Young People, Welfare and Crime

Governing Non-Participation

Fergusson, Ross, Ross Fergusson

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781447307013
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447321040
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

?Mass youth unemployment is now endemic and almost ubiquitous in the global north and south alike. This book offers an original and challenging interpretation of the ways in which young people's unemployment and general non-participation is becoming marginalised and criminalised. It re-examines the causes and consequences of non-participation from an unusually wide range of disciplines, using an innovative theorisation of the fast-changing relationships between extended studentship, welfare provision, labour market restructuring and crime. This approach offers an important contribution for understanding what it means for young people to be socially re-positioned and economically excluded in increasingly unequal societies, in and beyond the UK.

Part One
The crisis of non-participation

ONE

Crises of non-participation

Introduction

The effects of the global financial crisis (GFC) on young people in and beyond the world’s richer countries would be a compelling and deserving subject for a comprehensive analytical project in the social sciences. This is especially so for those young people whose prospects for becoming socially and financially independent adults have been severely delayed, significantly impaired or placed beyond reach as a result. An authoritative description of and explanation for mass unemployment, how it has become endemic amongst 16 to 24-year-olds, and why it shows serious signs of becoming a ubiquitous global phenomenon would be equally worthwhile. To differing degrees, these recent developments and the deep underlying concerns to which they give rise are one of the foci of this book. Not only do they set the context for what follows, they also direct the analytical gaze to the origins of the recent crises of young people’s participation and non-participation in education, training and paid work.1

In the UK at least, these crises are not without precedents, recognisable precursors, and familiar responses in policy and in public discourse. What is new is the urgent need to understand how these developments – recurrent, endemic and ubiquitous as they are becoming – should be interpreted and theorised, by connecting the multiple elements of the study of young people across a range of disciplines and fields of study of the social sciences. While it is no longer the case that such studies proceed only or predominantly within the analytical and empirical confines of their own specialisms, attempts at genuinely integrative studies that traverse policy fields and disciplinary foci and methodologies remain a small minority. Even rarer are studies that are explicitly theoretical in origin and orientation. Rarest of all are those that endeavour to understand the plights of the most adversely and severely affected groups of young people in ways that cross policy fields, social science disciplines and theories, and the groupings and paradigms within which they are embedded.

The critical need for such an approach is in one sense simply explained. Although there are specific and powerful examples of the ways in which social science research and analysis has exerted direct, transparent and even tangible effects on policies addressed to some groups of young people that are most negatively affected by major social, political and economic changes, they too are rare. Conversely, little has been achieved by the hundreds of studies, analyses and extended narratives of potential relevance to understanding the conditions, causes and effects of mass non-participation in education, training or work, insofar as can be judged by its endemic nature. To make this claim is not to place undue responsibility at the door of academic research and policy analysis, and the extraordinarily modest resources available to them. However, the underlying consistency of policy responses and of the regular reapplication of variations on their dominant themes and methods, despite limited effectiveness, invokes three equally unpalatable interpretations: that most academic analyses and their putative policy implications are ineffective, mistaken or ignored.

Alternative explanations are that studies, interpretations and analyses have been too narrow in scope and too little aware of contextual complexity to offer convincing readings of persistent mass non-participation and the harms that flow from it; that they have lacked theoretical coherence; or that their theoretical premises and analyses have been too entrenched in particular paradigms or interpretations to have regard to the insights offered by their alternatives.

Section 1: The crisis of non-participation

Evidence of policy failure is now palpable and transnational. Many years after the onset of the GFC, labour market conditions for young people continued to deteriorate throughout the world. The largest increases in youth unemployment occurred in the world’s richest countries. By 2014, the International Labour Organization (ILO) reported that:

unemployment among young people rose [further] to 18.3 per cent of the youth labour force. In total, 74.5 million young people aged 15–24 were unemployed in 2013, an increase of more than 700,000 over the previous year. There were 37.1 million fewer young people in employment in 2013 than in 2007, while the global youth population declined by only 8.1 million over the same period. The global youth labour force participation rate, at 47.4 per cent in 2013, remains more than 2 percentage points below the pre-crisis level, as more young people, frustrated with their employment prospects, continue to drop out of the labour market. (ILO, 2014, pp 21‒2)

The ILO also reported that ‘employment in Greece, Ireland and Portugal as a whole declined by 1.6 million between 2007 and 2012, but 75 per cent of this reduction, i.e. 1.2 million jobs, was concentrated among younger people (aged 15–24 years)’ (ILO, 2014, p 36).

Prior to the GFC, the rate of young people’s participation in the labour market in OECD and EU countries had been in a marked and steady decline for many years (ILO, 2015, Box 2, p 13).One international governmental organisation had already calculated that ‘Youth make up 25 per cent of the global working-age population but account for 43.7 per cent of the unemployed, which means that almost every other jobless person in the world is between the ages of 15 and 24’ (UNDESA, 2007, p 238). Modelled projections of actual rather than declared unemployment massively raise this proportion. For Ireland, for example, it increases from 28% to 47%, and for Spain from 41% to 52%. In 2008, in Moldova, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lithuania and Macedonia, quite remarkably, fewer than one in five 15 to 24-year-olds were employed (ILO, 2010). In addition, the ILO finds that far more young people are in working poverty: ‘overall, two in five (42.6 per cent) economically active youth are still either unemployed or working yet living in poverty… In 2013, more than one-third (37.8 per cent) of employed youth in the developing world were living on less than US$2 per day. Working poverty, therefore, affects as many as 169 million youth in the world. The number increases to 286 million if the near poor are included (living below US$4 per day)’ (ILO, 2015, pp 1-2).

In the UK, according to ILO data, unemployment among young people aged 15 to 24 reached 960,000 in 2011 and 2012, but has fallen back since.2 Almost half of the million who were recorded as not in employment, education or training (NEET) by mid-2014 were registered as unemployed, while the other half million are classified as ‘not working, not seeking work and/or not available to start work’ (that is, economically inactive).3 This implies that up to half a million young people have declared themselves to be living and surviving out of sight of systems which record all recognised forms of economic and educational participation. Analyses that look beyond such records find rates of economic inactivity and underemployment amongst 16 to 24-year-olds totalling over 2 million (Figure 1.1). On this reckoning, the total of un/underemployed young people increased by about three-quarters of a million between 2005 and 2013, most of which occurred following the GFC (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.1: Summary of the total hidden talent of young people (16 to 24-year-olds), England and Wales, Oct 2012–Sept 2013

But even these are not exceptional outcomes that can be attributed to the GFC alone. Clark (2014, pp 58‒9) demonstrates that each recession since the 1970s has had a cumulatively harsher effect on young people in the UK. His data shows that, when young people classified as NEET (or underemployed) are excluded, recorded unemployment among 16 to 24-year-olds significantly exceeded 20% for at least a year either side of the 1980‒81 and 1990‒91 recessions, as well as after the GFC. However, the rate of recovery in youth unemployment during the four years following the GFC-led recessions was negligible by comparison with the very rapid recovery after the 1990‒91 recession, and periods of unemployment of more than two years more than trebled (Gardiner, 2014, Figures 1.1 and 4.2). Gardiner concludes that ‘two in five young people in England and Wales can be considered not employed to their potential’ (p 30).

Figure 1.2: Total hidden talent, young people (16 to 24-year-olds), England and Wales

The impact of the UK’s post-GFC recessions fell especially heavily upon young people who were NEET. As Taylor-Gooby (2013, pp 7‒8) points out, cuts have been targeted away from popular widely-used fields of the welfare state, and towards less popular benefits for lower income people, including the unemployed. The harshest cuts have concentrated on those with low skills, poor work opportunities and no dependent children (p 10), and the net effect is that ‘the full impact is heaviest for poorer people of working age’ (p 11). Consistent with this, the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee (2013, p 167) received evidence that the Work Programme was giving least help to the worst off and largely ignoring the homeless and those with disabilities.4 Similarly, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission (2014, p 113) reported:

The recession hit young adults harder and for longer than others in the labour market and the recovery has benefited them least. … Despite large reductions in unemployment many young people remain out of work … some groups of young people, notably those from non-white backgrounds, are still much worse off than others … young people’s hourly pay … has dropped in real terms to levels last seen 15 years ago.

Gregg and Machin (2012) also show that the depressive effect of unemployment on mean UK pay rates almost doubled after the GFC, while other data shows that the effect on young people has been considerably harsher.5 Surveying conditions across Europe, Ellison (2014) draws attention to disadvantaged young people’s entrapment in insecure work, zero hours contracts, extended periods of unemployment and a deeply discouraging absence of future possibilities. This also raises questions of intergenerational justice that have been widely aired in popular debate.6 Jordan and Drakeford (2012) ask whether the current situation constitutes a relationship of injustice between older generations who enjoyed the heights of state welfare and pensions provision, and those who now struggle to find work, housing and an independent living, as growing proportions of young people prolong dependency on parents into their mid-twenties (see also Dorling, 2013; Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, 2014). Ainley and Allen (2009, p 104) argue that declining employment opportunities, student debt and adverse housing conditions mean that ‘it is possible that many young people may no longer be able to “grow up” at all. They are not just “lost in transition” the notion of “transition” itself may be lost.’7 Certainly, the Intergenerational Fairness Index (Leach and Hanton, 2015) demonstrates a major increase in unfairness between generations over the last 25 years, with a notional 10% decline in fairness in the years since the GFC, taking into account an ever-widening gap between 16 to 24-year-olds and the remainder of the population in employment rates, median annual income and housing affordability in particular. In 2015, the first Conservative Budget for almost two decades intensified intergenerational inequality considerably, with an anticipated allowance set at about half the minimum wage rate for 18 to 21-year-olds, the exclusion of 16 to 24-year-olds from the misleadingly named ‘national living wage’, and the removal of automatic housing benefit entitlement for 18 to 21-year-olds.8

Ellison (2014) also highlights the ill-effects of the GFC on young people’s health, family life and life expectancy. She reports on the trajectory of suicide rates among young men aged 15 to 24 in the UK. Historically, the sharpest and longest sustained period of increase, from 10 to 16 per 100,000 of population during the 1980‒81 recession, peaked around the 1990‒91 recession, when parasuicide rates among young unemployed men were up to 25 times higher than among their employed counterparts (Bartley et al, 2004). The trend rapidly returned to pre-1980s levels between 2000 and 2006, during a period of low youth unemployment.9 Most recently, Office for National Statistics (ONS) data for 2007‒11 shows a 12% rise in suicides coinciding with the rise in unemployment (ONS, 2013),10 while Barr et al (2012) show that this rise is regionally correlated with unemployment rates. One global health report has estimated that every percentage point increase in the general unemployment rate within the European Union is matched by a 0.8% increase in suicide rates (World Health Organization, 2011), and this finding is corroborated by alarming increases among young men without jobs in Greece and Spain (see Stuckler et al (2009); Katikireddi et al (2012); Chang et al (2013), summarised in Ellison (2014)). One extraordinary speech by the one-time Director-General of Schools at the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families during the GFC is said to have included an uncorroborated report that research in the North of England found that 15% of young people died within 10 years of being designated ‘NEET’.11

Behind these disturbing reports sits the frustration of modest youthful ambitions to achieve economic and social independence, and the despair of the poor prospects for doing so. The potential psycho-social effects of ‘never-worked’ extended unemployment and hopeless prospects are amplified by the pressures of responsibilisation, of implied failure to achieve and progress, and by what Lea and Hallsworth (2013, p 22) refer to as ‘“self-warehousing” through encouraging passivity and self-blame’, particularly among young people with criminal records. Others extend this line of analysis from the processes of despair to those of discontent. Jordan and Drakeford (2012, p 149) suggest that if young people’s prospects of attaining economic independence are blocked, they have little to lose from rebellion. Internationally, there is also evidence that higher levels of social inequality are associated with an increased incidence of childhood conflict, particularly in the UK, and that this can also be a strong predictor of adolescent and adult violence.12

A number of these indicators are statistically associated with social unrest among young people. The incidence of mass public protests by young people burgeoned internationally in the wake of the GFC (Somavia/ILO, 2012a). One study has argued that ‘globally, unemployment is the largest and most significant determinant of risk of unrest’ (Institute for International Labour Studies, 2011), and this finding is consistent with long-term historical European trends which show that fiscal retrenchment is correlated with social instability and unrest (Ponticelli and Voth, 2011). Many interpretations and analyses of the August riots of 2011 in England focused on deep discontent among young people in impoverished localities (see for example Berman (2011); Lewis et al (2011); National Centre for Social Research (2011); Briggs (2012); General Synod (2012); Newburn (2012); Nwabuzo (2012)). An ILO (2011) report models indicators of social unrest derived from global survey data that includes respondents’ confidence in their national governments and their perceptions of deteriorating national economies and standards of living. One predictive factor in the model is the proportion of 15 to 24-year-olds registered as unemployed. The report cites previous research which found that c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• List of abbreviations
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: The crisis of non-participation
• Part Two: Work, welfare and crime: research and policy
• Part Three: Theorising non-participation
• Part Four: Criminalising non-participation
• References
• Copyright material