Youth transitions, precarity and place Robert MacDonald

1. @RFMacDonald r.f.macdonald@icloud.com Youth transitions, precarity and placeRobert MacDonald

2. the economic marginality of disadvantaged, working-class youth: lessons from Teesside... • Reflecting on 25+ years of youth research on Teesside... • We can’t understand young people’s lives outside their social/ economic/political/ historic context; outside of the landscape that frames their lives

3. Teesside: industrial prowess… to ‘worst’, ‘poorest’, ‘bottom’

4. The Teesside Studies of Youth Transitions & Social Exclusion [1991] 1998-now [http://tees.openrepository.com/tees/] • Funded by ESRC & JRF, in some of poorest neighbourhoods in England (Teesside) • 186 white, working-class ‘hard to reach’ young adults • Qualitative, in-depth, broad-ranging interviews • Long-term/longitudinal, following (some) same individuals teens to 30s...

5. School… a depressingly familiar, classed story • Some later re-engagement with education/ training • BUT, what value had their courses?.... • ‘Disappointment’ - disaffection - disengagement • Underachieving pupils in underachieving schools ‘Our school didn’t really do much homework or nothing, I found. I dunno, there was no encouragement there, I didn’t feel there was anyway…Well, I dunno, maybe if, I dunno…I was in lower sets than a lot of people so I’d just, I think maybe under that mark, there didn’t seem there was enough encouragement…’ (Anthony, 23 years)

6. Non-university post-16 routes often = ‘vague’, ‘muddled’, ‘little value’ (Wolf, 2011: 82) • ‘Young people.. are being deceived’ • ‘…The staple offer for between a quarter and a third of the post-16 cohort is a diet of low-level vocational qualifications, most of which have little to no labour market value. Among 16 to 19 year olds… at least 350,000 get little to no benefit from the post-16 education system’ (Wolf, 2011: 7) • 28 applications for every 1 manufacturing apprenticeship in Teesside

7. Underemployment as job insecurity: the Teesside studies • Unemployment = common & recurrent • …but so was employment • Long-term post-school transitions, into 30s = insecure & non-progressive age 16-18: School-youth training-unemployment…/ age 18-26: job unemployment-FE-unemployment-training scheme…/ age 26-36: unemployment-job-unemployment-job-unemployment... • Not labour market exclusion • Nor a welfare dependent underclass • But long-term churning underemployment & economic marginality

8. ...a dynamic view of unemployment:‘the low-pay, no-pay cycle’ • Pattern persisted through 20s & 30s (and for those aged 40+) – not a ‘youth problem’: casualised, low-paid/ low skilled/ insecure jobs: factory workers, bar/ fast food staff, care assistants, security guards, labourers, shop assistants, call centre workers

9. ‘Low-pay, no-pay’ insecurity: Richard (30, currently unemployed)… ‘Just jumping from job to job it’s no way to go. It’s a nightmare! Jack of all trades, master of none (laughs). I just want something with a bit of job security - where maybes I can buy me own house in the future rather than just where you’ve got to be on a wing and a prayer type thing… just a job that I can call me own, you know what I mean? Rather than just looking for one all the time or just jumping from job to job’. Since age 16: • 15 episodes of unemployment • 5 training schemes • 9 jobs (longest 18 months), now via employment agencies • All low paid

10. old, class-based norms & practices about ‘real work’ + massive, locally concentrated de-industrialisation + proliferation of insecure ‘poor work’ + mixed quality post-16 training education & training courses + punitive ‘welfare’ & ‘welfare to work’ system = youth transitions marked by poverty & economic marginality (& intergenerational, downward social mobility) Teesside Studies: summaryThe marginal transitions equation

11. How do we explain all this? A new Precariat class? (Standing, 2011) • Neo-liberal, flexible labour markets give rise to new global class defined by their insecurity of work & life conditions • Mass, diverse, global membership, with “youth at the core of the Precariat”- uniting the economically marginal working-class youth of Teesside & career-less graduates from ‘better off’ backgrounds…

12. How do we explain all this?The government (& academic?) orthodoxy • Low aspiration & low skill → youth unemployment • ‘NEET’ (magically) solved by harsher benefit conditionality & ‘up-skilling’ – by expanded FE/ HE • Numbers of low-skilled jobs will decline drastically • More graduates needed for the current/ coming ‘high-skill, information economy’ • Nonsense! This is voodoo sociology

13. How do we explain all this? the Myth of the High Skills Economy • Supply of better skilled workers has increased markedly (with massive expansion of HE; globally too) • BUT no equivalent increase in demand from UK employers for skilled/ graduate workers • Up-skilling strategy ignores ‘the scale and persistence of low-paid employment within the UK economy … the numbers of jobs requiring little or no qualification appears to be growing rather than shrinking’.(Keep and Mayhew, 2010).

14. How do we explain all this?The Hour-Glass Economy (Sissons 2012) • Growth in ‘lovely’ jobs & ‘lousy jobs’ – hollowing out of middle • Underemployment becomes the most serious issue: involuntary part-time work/ sporadic insecure jobs/ over-qualification... • ‘...significant under-employment of well-qualified people in Tees Valley, with science graduates, for instance, working as school laboratory technicians and in call centres’.(Tees Valley Unlimited, 2014)

15. Conclusions/ summary • Disadvantaged working-class young people (e.g. on Teesside) & ‘better off’ youth (e.g. UK graduates) experience precarity as ‘underemployment’ • Low-pay/ no-pay churning & economic marginality • Over-qualification for available ‘graduate’ jobs • Nothing to do with individual’s aspirations! • Nor with a separate, distinct underclass • We can conjure with the idea of a new ‘Precariat’… • Surely it is about the degradation & impoverishment of opportunity structures since 1970s – through economy & politics - that make some places & populations at high risk of marginalisation and precariatisation?

16. Thank you for listening