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.
For many, earlier exposure to the world of work — and the real world in general, rather than the virtual one — might help to alleviate some of their anxieties. It could also reframe their expectations that have been so warped by the conspicuous consumption flaunted on Instagram. This, as well as a more positive economic outlook for young people — in which you are actually fairly rewarded for working hard — might make a job something worth believing in again.
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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?
When the job advertises for skills you don’t have and makes no mention of training you aren’t going to apply as it would be a waste of everybody’s time to do so
You’re mixing things up. If the ad advertises for skill based staff then it’s not an entry level job and of course there would be no mention of training. If you have the skill already then you apply. Everyone begins with limited skills. Getting your first job is always difficult and it always has been. All you have is character and potential to offer. You’re actually worth very little except for that potential.
So how do people get these skills if the company isn’t willing to pay to train them?
Saying there’s a skills shortage in any job is absolute b***ocks, there’s only ever a shortage of companies willing to train people
You’re not even making sense. Everything you’ve said is based on the idea that companies won’t train new entrants. There are young people all over the country who leave school and get jobs. They have no skills when they’re employed. Once employed they start learning. Are you suggesting that companies only hire older people?
With the proviso that the worker actually wants to train. Training doesn’t just involve the mechanics of the job, it involves learning how to deal with other people, how to be a team player. So the junior often makes the tea and does the fetching and carrying – as well as learning the mechanics of the job.
That’s a fair point. Ultimately the burden of finding a way to make a profit, including getting, training, and retaining good employees falls on the business owners/investors/management. That’s capitalistic competition. As you point out, it’s not the government’s job. I think we’ve all heard enough excuses from millionaires and billionaires.
Does this apply to young people though?
Even if an entry level job is paying a fair wage, it will involve real work, and it won’t support young people as well as their parents will. If you have food and shelter and wifi, access to a car, and spending cash, why work?
So, time to cut the cord.
Rather than forgiving student loans, government help students learn valuable trade skills.
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.
Aye, as I mentioned above, given the lamentable condition of the education establishment and the indoctrination we know very well is occurring in primary and secondary schools, we shouldn’t be too shocked at the level of stupidity or the conclusions drawn. It’s just another symptom of our overall social ills, and there’s plenty of bad behavior on all sides. At the end of the day, the people who must be held responsible for the decline in society are the ones who actually have the power to change it, i.e. the ruling class. Sooner or later, it all comes back to that.
It does seem a bit far-fetched. I can’t say I’ve ever told my wage to anyone in the form of a lump monthly sum or yearly total. Salaried people can do that but not hourly wage workers and most salaried employees don’t get paid overtime, although maybe that’s different in the UK. I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it either. If people want to share, and most don’t, they share their hourly wage.
A more likely version of these events is that this young fellow took a look at his friend’s paycheck, perhaps without said friends knowledge or approval, or he found some other record at his workplace that had the information and looked it up even though it’s none of his business. He probably went straight to the union rep when he saw it and may not have ever discussed it with his friend at any point.
If this more plausible version of the story is actually true, then the guy is guilty of being a creep, a bad friend, possibly a minor criminal, and above all, an idiot for having no understanding of how wages work and how discrepancies in a paycheck may or may not reflect a discrepancy in base wage. He’s just an idiot who saw his friend’s check and thought he was being cheated somehow because he legitimately didn’t know any better.
I can sympathize with Mr. Gibbon’s annoyance, because it was a stupid thing to do on the part of this young worker regardless, but the world never has had any shortage of idiots, and young people are not really taught these things in schools, though they should be. Everyone should have to take a class in basic civics that covers things like how the government works, a person’s rights and responsibilities as a citizen, elementary economics, and other such things. Instead the educational establishment prefers to teach that some men are women and some women are men and how you’re a bigot if you don’t call someone by their ‘proper’ pronouns. Given the state of the educational systems on both sides of the Atlantic and the wildly misplaced priorities of most of the education establishment, we shouldn’t really be surprised by nonsensical situations like this.
Consider the young worker’s point of view. He’s legitimately ignorant of how the pay system works. He’s never been taught anything about it or taught about his specific rights, but he has been indoctrinated by the education establishment, who have filled his head with images of evil colonialists exploiting natives and taught that racism is everywhere and explained how to find it in even the most innocent situations. He is a young person with limited life experience and he sees a friend making more money than he is. His immediate conclusion is to remember what he was taught and conclude that he’s being discriminated against by a racist white person. When schools teach moralistic nonsense instead of actual skills, we get situations like this. I blame the education systems and establishment, the public sector unions that enforce conformity and resist change, and governments that want better economic numbers to report and that open the borders because it’s cheaper and easier in the short term than fixing things.
Either way, Mr. Gibbon is essentially blaming a child for his ignorance and ‘laziness’ rather than questioning how that child got to be in such a sorry state in the first place. The young worker didn’t do anything wrong unless he actually spied on his friend or accessed information he wasn’t supposed to. He drew a conclusion based on his limited experience and politicized education.
But presumably if he had gone to the union rep then it would have been cleared up by the rep pretty sharpish, as he’d have had a much better idea as to who earned what and who was putting in the extra hours. Unions can be crooked at times but they’re not stupid, they wouldn’t have wasted their time challenging management over some young lads confusion
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?
Quite. If the gravy train is stuck in the station why would anybody want to get on!
“Bother”! Why should anyone have a choice not to work? Because……the rest of us don’t own lazy layabouts a living – as every past generation, vastly poorer than many young people today, would have considered. Simply cutting off state support after a year would transform this situation.
Cutting off state support for who, the workers or the companies that rely on a constant stream of cheap imported labour?
We here a lot about how millennials can’t afford to buy a house and how wages aren’t high enough. I started work at 18, 36 years ago on a pittance. If the minimum wage had existed then at a comparative rate with now (e.g. allowing for inflation), they would have had to raise my wage by 1/3 – I saved, I was reasonable and bought a fixer upper terrace house at 26. Flash forward another 4 years and whilst still workjng full time, I studied for a part time degree, tuition fees paid off with my wages and landed a professional job. When I married, it was in a registry office for £200.
Add all this up – no student debt -£50k, no fancy wedding -£25k, renovating my own house -£40k.
That’s £115k, right there towards your unaffordable house.
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?
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.
Still I do think the housing crisis should not be underestimated. Not only can many people not afford to buy, but they also cannot rent. More and more of them are spending their 20s and even their 30s living in their parents’ house even if they do work. There was a time where this was normal but this was also the time where the rules were clear, options limited, and your family/society would practically arrange your nuclear family future. Now young people withdraw in their digital worlds that both feed on and worsen their state.
There are no relationships or friendships or new experiences for a lot of young people. They spend the majority of their lives either at work or at home staring at a screen. You can blame social media or the internet or anything you like, but the fact remains that they do not live the way people their age did twenty or thirty years ago.
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.
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, entrepreneur, 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.
Work like exercise should be seen as a way to alleviate depression. Being work shy was not an option in the past – you worked, starved or were supported by parents. State benefits should come with strings firmly attached.
Being unemployed is very bad for mental health. Of the people I know who suffer from depression being occupied is one of most important things in their life.
It’s possible to be occupied and unemployed at the same time. In fact, most worthwhile endeavour is separate from the concerns of the rational wealth maximisers, most of whose jobs are either pointless, or serve to strengthen this machine we seem to have built around ourselves, and is sucking us dry.
I say get out of employment if you can, and do something useful.
Have you ever been unemployed? As in you cannot get a job.
They won’t hire us. I spent about a year getting rejection after rejection for full time jobs and I just got sick of it. The fault isn’t on the young people, it’s on the managers who refuse to hire them. And when the older generations retire, the people huddled up in their ivory towers can reap what they have sowed.
Do you have a job now?
Do you?
What’s your point?
I wonder how many of these are working in underground “hustle culture” activities like drugs, crypto trading, dropshipping etc.
I think there are many different reasons for this situation. Getting a foot on the jobs ladder is a challenge in itself for many young people. When I was a student, we literally walked in to a shop or pub or restaurant and asked if there was any part time jobs going and if there was, we were asked to come on said day in white blouse and black trousers or skirt and smart/comfortable shoes. Now they have to send off their CV’s and hope to god that they get a reply, which more often than not, they don’t. Then there are those who have just given up altogether. They’re not academic and have been made to feel stupid by the education system that they’re stuck in. Mental health “experts” have convinced them that anxiety is a disorder and not a completely normal experience for anyone doing something new like a job interview. Then they become depressed because they have no self worth.
I’m (probably correctly) assuming mommy and daddy are supporting them. I’m a Boomer, and if I had pulled this stunt with my parents I would have found myself out on the street. Anxiety be damned. Gen Z is doomed., and will be a drain on the economy (and Disability claims).
Why aren’t young people working? Because they can get enough money to live on without working. It’s not rocket science.
As flippant as these online fads may seem, it turns out that young people really are giving up on the capitalist dream
It’s funny that it’s capitalism that allows them to live without working. I’m not sure the author feels the irony of this rejection of capitalism.
People have always worked though, even when there was no social mobility and owning anything much wasn’t going to happen.
The difference is, if they didn’t work they wouldn’t eat and they’d freeze in the winter.
I do agree that missing the window of working, or otherwise contributing in significant ways to the success of the family, has been really negative for teens. Most go through a period around 14 or so that they are desperate to work and contribute and have some autonomy. After that, they seem to become used to existing on the largest of others.
We need to be also asking – why do we have less 60yrs+ working population than we did in the 70s?
The Boomers have stopped working younger than any other generation.
Useful smokescreen to deflect onto the young.
Once again the deflection is purely yours.
The Boomers have benefited from low interest rates and all that lovely mass immigration you’re so fond off but others realised the game was rigged and got out early.
After Covid the younger generations have figured out the same thing and are giving up.
Somewhat contradictory statement there AR.
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Those late Boomers were probably made to feel unwanted, dinosaurs and all that. If voluntary redundancy or early retirement was available, why not take it. The mortgage could be paid off, no more long expensive journeys on ageing overcrowded, trains or stuck in endless traffic jams on potholed roads with nowhere to park at the end of the journey.
The youngsters are in similar predicament but they have low paid service jobs with few benefits and little chance of advancement. They can’t afford to buy a house, or even rent one.
We’ll just keep on with the cycle of importing millions of people to do menial tasks while watching public services buckle under the strain and our infrastructure falls to bits.
The Boomers have benefited from low interest rates
What country and what proof of that?
The UK mainly, by buying up assets, namely housing. With low interest rates wages are kept low, the low paid can make up the shortfall by borrowing more cheaply. Those who were already asset rich could simply acquire more assets cheaply, raising the value of said assets.
There’s no doubt that many Boomers, not all, have matured with assets, as you might expect after a lifetime if solid work. I don’t know how old you are but the Boomers went through a period of very aggressive interest rates, up to 17%, in the late 70s and 80s. It wasn’t always in single figures. You seem to have the idea that Boomers (what numbers?) have bought up assets. Most Boomers I know own one house, the one they lived in and slowly paid off. What probably made a difference for some Boomers was how banks slowly changed their attitudes to lending, which enabled people to buy another property which they rented. No doubt they were fortunate in many ways over their lifetime compared to current younger generations, but give up this idea that Boomers were served by low interest rates which made their life so easy and others harder.
The whole of the progressive left ideology is crumbling and the cognitive dussonance is something to behold.
I think some is crumbling and no bad thing. Some of the looney left stuff was just that.
The Right of course now slightly panicked because in the UK it made a complete horlicks of things and in the US with Trumpster highly likely to do similar. The left behinds and little guy will not benefit from the Billionaires protecting themselves. Observe.
You’re probably right but what exactly were the billionaire funded NGOs doing for the little guy.
why do we have less 60yrs+ working population than we did in the 70s?
Do we? What country and what proof of that? Anyway if boomers are retiring earlier wouldn’t that create more jobs?
IFS report and Govt’s own data. Worth listening to Melinda Mills – Nuffield prof of Demographics at Oxford too. I was surprised by this fact, but anecdotally one can sense it intuitively too as at an age where increasingly folks I know of similar age are already retired, or at least stopped working. Anecdote shouldn’t count for much but when reaffirmed by a population expert different matter.
There is a tendency on the Right to want to blame woke-tard youngsters. My generation, and maybe yours, have loaded the dice in our favour and seize confirmatory bias too easily.
So I think you’re trying to say that people have been able to retire earlier because they don’t need to wait until 66 to get a pension, that they are financially independent.
The reasons may include that.
Asset wealth, and inheritance may be as big a factors and those of us who acquired assets, especially homes before prices rocketed out of reach benefitted. That has nothing to do with ‘just deserts’ and is mere good fortune.
Thus we older folks, as a minimum, should thus be a little more humble about our advantage and a little less critical of the young who are not likely to have the same good fortune. Furthermore when we ponder the proportion of a population we need to be working to help pay for all the things a society needs we should look at those who’ve quit early through good fortune too and ask what are they contributing.
Where I’ve more sympathy is that proportion who have quit because they have to care for older parents. That is clearly going to be an increasing societal challenge.
What I dislike is the finger pointing, the constant blame attributed to the past or some group like baby boomers. No one chooses their circumstances, no one chooses their parents. Not all baby boomers have wealth or investment properties. Not everyone inherited money. There’s no doubt these are tough times for some, but not all of the younger generation are suffering anymore than the boomers have. I don’t believe the boomers have “loaded the dice” in their favour. What has happened was the result of them trying to carve out a space for themselves in what is always a combative world. There is a little bit of the victim mentality going on with younger generations which is not something that can be pinned on the boomers. There have been generations in the past who’ve had it very difficult, more than younger generations have ever experienced.
It occurs to me that the accumulation of assets by the boomers happened sometime ago. I’m not sure that the current housing problem in terms of cost can necessarily be attributed to something in the past. The buying of homes by the boomers stopped some time ago, The selling off of assets is recent. What exactly is the source of inflated housing prices that can it be attributed to the boomers? Is it too many houses being sold or too little?
But did you therefore criticise the premise of the Article and its implied criticism in its title?
Of course these themes have to be based on aggregation and there will be exceptions.
Remember for some to lack wealth some have to have it – basic double sided entry. Thus ask yourself if our young don’t have it and less chance ownership of a home who now has that wealth instead? It’s somewhere
I’m sorry but I can’t follow what you’re getting at in relation to my comment.