WUNRN
YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT IS GLOBAL CRISIS
- YOUNG WOMEN WITHOUT JOBS
FACT SHEET ON YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT
& WOMEN
_________________________________________________________
NEW YORK -
September 27, 2013 - The next global financial crisis has already started, in
the form of nearly 75 million unemployed young people
around the world.......
When a
country suffers economically, younger workers are usually the last in and the first
out, according to the World Economic Forum.......
The decline
of the eurozone, combined with harsh austerity policies in countries where
governments cut social services, made it increasingly difficult for young
people to find jobs.
____________________________________________________________
Updated 10/23/2013
Infographic by
Alissa Scheller for The Huffington Post.
In the
French city of
Pallot
has a diploma from an advanced vocational school, a credential that might have
once inoculated him from this fate. Today that degree merely places him amid
the teeming ranks of a so-called Lost Generation: He is one of millions of
young people worldwide who have emerged from college with diplomas only to fall
into joblessness and its attendant hardships -- financial trouble, despair and
a nebulous sense of having lost their way.
"To
grow as a person, you have to have a job," Pallot tells Le Huffington
Post, speaking as if this were self-evident. "Before, I talked about my
work with the people close to me, and now I have nothing to talk about."
In many
countries, youth employment is understood as a pressing domestic issue. But the
proper lens is global: From Europe to North America to the
The
crisis is altering family dynamics, as parents find themselves caring for grown
children and as unemployed young people defer starting their own families. It
is reinforcing austerity, as governments struggle to finance unemployment
benefits and large numbers of would-be young consumers find themselves
hunkering down in joblessness. Above all, it is assailing the psyches of young
people who have been told that education is the pathway to a more prosperous
life only to find that their degrees are no antidote to a bleak job market.
"Youth
unemployment is dramatic," according to José María Aznar, the former prime
minister of
The
profound shortage of working opportunities for young people around the globe is
largely the result of the synchronized financial crisis that emerged in the
The
Huffington Post has deployed its global resources in an effort to capture the
scope of this crisis and its many permutations, forging a collective report
drawn from newsrooms at international editions in seven countries. This story
is intended as the beginning of a sustained conversation about the consequences
of youth unemployment, examining the pitfalls and also possible ways out.
Future stories will spotlight programs that may yield improvements, as well as
the entrepreneurial spirit that is emerging as young people confront pressure
to make their own opportunities.
This
report focuses on an affected group of particular importance: those who managed
to graduate from college yet still find themselves jobless. The costs of this
disappointment are crushing for the young graduates themselves, particularly
those bearing student loan debt. But it's society that bears the full costs:
From the United States to
In the
"I
don't think the economy is going to be able to continue to function as it has
been, with this becoming the norm," she tells The Huffington Post.
"It used to be that college graduates were the ones who were buying new
cars and new homes, taking out mortgages. Now it's completely reversed itself,
and we can't afford to do those things any more."
Six
years have passed since
"I'm
laughing, but I should be crying," says Luciana Di Virgilio, a 27-year-old
Italian industrial designer. "In our trade journals, it's common to read
the phrase 'young designer.' And then you see they're writing about nearly 50-year-old
men and women. Here you're still considered young at 30, whereas in the rest of
In
"Last
year I would never have imagined that I would still be living at my parents'
place," she tells El Huffington Post. "I thought something would come
my way."
Nearly
27 percent of unemployed Spaniards have college degrees, according to
In
Sub-Saharan Africa and the
In
The
problem has even become a spiritual issue: Pope Francis recently declared that
youth unemployment amounts to "one of the most serious evils that afflicts
the world these days," putting it alongside "the loneliness of the
old."
"The
young need work and hope but have neither one nor the other, and the problem is
they don't even look for them any more," Pope Francis said in an interview
with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. "They
have been crushed by the present. You tell me: Can you live crushed under the
weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to
look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go
on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is
facing."
'HOW AM
I GOING TO GET EXPERIENCE?'
In the
Spanish city of
What
she pointedly does not mention -- not on her résumé, and certainly not in job
interviews -- is her considerable education. She steers around the fact that
she's working on her doctorate and already has a master's degree in addition to
her nursing degree. She knows these details may distinguish her as another
over-educated young Spaniard ill-suited for a bleak job market.
Overall,
some 2.5 million Spanish workers are employed in sectors other than those for
which they studied, according to the General Workers Union. And this dynamic
only appears to reinforce itself: As recent graduates take whatever jobs they
can find, they have no way of amassing experience in their chosen fields.
Alberto
Peza, a 26-year-old resident of Valencia trained in workplace safety, now sells
sporting goods part-time, earning about 350 euros (or $472) a month. He feels
impotent. He feels stuck.
"How
am I going to get experience if no one will give me a chance to show my skills
and pursue my goals?" he asks.
Some
are now creating their own work experience. After five months of searching for
a job on the strength of his art history degree, 24-year-old Antonio Jimenez
opted to open a bar in his neighborhood in
That
decision made him something of a pioneer: Only 4 percent of unemployed young
Spaniards opt to start their own businesses, according to the 2012 Report on
Youth in
Jimenez
didn't have a single euro to invest, so his parents helped him out.
"Getting financing to start a business in
And
what do his parents think of this career trajectory -- their son's art history
degree as a prerequisite for postgraduate studies in serving cocktails?
"That's
life," says his father, Antonio Jiménez Laso. "I would like to see
him work in something more fulfilling, but this is better than being at home,
depressed and bored."
Others
are simply giving up on working in
Large
numbers of youth are now emigrating. Since the crisis began, the number of
young Spaniards venturing abroad has increased 41 percent, according to the
National Institute of Statistics.
Javier
Rincón, 27, has spent the last two years in
"Every
time I go back, I'm more surprised by the sad state of my country," he
says. "I can see a clear decline in culture, politics, economy."
MIND-BOGGLING
DEBT
Brette
Jackson never imagined it this way. Three years out from her college
graduation, she's working part-time at a
Back
when she enrolled at the Art Institute of Seattle five years ago -- which is to
say, back when she and her parents signed off on her $50,000 in loans -- this
was not among the outcomes described by the admissions counselors.
"They
gave out a lot of statistics,"
Since
she got her associate's degree from the for-profit school in the of spring
2010,
The
Great Recession and its far from vigorous recovery have been especially
punishing for young Americans. The unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-old
workers is about 13 percent, nearly double the overall unemployment rate,
according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A
college degree is generally considered the way to avoid joblessness, but the
unemployment rate for college graduates younger than 24 is 8.8 percent, up from
5.7 percent in 2007, according to a recent Economic Policy Institute analysis
of federal census and labor data.
Young
college graduates still fare much better than those with only a high school
diploma, but the EPI analysis found that large numbers of young people with
college degrees are settling for jobs below their skill levels.
Here,
another measure comes in handy -- the so-called underemployment rate, which
adds to the jobless those who have accepted part-time positions for lack of
available full-time work and those who have simply stopped looking. The
underemployment rate for college graduates is now 18.3 percent, up from 9.9
percent in 2007.
"A
large swath of these young, highly educated workers either have a job but
cannot attain the hours they need, or want a job but have given up looking for
work," the EPI report found.
Her
mother, Laura Rupe-Jackson, is a school bus driver and pre-school worker who
carries about $35,000 of the total $50,000 debt burden.
"She
has the grades and the drive to do great things, which is frustrating for
us," Rupe-Jackson says of Julianna. "We are still just in deferment
on the parent loans, and really close to bankruptcy right now. The whole idea,
it just scares me."
The
family has held off on basic house repairs for years, including a roof that
needs replacing. When
If only
she and her family had asked more questions back when her daughter was deciding
to enroll at the art institute. This is the thought that keeps Rupe-Jackson up
at night.
The Art
Institute in
"It
was 'OK, here's the student loan package. We need to hurry up and get you
enrolled,'" Rupe-Jackson says. "For my daughter, it was, 'Oh yay, I
want to go to school, and I can start right away.' But it just didn't seem
right to me when I thought about it afterward."
When
"No
one from the fashion industry showed up to our show," she recalls. "I
didn't hand out any résumés."
Over
the following months, the career services office sent sporadic job listings her
way, but many were for unpaid internships. Others were listings she could have
found by herself online, she says.
Desperate
for income, she worked shifts at Macy's during the 2010 holiday season, but was
laid off after the rush. She applied to other department stores, hoping that
more retail experience would put her on a path for fashion-design gigs.
But
many of those employers sought more retail experience. After being out of work
for almost a year, she landed another temporary retail job at a See's Candies
store in the
When
that job ended, she got in touch with a temp agency that needed seamstresses to
repair and sew labels on lab coats. Hired on, she hoped she was finally on her
way to something stable. But late last year she was laid off again -- after she
trained a new batch of temp workers to do her old job.
By
then, she had moved into her own apartment. "I was frantic to get a new
job," she says. "I had bills to pay."
So she
took whatever she could get. She took the job at the supermarket. She now works
between 20 and 40 hours a week. With food stamps and paychecks, she gets by,
but she can't look ahead.
So many
of her friends face the same predicament, she says. They've all begun to
question the basic premise that a college degree is the gateway to a
middle-class life.
"For
a lot of my peers, it's just become the norm," she says. "You have
this mind-boggling amount of debt, not really knowing how or when you're going
to pay it off. You just anticipate that it's this debt you're going to have for
the rest of your life."
NO LIFE
PLAN
Across
a continent and an ocean, Thomas Pallot sums up his own reality using
strikingly similar words. "I get by," he says. "I have no
choice."
What
once seemed a reasonable aspiration now seems like a moon shot: He wants a job
as a computer technician, one that matches his qualifications and pays perhaps
as much as 1,500 euros after taxes each month.
Back
when he was nearing the end of his studies, "I never imagined it would be
so hard," he says. "But when I saw the economic situation
deteriorate, I immediately understood it was going to be difficult."
To make
ends meet, Pallot takes assignments from temporary employment agencies. One
day, he distributes flyers. The next, he lifts boxes. He does what he can to
cover his bills, working about a third of the time. He lives on 580 euros per
month, 300 of which goes to pay his rent.
As in
much of the developed world, in
But
those figures come as no consolation to those struggling to find work. Despite
his degree, and despite a host of government programs aimed at attacking youth
unemployment -- it was the No. 1 priority of presidential candidate François
Hollande during his successful 2012 campaign -- Pallot remains on the outside.
"I
hear every day about young people, training plans," he says. "But I
don't see anything behind it."
He misses
not only the stability and ease of a regular job, but also the activity and
social interaction. What's hardest is the void that defines his life, he says.
With his friends, he avoids the topic of his job search. So, too, with his
parents.
"They
pressure me -- that's normal," he says. "They made sacrifices so that I
could have everything when I was a child."
He
can't contemplate having his own children. "For the moment it's out of the
question," he says. "I have no plan for the future, no life plan; all
that counts is stabilizing my situation."
Pallot
no longer expects much help from his local unemployment office. "I had
three different counsellors in one year," he says. "How could we be
getting effective support? What's the logic?"
What
training exists is systematically denied to him, he says, because of his age:
At 25, he's near the start of what was supposed to be his working life, yet old
enough to fall to the bottom of the waiting list for government help.
He
hasn’t lost hope, he says, and even finds himself giving advice to those in the
same predicament: Be patient, keep your hopes up, stay active, work your
connections and, above all, "get as much support as you can."
Following
that prescription is harder than dispensing it. Pallot thinks of himself as a
hard worker, capable and pragmatic, but two years of going without work is
undermining his sense of value. "I feel I'm projecting the image of
someone with no willpower, someone who is waiting for something to happen and
doesn't see anything happening," he says.
It's a
state of mind that lends itself to bad habits. Exhaustion and frustration take
over. "There are times you do nothing," he says, "because you're
at the end of your rope."
JUSTIFYING
THE RISK
For
Samantha Ostrov of
Yet in
the three-plus years since she graduated from
"It
makes for an awkward job interview when you have to address the discrepancy
between your degree and the job you are interviewing for," Ostrov tells
HuffPost
Her
parents paid for her first two years of university, and she then relied on
loans to complete her degree. Since graduation, loan payments have become her
most stressful expense. "I've always understood the reality of a loan, but
I never anticipated how the struggle for consistent work would prolong the
repayment process," she says.
Ostrov
is merely one pixel in the picture of youth employment in
More
Canadians are enrolled in post-secondary education today than ever before, yet a
report this summer from CIBC, one of the country's biggest banks, warned
that youth unemployment is worsened by universities that keep churning out
graduates with no job experience.
"While
more education is positive, increasingly, students are completing their
education without any work experience and are more likely to be caught in the
no job–no experience, and no experience–no job cycle," said the study's
author, Benjamin Tal.
Once
they have a job, youth in
After
several periods of unemployment over the past five years -- some stretching as
long as seven months -- Ostrov now works on a casual basis as a ward clerk at a
hospital. But she says she plans to follow many of her friends nearly 5,000
kilometers (3,100 miles) west to
Her
dream is to find a career that matches her skills, and combines her passion for
international politics with written communication. Her parents didn't go to
university, and she hopes to show them that the years she spent in school were
valuable.
"It's
important to me that I apply my degree in the future," she says, noting
that her parents "took a risk with me that they never took for themselves
as young adults."
That
risk adds another layer to her worries and her aspirations. "I want to
prove that it was worth it," she says.
THE
RIGHT PUZZLE PIECE
Damilola
Odelola wants to be a writer, lecturer and educator. She envisions setting up
workshops to talk about feminism, African literature, social justice and
religion. She sees herself writing plays and poems that change people's lives.
But
like hundreds of thousands of young people in
She was
accepted at the prestigious
Instead,
she's trying to increase her profile through writing, blogging and taking on
internships, while looking for a job that can keep her going while still
letting her chase her dream.
"I'm
halfway between applying for anything and being picky," she says. She
fears being stuck in a job she doesn't enjoy out of desperation. But she also
fears being left with no job at all.
In her
borough, Lambeth, the 10 percent unemployment rate is one of the highest in the
capital, and far above the national average of 7.7 percent.
Odelola
searches online for media and education jobs, and she's signed on with a
recruitment agency. She receives a jobseeker's allowance while she looks for
work through her local Job Centre. It can be a grueling task, applying for job
after job with little success, and too often without hearing back. But she
strives to stay positive.
"I've
learned to understand that being rejected doesn't mean I'm a failure, it just
means that I wasn't the right puzzle piece," she says. "I'm a very
hopeful person and I believe that everything happens for a reason, and the
reason may not be clear now, but when it is I'll look back and think, 'Yeah,
that needed to happen.'"
She
tries not to forget the sacrifices her family has made to help her during her
unemployment. Her mother has taken time off from work to take her to seminars
and financially supported her efforts to become a writer.
"We
rely on each other, and I am needed at home," Odelola says. "But she
has made it clear that if I need to go somewhere else in order to see the fruit
of my aspiration, then she'll be happy to send me on my way."
Her
social life has been dented, but Odelola is grateful to have friends who
understand and accommodate her situation. "I don't really get hassled to
come out all the time, unless it's free," she says. "And my really
close friends will come to see me and bring me edible gifts, which is never a
bad thing."
She
rejects the "lazy youth" stereotype that has grown along with the
ranks of
"My
generation is very active," she says. "We enjoy being busy and doing
stuff, we have bred a lot of entrepreneurs and self-starters. Many of us have
begun building our own brands and making a name for ourselves, because nobody
else will."
But she
worries that youth unemployment is now so established that it has insinuated
itself into the basic understanding of British reality.
"You
have to assume that unemployment and youth are not our government's priority
right now," she says. "I do understand that it is also a sign of our
economic times -- we've been in like 22 recessions in the last three years, and
it's getting pretty ridiculous now. Nobody knows anything and we're all just
watching our economy crumble."
Peter
Goodman and Chris Kirkham reported from New York, and Stanislas Kraland from