Young People and Long-Term Unemployment

Personal, Social, and Political Effects

Marco Giugni, Jasmine Lorenzini, Manlio Cinalli, Christian Lahusen, Simone Baglioni

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000327700
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Economics
• Categoría: Political Economy

Young People and Long-Term Unemployment examines the consequences of long-term unemployment for the personal, social, and political lives of young adults aged 18–34 across four European cities: Cologne (Germany), Geneva (Switzerland), Lyon (France), and Turin (Italy).

Adopting a multidimensional theoretical framework aiming to bring together insights based on the contextual (macro), organizational (meso), and individual (micro) levels, and combining quantitative and qualitative data and analyses, it reaches a number of important conclusions. First, our study shows that the experience of long-term unemployment has a negative impact on different dimensions of young people's lives. When compared to employed youth, unemployed youth are less satisfied with their lives, more isolated, and less independent financially. Second, however, there are important variations across the four cities. This means that, in spite of widespread retrenchments, in some places the welfare state still acts as a buffer against unemployment. Third, although young unemployed people participate in politics equally if not slightly more than employed youth, the young unemployed are often disconnected from politics. This is so even when they have important grievances to express in the face of high youth unemployment, precarious working conditions, and grim future perspectives on the labor market. This book will be useful for scholars interested in unemployment politics and youth politics, researchers and teachers in political science, sociology, and social psychology.

Chapter 1

A multidimensional, multi-level, comparative perspective on youth unemployment

Youth and the labor market

Youth unemployment makes headlines whenever it reaches high levels, as it did during the Great Recession in Europe. In 2017, the International Labour Organization (ILO) published a report highlighting not only a worldwide rise in youth unemployment, but also the risks of poverty associated with paid employment for many young people around the world.¹ The sheer number of young unemployed people in Europe is worrisome: 1.7 million in Eastern Europe and 4.1 million in north, south, and Western Europe in 2017.² This amounts to one in five people aged 15–24 years old facing unemployment in Europe. Furthermore, working conditions are worsening, as attested by the risk of poverty related to paid employment. The ILO warns that the youth are replacing the elderly as the social category most exposed to poverty. In turn, this fuels motivation among young people to emigrate and search for a brighter future in a different country.

In this book, we analyze the consequences of long-term unemployment for the personal, social, and political lives of young adults aged 18–34 across four European cities. These cities are characterized by different youth unemployment rates, differing impacts of the Great Recession, and distinct unemployment regimes. Cologne, a German city, has low and declining youth unemployment, where the consequences of the Recession have been moderate, yet the Hartz IV reforms of the early 2000s drastically reduced the welfare benefits and rights of the unemployed. Geneva, a Swiss city, has a low unemployment rate, experienced a limited impact of the Recession, and has a relatively generous welfare state. Lyon is a French city with a high youth unemployment rate, and it experienced a worsening of its employment situation during the Recession but has a generous welfare state. Finally, Turin in Italy has a high youth unemployment rate, experienced a strong impact from the Recession, and has a less supportive welfare state.

Employment is a major issue and policy field in the modern world. Contemporary societies rest to a large extent upon remunerated work, which is a fundamental social value as well as a source of money, social recognition, and dignity. Such an important role is often constitutionally anchored, as epitomized, for example, in the first article of the Italian Constitution: “Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labor.” The importance of paid employment also appears in the class cleavage, the main dividing line structuring politics and society since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Much of this division revolves around issues pertaining to the labor market, work, and employment.

As a result, unless it is a free and deliberate choice – a luxury few can afford – being excluded from the labor market entails negative consequences at various levels: psychological, social, as well as political. People without a paid job are often the object of stigmatization, especially so when that lack of work is long-lasting. This is all the more true today, in a period characterized by views and policies that place individual responsibility center stage (Rose 1996), hence putting even more pressure on those without a job. The unemployed are expected to invest in their employability by ensuring their skills and personal fulfillment are aligned with the needs of the labor market, the economy, and an underlying logic of profit. In this context, the consequences of long-term unemployment for young people’s personal, social, and political lives are important. Therefore, this book addresses the following questions: What are the consequences of being excluded from the labor market on a person’s well-being, social inclusion, and political inclusion? Which factors might prevent, or at least reduce, the negative impact of unemployment in these three spheres of everyday life? How do the young unemployed experience their long-lasting exclusion from the labor market? Answering these, as well as related, questions, we hope, will also yield important insights into the broader meaning of paid employment today, especially in a context of precarious employment and flexible labor market relations, characterized by drastic changes in individual professional careers.

This general aim should be qualified or specified in two important ways. First, we are interested in particular in long-term unemployment, which we define as not having had a paid job for at least one year. While any specified time period will always be arbitrary to some extent, we adopt this definition since it reflects standard practice in official statistics – as well as institutional practice. Most importantly, it is a long enough period of time to exclude people who are only temporarily without a job and bear out the effects on those hit by joblessness as well as on their lives. Our focus lies on the condition of being excluded in some more structural fashion. This is crucial, since long-term unemployment is one cause of persistent poverty (Gallie et al. 2003; Saunders 2002). Most importantly for our present purpose, long-term unemployment – as opposed to the short-term privation of a job – has deeper consequences on the lives of those who experience it.

Second, we deal with a specific age cohort rather than examining the general population as a whole. Our study concentrates on young people. Defining who belongs to this category is perhaps even trickier than defining long-term unemployment. “Youth” is commonly understood as being related to age and comprises the period between childhood and adult age (Grasso 2014; van de Velde 2008). However, youth not only is a biological concept alone but also has sociological and psychological meanings beyond age (Settersten and Mayer 1997). In particular, youth is a socially constructed category (Bourdieu 1978). Official statistics on youth unemployment – for example, those produced by the central governments of our countries, as well as Eurostat and the ILO – refer specifically to the cohort of young people aged less than 25, sometimes including young people up to 29 years. In our study, we extend this age range to also include people up to 34 years. We have decided to be more inclusive in terms of age to account for the fact that, today, the time span that individuals have to wait for before entering a full adult life has substantially augmented (Billari 2004). This decision also follows from the fact that our study includes countries where this lengthening of youth is remarkable due to the changes in family situation, living conditions, health, and education (Eurostat 2009).

This book is, therefore, about the impact of prolonged exclusion from the labor market on the personal, social, and political lives of young adults. As we explain in more detail below, we consider this impact to be constrained by three sets of factors: the individual resources and characteristics of those hit by long-term unemployment, the networks and activities of civil society organizations (CSOs) intervening in the field of unemployment and precarity, and the institutional context within which the young unemployed are located.

Concerning the institutional context, as we also describe below, we compare the conditions in four Western European countries that offer variation in how youth unemployment – and unemployment more generally, for that matter – is dealt with, while also sharing some common traits in this respect. We further focus on the local level, insofar as our empirical investigation is conducted in four cities, one in each country, that we deem “representative” of the wider national situation in that country. However, we believe that the lessons we draw from our analysis stretch beyond the specific local contexts of the study, so suggest a number of patterns and trends that hold for Europe more generally.

The main contribution of the present volume, we believe, lies in its multidimensional and comparative approach. The analyses presented in this book rest on a threefold added value: they cover various dimensions of the experience of the young unemployed, particularly in relation to their subjective well-being as well as their social and political lives; they adopt a multilayered approach to youth unemployment covering macro, meso, and micro aspects and factors; and they follow a cross-national comparative perspective. We address these aspects in more detail next, also in relation to existing works in the field, by discussing our comprehensive view of unemployed young people’s experience and outlining the multilevel and comparative framework that informs our study.

The multidimensionality of youth unemployment: subjective well-being, social inclusion, and political inclusion

Given the central role of paid employment in contemporary society, the experience of unemployment, especially as a durable condition, can be quite traumatic. As such, it is likely to have important (negative) consequences on various spheres of the lives of those who find themselves without a paid job for a prolonged period of time. Such people may suffer psychologically, experience lower levels of trust and confidence, reduced self-esteem, pessimism and a lack of future perspectives, and so forth. It can also produce health problems (Hammer 1993; Herman 2007; Winefield 1997), further contributing to reducing the well-being of those already affected by joblessness. Additionally, long-term unemployment has profound consequences not only on the personal lives of young adults but also on their social lives, leading to social isolation and exclusion (Hammer 2003a; Paugam 2006; Schnapper 1981). Further, although less often investigated in the literature, being excluded from the labor market might also affect the political life of young people, pushing them to either withdraw from politics or, on the contrary, to become even more engaged in protest-like activities, whenever the conditions are favorable. These three spheres of the lives of the young unemployed, furthermore, may also impinge upon each other in numerous ways. Previous research has most often focused on one of these three aspects of the impact of unemployment on young people’s lives, or at best on two of them. A major contribution of the present volume, we believe, lies in taking into account all three dimensions as well as how they relate to each other.

The impact of unemployment on well-being represents a long-standing research avenue, particularly in psychology – including clinical psychology – social psychology, and sociology. Perhaps the first and most well-known piece of research that shows the negative impact of joblessness not only on the subjective well-being of individuals – but also on their social relations – was conducted by Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel in Marienthal in the 1930s (Jahoda et al. 1971). This seminal study of an unemployed community in an Austrian village argues that prolonged unemployment leads to apathy and, ultimately, a breakdown in the personality structure of a group. Since then, an array of studies have pointed to the negative effects of long-term unemployment on the subjective well-being of people who remain excluded from the labor market for a long time, including young people. Thus, for example, unemployment may be associated with anxiety, lack of self-confidence, and depression (Brand 2015). More generally, it leads to a de-structuration of everyday life (Jahoda et al. 1971; Wanberg et al. 1997). People hit by durable unemployment may begin to feel useless, overly dependent upon others, and undergo a loss of job-related identifications and personal identities (Joelson and Wahlquist 1987; Winkelmann 2009). A person’s well-being in the widest sense can be affected by not having a job.

These negative consequences of joblessness on well-being hold as well for young people (Hammer 2003a; Kieselbach et al. 2001). In fact, the youth – especially the youngest among them – might even be affected more deeply since joblessness and social exclusion strikes this group in a crucial and sensitive period of their lives, at a stage when they are not yet fully integrated into social life as independent citizens and autonomous individuals (Lahusen and Giugni 2016). Unemployment might, therefore, interact with processes of socialization and individuation, hence producing a negative and path-dependent spiral, making it more difficult to get out of the condition of being unemployed. In this regard, research has pointed for example to so-called “scarring effects,” that is, long-term consequences of unemployment on the future life course of the young unemployed (Clark et al. 2001; Cockx and Picchio 2012; Goldman-Mellor et al. 2016; Gregg 2001). Discouragement, pessimism, and more generally a low level of life satisfaction may then take over, sometimes even increasing the risks of being exposed to mental health problems (Hammer 2000; Strandh et al. 2014). In brief, long-term unemployment might lead the young unemployed to experience marginalization, stigmatization, and discrimination, which in turn is likely to generate feelings of dissatisfaction, boredom, uselessness, shame, resignation, and distress, with detrimental effects on a person’s self-conception and identity (Lahusen and Giugni 2016), unless one has a strong capacity of resilience and disposes of human capital as well as social support that tries to help people to better cope with being unemployed.

The negative repercussions of a prolonged condition of unemployment on the subjective well-being of young people are indeed linked to a number of further effects on their social life and relations. Long-term unemployment affects the degree of social inclusion of young adults. Unemployment then often leads to social exclusion, marginalization, and isolation. Jobless people are often excluded from various spheres of wider social life and have weakened social bonds (Castel 1995; Hammer 2003a; Paugam 2009). Again, this also applies to young people, in fact perhaps even more so than to other cohorts (Kieselbach et al. 2001; Hammer 2003a). The risk is that, being excluded from the labor market, the youth might enter a process which Paugam (2009) calls “social disqualification,” meaning they have progressively become socially excluded and isolated, with important repercussions on their identities and how they refer to and understand themselves. Younger people start to retreat from various spheres of social life, such as reducing social activities with their peers due to among other things the worry of being judged for their situation and considered responsible for having lost their job or not finding one, and due to the stigma associated with joblessness that makes it difficult for them to socialize with people not exposed to a similar fate (Joelson and Wahlquist 1987; Winkelmann 2009). This is all the more true in a discursive context that values paid work and has made “employability” a master word when it comes to both diagnosing and prognosing unemployment or under-employment, and this plays a crucial role in informing labor market policies (McQuaid and Lindsay 2005).

The impact of long-term unemployment on the social inclusion of young people also relates to the literature on social capital. This can be subject to two different kinds of reading. The wide and nowadays well-established literature on social capital has repeatedly shown the important role played by various forms of sociability, associational life, and so on, as well as the trust and norms of reciprocity attached to them (Coleman 1988, 1990; Putnam 1993, 2000; Stolle 2007). Thus, on the one hand, being durably excluded from the labor market might not only lead to social exclusion but also, in turn, erode the social capital of unemployed young people. On the other hand, however, those youth who are endowed with a higher level of social capital have better chances to survive a prolonged period of unemployment. Additionally, the very same web of social relations that might generate social capital can also offer resources and opportunities that the young unemployed may use while being excluded from the labor market. The role of social support is shown to be crucial in this regard (Broman et al. 2001; Gore 1978; Huffman et al. 2015; Kieselbach 2003; Lorenzini and Giugni 2011; Thoits 1995), as it is not only a potential source of social capital, but can also provide the emotional, financial, and material resources needed to cope with and possibly overcome long-lasting ...