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November 15, 2024 - 7:00am
A few years ago, a viral voiceover appeared on TikTok in which a young woman, asked what her dream job is, replies languidly: “Darling, I do not dream of labour.” It was soon followed by the trend of #quittok, in which workers live-streamed leaving their jobs as part of “The Great Resignation”, and then the cult of “quiet quitting”, in which content creators boasted about doing the bare minimum rather than risk burnout.
As flippant as these online fads may seem, it turns out that young people really are giving up on the capitalist dream. According to the Office for National Statistics, youth worklessness has risen to a 10-year high of 1.2 million, while a record 789,000 people aged 16 to 24 are neither studying full-time, working, nor looking for a job — an increase of 48% in just two years.
How have we ended up in a situation where a country can be desperately short of workers, but also have over a million young people neither in full-time education nor employment?
As ever, the youth mental health crisis seems to be at least partly to blame. According to research from The Prince’s Trust, one in five young people have missed school or work in the past year due to their mental health, while 32% of economically inactive young people said they had been unable to apply for jobs because of it. Britain is also an international outlier when it comes to the number of people on sick leave, up 27% since the Covid-19 pandemic. Interestingly, university students are now one of the biggest contributors: in 2021-22, over 63,000 graduates went straight from studying to long-term sickness, up from around 37,000 in 2019-20.
Why are young people nowadays so defined by anxiety rather than ambition? The answer is inevitably multifaceted: sheltered upbringings, pandemic disruption, inflated expectations from social media, lack of aspiration because all the old rewards of working hard — such as buying a house — seem hopelessly out of reach. Work is often difficult, especially at the beginning: long hours, long commutes, long days writing cover letters and job applications. For far too many, stagnant wages, the cost-of-living crisis, and a record tax burden have made all of this seem even more unappealing, but also downright overwhelming.
How much is the decline in teen employment to blame? The number of teenagers with part-time jobs has halved since their parents’ generation, and so rather than babysitting, or dog-walking, or gardening, or paper rounds, they spend their free time inside, tethered to their phones. The vast majority are therefore missing out on an opportunity to gain financial independence, a work ethic, confidence, social networks, but also, most importantly, a sense of purpose.
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SubscribeThere are basically two possible reasons for a labor shortage. First, there is a failure on the part of the capital class to invest in economically profitable activities. Ultimately, the laws of supply and demand apply to labor as they do anything else. The price is a function of both the supply and the demand. If there is a shortage of labor, it follows that the price being offered is too low. Are young people not working enough or are employers not paying enough. There presumably exists a price point where employers could easily fill the openings they have, which is higher than what is being offered for these unfilled positions. Employers want to pay the lowest price possible, but if they cannot find workers at that price, then, economically speaking, they are out of luck. If the price of labor for a given product or service becomes so high that it becomes impossible to profit from it, then this is not a worthwhile and efficient use of resources, and employers/capital should shift their capital into other economic activities that are either profitable enough to pay the market price for workers or require less labor.
Economics isn’t complicated. The price of a good is whatever you must pay. Labor is no different. The whining that comes from the capital class complaining about lazy/unmotivated workers who won’t work for the wage they want to pay is no different than the whining of the laborer class whining about being overworked/underpaid. They are two sides of the same coin. Both sides are right, and both are wrong. The old standby of lazy unmotivated young people is itself a lazy and one sided view of the problem. Last I checked, the investor class isn’t struggling too badly to stay afloat. Workers, on the other hand.. Make of this what you will, but I’ve little sympathy for the complaints of the already affluent who still want more.
Incidentally, a lot of the immigration is driven by employers. If the supply of labor increases, the price of labor will drop, benefiting employers who now have to pay a lower rate. The demand and desire of the capital class to make ever greater profits and keep more of it for themselves leads them to be willing to import people regardless of other consequences. There is also a social/cultural dimension whereby immigrants from poorer and less industrialized areas often don’t have the same cultural expectations of fairness and class equity. Employers never seem to have any problem exploiting this. The government can either allow immigration to appease the capital class or limit immigration to appease the labor class. A good government must find a balance to preserve social cohesion and avoid class based animosities. Needless to say, governments on both sides of the Atlantic are handling this issue quite badly and class conflicts are a natural result.
The other possibility is that there is a mismatch of skilled laborers to job openings. If the available workers don’t have the right skills, this is a very different problem and harder to address as people lose the ability to add new skills and shift to different careers as they get older, meaning there’s a certain inflexibility to labor. If schools aren’t giving students the skills they need to fill the jobs that are available, that too is a major issue.
It’s the employers job to train people to have the skills their business needs, not societies or the worker.
If we have a “skills shortage” then employers need to put their hand in their pocket and pay to upskill the staff they have or train new employees. I’m sick of business whining that they can’t find skilled staff and then expect the government to open up the immigration floodgates. What they really mean is they can’t find skilled staff for the pittance they want to pay
But you do have to actually apply for a job to be introduced to those skills. They’re learned in the workplace not outside of it. If they’re not working and not in education how can they develop skills?
If work no longer leads to economic advancement long term (owning a house, becoming financially comfortable etc) then why would you bother?
If the government is simply going to keep importing workers rather than let wages rise then the game is clearly rigged against the youngsters, therefore why should they bother playing it?
We have a minimum wage which makes what I was paid to do jobs when younger (literal pennies) seem like some sort of indentured servitude. When you are earning £10 an hour for babysitting – also known as sitting in a house – or dog walking it is a bit rich to be claiming you aren’t fairly compensated. You’re actually being overcompensated.
After the pandemic I had a young chap at work complain to me that one of his colleagues was earning more than him. He came in with his union rep and said he was being discriminated against for age and race, saying he had his mum to look after and we were causing him to go to food banks. It took me and the union a few minutes to realise this chap had never heard of overtime and his colleague was simply doing double the amount of work that he was. When asked if he wanted to earn the same amount (earning more than me as a manager) and we explained he needed to do double the hours he said “Nah, I don’t think so.” You just don’t get that with older British workers or young foreign workers.
This never happened did it?
We’re supposed to believe that the youngster was that close to his coworker that he knew how much he took home each week, whilst simultaneously that distant he was unaware that the other man was working vast amounts of overtime?
Yep. Several weeks of working together. The young guy wasn’t even a new starter.
Sorry it just doesn’t sound feasible. I’ve always been well aware when the lads at work have been putting the hours in, I know almost nothing of how much each of them are paid.
How was this young lad ignorant of his mate working loads of extra hours yet knew personal details such how much he took home each week?
First of all, I am not trying to talk down to you but the taboo of “not talking about what you are paid” is a scam by the rich to keep workers in depressed-wage situations, do you not think rich people discuss money/what they earn all the time with eachother? You should be discussing this stuff with your workmates (management or not). I was brought up like you not to discuss vulgar things like how much you earn. Youtube is good for helping break down this barrier.
Secondly, I don’t know, we didn’t do an investigation into what was said between this guy and his colleague. Just had his head in he clouds like a lot of young people. All of a sudden he gets brought down to earth and his first thought is that management is discriminating against him. He was one of the very few who had gone to uni which definitely doesn’t help.
To be able to not work is surely the most important aspect of this phenomenon. Over 1 million young people. Who exactly are they, what socio-economic group do they come from?
lack of aspiration because all the old rewards of working hard — such as buying a house — seem hopelessly out of reach.
The idea that young people have given up because the old rewards are hopelessly out of reach seems a bit odd. At that age it’s about being alive, independence, friends, new experiences, relationships. That requires only just enough money to take part. For many the future barely exists. It’s all about “now”. This is an age when it’s all new and there’s a lot to learn, a lot of curiosity and potential for unknown things.
There are very few skills present when leaving school. One might have something they were born with that can be developed and gets you a foot in the door, but all the rest is learned on the job. Which means you only have potential to offer, which is not worth much, but you do have an opportunity to learn.
So it’s a mystery to me that there are that many doing nothing. If it’s lack of employment then that explains a lot, but apparently it is not. That does seem to leave only this;
Work is often difficult, especially at the beginning: long hours, long commutes, long days writing cover letters and job applications.
Yes, it’s hard work.
It seems to me the pandemic has accelerated a lot dormant problems. From a mental health crisis to a political culture and economy that no longer make sense. And perhaps all of those things are related.
The lockdowns unveiled an uncomfortable truth about non-essential workers. That in many cases their most important job may as well be to keep consuming. Demand, not supply, seems to be the biggest challenge in advanced economies. At the same time essential workers are chronically underpaid. Perhaps we cling to economic models and a puritan work ethic that simply do not apply anymore. This resonates with the BS job hypothesis from David Graeber. A must-read in my opinion.
During the pandemic we kept the economy afloat using extreme fiscal stimulus. But we have been doing that since 2008 and to some degree since the late 70s. Most of the money and cheap credit flow to assets; to the speculative financial asset economy. That automatically means that the real economy of wages and labor is being ‘devalued’. The effects are most noticeable now for many people in the housing marked: it is impossible to buy a house with a normal job. It also means that if you joined the (housing) ponzi on time, it might be easier to stop working.
But if you still need to get ahead, it is now clear that you need to go where the money is really handed out. Either by becoming a ‘professional’ and joining the managerial bureaucracy as a non-essential worker or by imitating the successful hustler class. That means becoming a scam artist, a rent seeking speculator, influencer, self-help guru, entrepeneur, tech/crypto bro or a combination of these things. The young are being coerced into aiming for this lifestyle on online social media platforms that feed on their attention, consumerism, weak ego and unstable mental health. And if it doesn’t work one can look at a lifetime of uncertainty as a gig economy worker and eternal renter. All part of the same self-devouring system.
Had to happen ; globalisation, infantilisation, coddling liberalism, permanent surveillance, WEF elite domination , bullsh!t multiculturalism equals oppression of agency, post truth relativism. Why the surprise?
We can’t have everyone earning £65k pa “working” for an NGO.
Families of the young people play a big part in enabling them to be supported whilst not contributing. Also so many rules about not working whilst under 18. Finally social media/gaming/internet totally distracting them and removing them from mainstream life.
To be fair to the younger generations we did have jobs as kids: cutting lawns, newspaper delivery, babysitting, caddying, which introduced us to work and receiving money in return, and completing a job to the satisfaction of the person paying you. That was a good experience.