Young people pay the price of Britain’s jobs crisis

Prime minister Keir Starmer and DWP secretary Pat McFadden meet apprentices at South Bank Technical College (Photo: Flickr/ by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street)

After attacking children, pensioners and disabled people, Keir Starmer’s government is preparing for a new attack in its assault on the welfare state.

The number of young people not in education, employment or ­training (Neets) is expected to jump to 1.25 million in the next five years.

Big business claims the increase in the national minimum wage for younger workers is to blame. And the right wing media is lining up to claim that young people have only got themselves to blame for being out of work.

That’s despite a new report last week that slams youth unemployment as “a catastrophic ­systems failure”. Even its author Alan Milburn—a former Blairite minister in the 2000s—says the minimum wage isn’t to blame.

The report says the reason for youth unemployment is that “the engine of job creation in Britain is not running efficiently enough for this age group”.

Idman is one of over a million 16-24 year olds in Britain currently not in employment, education or training.

She told Socialist Worker, “Right now we’re faced with something no other generation has dealt with.”

She says that it feels “impossible” for young people to plan their lives.

Many people are trapped in a cycle of constantly applying for jobs and getting rejected or not getting any response at all.

“I think people fail to understand the big psychological effect of the constant rejection,” Idman said.

“The government and bosses want to undermine young people as a group. They say we just don’t want to try hard. But a lot of this generation are incredibly hard working.

“All we want is a chance,” she said.

“We just want somewhere we can see some career progression or something stable. I think we deserve stability.”

Since 2020, there had been a steady increase in job creation, but this has stalled to pre-pandemic levels.

The job market for young people has essentially collapsed. In 2022, the number of vacancies peaked at nearly 1.3 million.

By April of this year there were only about 705,000.

Retail and hospitality—among the key sectors of work for young people—have dramatically changed in recent years.

There are 8,000 fewer shops on high streets than in 2019—that’s hundreds of thousands of jobs lost. Jobs in the hospitality sector have fallen by half since 2022.

And many young workers are doing the same jobs as older workers for less, simply because of their age.

Bosses use different wage rates based on age to drive down everyone’s wages and increase their profits.

Labour promised to get rid of these discriminatory age bands in its 2024 manifesto, but it has betrayed this promise.

Now Labour’s answer to youth unemployment seems to be a recycled version of Margaret Thatcher’s Youth Training Schemes (YTSs) from the 1980s.

With four million ­unemployed at the time, YTSs forced school leavers into work schemes on the premise of ­getting them off the dole.

In reality, it provided bosses with cheap labour—and allowed them to undercut other workers.

The Department for Work and Pensions has pledged to create tens of thousands of work experience positions for young people.

Some 300,000 places will be part of this scheme and will last six weeks, with the promise of a job interview.

But using young workers as ­short-term labour at Gatwick Airport or on construction sites is not an opportunity for them to develop their skills. It’s a sentence for a life of hard, underpaid work. And it may well not result in a job at the end of the period.

We can’t rely on Labour to deliver real change for young workers.

A fight over the cost of living crisis and the rise in youth unemployment is urgent—and the trade unions should be leading it.

The money is there. The number of billionaires worldwide has risen above 3,000 for the first time. This immense wealth should be used for public services, education and young workers’ wages.