invent themselves again and again in order to survive – with no guarantees attached:

who we are becomes something that we experience as a question to be answered rather than the answers resting in a pre-given order of things .. The ‘we’ [too] is problematic if constructed as a universal (Edwards and Usher, 2000, p. 101).

Labor force decisions being made by individuals are becoming ambiguous and insecure. In the context of a rapidly shifting globalizing marketplace that creates recurring experiences of dislocation, people are being compelled to write and re-write themselves into ever changing (auto)biographies – vocationally, individually, socially. Reflexivity – in other words, the capacity to construct and re-construct our identities and new narratives of self in relation to constantly changing notions of the labor market – becomes an essential skill for survival. We might therefore expect support for the development of such capacity to be made integral to notions of ‘activation’.

This ‘Activation’ Trend: What’s it all About?

Over the course of our research project and the writing of this book, we noted with interest significant shifts in social policy discourses. The naming and framing of programs for unemployed young people as ‘activation initiatives’ became more and more apparent. In the not so distant past, the term vocational Education, Training and Guidance (ETG) would have been widely used as relevant terms for projects aimed at unemployed young people. Why is this no longer a ‘taken for granted’ form of discourse? Of course, many initiatives are still referenced thus, but the rhetoric has changed. What is being signified by these shifts and new absences?

We first encountered the term ‘activation’ in the Danish context where there w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1 ENCOUNTERS
• PART 2 Lenses on the Shifting Landscape of ‘Activation’
• PART 3 Paradoxes and Possibilities: Policy, Practice and Research
• Appendix Case Study Projects from the Six European Countries: ‘Pen Portraits’1
• Index