Britain’s economy has delivered a bumpy ride for young people in recent decades but it has still managed to suck more of them in. The proportion of 18 to 24 year olds who are on the sidelines of the labour market — neither working nor studying — has declined since the 1990s. That is no mean feat given the shocks delivered by the financial crisis and the pandemic. Yet the trend is a good example of why it’s important to dig under the surface of statistics. What looks like one story is actually two: one largely positive; the other distinctly worrying.
The biggest driver of the decline in youth worklessness in recent decades is the collapse in the number of stay-at-home young mothers. The number of young women who are “economically inactive” because they are caring for family dropped 78 per cent between 2006 and 2021, according to(opens a new window) an analysis by the Resolution Foundation. The trope of the teenage mum living off benefits is badly out of date.
There are two things going on. Fewer young women are having babies, and those who do become young mothers are now more likely to work. Lower birth rates among young women are a broader societal trend common to many countries, though UK policymakers did apply an extra push with the introduction of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in 1999. Given that teenage mothers are less likely to finish education and more likely to end up in poverty, this trend is worth celebrating.
Higher employment rates for young mothers, meanwhile, are probably the result of various factors, including somewhat better childcare provision. Benefits were also made more conditional after 2008 to encourage more lone parents into work, which will apply to some (but not all) of this group. Evaluations of that policy change point to mixed results. Lone parents did become more likely to work, but many ended up in low-paid, part-time jobs. One government survey(opens a new window) found that a third of the respondents who had entered work said they earned less than £6 an hour, though the minimum wage was £6.08 when the survey was done. Finances did improve in households where lone parents found work, but the survey found that two in five were still in “material deprivation”.
The other story hidden in the youth worklessness data is more troubling. The proportion of young men who are inactive (neither working nor looking for work) has climbed steadily from 5 per cent in 2000 to 9 per cent last year. The UK isn’t the only country to see men drop out of the labour market: in the US, economists have mooted a number of explanations including the allure of video games(opens a new window). But Louise Murphy of the Resolution Foundation says the UK data suggests a major reason for rising inactivity among young men is ill health, particularly mental health. The same trend is evident for young women too, though not as strongly.
Is mental health really worsening among the young, or is there a greater awareness now of mental health problems that people struggled with for decades but weren’t willing to talk about? Tony Wilson of the Institute for Employment Studies says the consensus is that “it’s a bit of both, but it does appear young people’s mental health is getting worse”.
Helping these young people to recover will require mental health support and treatment to be more widely available. Local authorities and charities might need more resources to find and support them. They might also need more specialised help to find their way into the labour market. But many of these young people are not “in the system” because they are not claiming benefits: only 44 per cent of workless young women and 32 per cent of workless young men were on income-related benefits in 2019. While that saves the taxpayer money in the short term, it also means they are harder to reach.
In Britain, you get career advice at school (though many young people complain about its quality) and job-hunting support if you are on benefits. Outside that, there is little help available from the state. Most other European countries, Wilson says, have public employment services that extend job hunting and career support for people who aren’t on benefits.
There is a case for the UK to follow suit with a modern public employment service open to all. Young people wouldn’t be the only ones to benefit, since the pandemic has triggered a swathe of older people to drop out of the labour market too. But for the young, a bad start is particularly hard to recover from.
Britain can’t afford to let anyone slip through the cracks; its young people least of all.
I need to know if they are white before I dispense my amount of care. Xox
Another garbage article blaming young men being out of work on women in the workplace and women not having kids
Shock!
What do these people want exactly? A return to the fucking 50’s?
So to summarise: job amount is the same, less stay at home mums, jobs divided fairly so less men are working?
I don’t really see a solution here outside of ‘create more jobs’ or ‘let women be able to afford to stay at home again’.
Edit: to the boomers reading and have their heads in the sand
A large number of young men are out of school , men are quitting college and are large number are staying at home with parents this coupled with other issues destroys their social life ( which women is gonna go back to a 23yr olds moms basement )
This makes it harder for their social life causing them to seek friendships online and elsewhere where the stigma wouldn’t hurt as bad or exist , they meet Nazi or incel groups violent crime/gangs , religious terrorism that tell them it’s ok and their problem is caused by such and such ,
months years of that propaganda can culminate into timmy feeling that society is moving on without him and has left him behind in a dead end job with no prospects and living at home with his mom that coupled with the mockery (dead end job living in moms basement ) and stigma he faces can cause hateful thoughts to emerge
He then decides to hit back at those he feels “robbed him” of his life and mock him for his fate ,
We as a nation can solve this but our leaders have us fighting culture wars over immigrants , we are facing a growing epidemic of millions of young men going down this incel/violent crime/gangs , religious terrorism /Nazi pipeline and we need to solve this asap
The mental health explanation doesn’t hold water with me. This has a structural component. Some college-required jobs (such as teaching and nursing) were gendered for much of the 20th century in order to keep pay low. However, traditionally male employment has decreased along with’masculine’ jobs (like manufacturing). This combined with acculturation (men do not teach or care for people) produces the desired outcome.
I struggled with both being NEET and mental health issues from 2006 – 2008. It was a dreadful time all around really.
I think the mental health issues were mostly anxiety related. I hadn’t done great at school, not because I was stupid mind you, I squandered much of my youth playing video games. I got bullied quite badly for about a year when I went up in to a different school, and that really changed my outlook on school from something I enjoyed to something that had to be endured until I come leave.
Anyway, upon reflection, I feel as if my education was somewhat neglected by both my parents and my teachers. I didn’t know my alphabet until the age of 7 when my elder half-sister basically found out I didn’t know it and sat me down and taught me it. This education neglected, mixed with a love of video games was absolutely corrosive to education.
This all culminated when I left school at 16. My grades weren’t great (but not terrible either), but my parents refused to allow me to go to sixth form. Made it clear in no uncertain terms they wouldn’t support me while I studied. I think leaving school with no plan, no (decent) education, no prospect, and very unsupportive parents really affected my mental health. I developed an anxiety disorder. This practically just compounded the issues I was already dealing with and made matters worse.
Anyway, I ended up basically losing two years to bouncing from meaningless job to being NEET to another meaningless job while trying to deal with anxiety issues, and unsupportive, and quite frankly cunty parents.
Eventually, I got the anxiety order under control and I finally got to go to culinary college, but only after my half sister and sister basically argued with my parents for a good while that simply leaving me no real education or training was a fucking dreadful idea, and boy did my parents push back on that.
That whole experience basically cost me two years of essentially doing nothing, and had lasting effects on my self-confidence, self-worth, etc that still affect me today. I still hold a bit of a grudge against my parents for it. My mother has tacitly admitted fault, but neither have apologised. I can’t help but feel those years were a major turning point in my life, and not in s good way.
(tl;dr: I suffered from mental health issues and unemployment between 2006 – 2008, and it’s had a lasting negative affect on my life.)
Must be a war coming.
Quietly? Young people have been struggling in the UK for years, it’s only been quietly if you’ve been ignoring it.
Completely unrelated:
But when I say “Author: Sarah O’Conner.” I thought.
“I wonder if she is being hunted by the Term O’Nator.”
Honestly the amount of job in UK is inormus in my 14 years here i observe that young lads are just lazy spoiled kids and social media just made the tings worst.i came from not rich EU country and in my teens i was working in food factory that pay 0.30p per hour i was doing 12 hours shifts.Now thinkig about that time iam not feeling exploited but happy becouse this help me to build my work etic.What we observe now and in the future is if the 18-20 years old lad dont get 30k-50k job they think the job is not worthed the time.this is very dangerous becouse if you lake work etic it dosent metter the pay,you will always feel not in your place and will be unhappy.
As a man who just hit his 30s, if you didn’t enter into the labour trades or digital industries as part of my generation, you are now screwed for financial hope. You are part of a vast pool of individuals fighting for scraps of management positions for companies that seem less sustainable by the day, below that you are unskilled labour for warehouses, and below that we have the gig economy.
Retraining requires money you just cannot earn and save to pursue a job in a field that might not even be that interesting to you, but you do because it pays better. There is no motivation in that, no reason or ability to sink thousands into a course that guarantees nothing. Instead, we get to sit as solutions are described for the generation after us, knowing that even if something manages to get sorted for them, we’re done for. That leaves a lot of angry individuals with nowhere to go and a lot to lash out at.
We’re going to end up with an entire generation of people in poverty. It’s madness.
The elites will whine about the poor when they’re not having kids; and whine about the poor when they do have kids. I’m starting to think that they just hate the poor!
De-professionalisation and de-skilling are the problem.
The concept of training for a skilled function and then being valued for performing that function has ceased to exist, and even “management” jobs are expected to be permanently filled by unpaid interns.
To provide a feminist analysis of the mental health hypothesis for this change, there’s likely something to do with patriarchy (when isn’t there? If you have a hammer every problem is a nail et cetera.)
Under traditional patriarchal structures the trajectory is thus: work, get married in your early-mid 20s, if you’re a woman stay home with kids, if you’re a man bring home the money for the family.
What we’ve been seeing over the last 30 years in unemployment is the fruits of the labour of feminists over the last 50 years. Women have built an alternative life in the working woman. Instead of having to leave work to have children (or if you look earlier, marry) there are now many long term career options, and plenty of women gone before you who have proven you can do it. The stereotype of the “old maid” is not a spectre over women in their 20s in the same way it was. Women find worth in their work and friends who support them. Sure, many want to have a family and find a partner, but it is no longer the panic it was for women of an earlier age. Unfulfilled young women see many paths open for them, and hence do not blame their lack of men for their woes.
Men have not moved with the program.* There is a lot of patriarchal masculine worth still attached to “having a woman.” Hence, as young women feel less pressured to settle down, or provide themselves to a man who is not up to their standards, many young men feel left behind and unfulfilled. They blame women for this, naturally, but in reality it is a wider social issue of men not having alternate social models of fulfullment. Men are still shackled by patriarchal identity in a manner women are not. Unfulfilled young men see few options open to them when it comes to self actualisation, and hence possibly have more trouble heaving themselves to fulfillment.
There needs to be a transformation of purpose for young men. They need new rolemodels who can show them alternate ways to be. Women cannot provide this, it has to be a sea change in the “man-o-sphere” as I’ve seen some “sigma male gurus” put it. These gurus almost get it, but they still predicate a lot of their advice on women, rather than on ways men can find fulfillment.
*Obviously “nOt AlL mEN.” Finding happiness is a process, and those who find their niche early on are far less likely to fall into these misogynistic ways of thinking. What’s not happening is the process of helping young men find their niche.
Hmm, I’ve often thought that there is a ticking timebomb of young, white, working class boys heading for the scrapheap.
Now of course I’m not pretending for a second that white privilege doesn’t exist and that young, black, working class boys don’t have it even harder. But here we have a very large group who have been ignored by successive governments and have already fallen through the cracks
17 comments
Author: Sarah O’Connor
Britain’s economy has delivered a bumpy ride for young people in recent decades but it has still managed to suck more of them in. The proportion of 18 to 24 year olds who are on the sidelines of the labour market — neither working nor studying — has declined since the 1990s. That is no mean feat given the shocks delivered by the financial crisis and the pandemic. Yet the trend is a good example of why it’s important to dig under the surface of statistics. What looks like one story is actually two: one largely positive; the other distinctly worrying.
The biggest driver of the decline in youth worklessness in recent decades is the collapse in the number of stay-at-home young mothers. The number of young women who are “economically inactive” because they are caring for family dropped 78 per cent between 2006 and 2021, according to(opens a new window) an analysis by the Resolution Foundation. The trope of the teenage mum living off benefits is badly out of date.
There are two things going on. Fewer young women are having babies, and those who do become young mothers are now more likely to work. Lower birth rates among young women are a broader societal trend common to many countries, though UK policymakers did apply an extra push with the introduction of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in 1999. Given that teenage mothers are less likely to finish education and more likely to end up in poverty, this trend is worth celebrating.
Higher employment rates for young mothers, meanwhile, are probably the result of various factors, including somewhat better childcare provision. Benefits were also made more conditional after 2008 to encourage more lone parents into work, which will apply to some (but not all) of this group. Evaluations of that policy change point to mixed results. Lone parents did become more likely to work, but many ended up in low-paid, part-time jobs. One government survey(opens a new window) found that a third of the respondents who had entered work said they earned less than £6 an hour, though the minimum wage was £6.08 when the survey was done. Finances did improve in households where lone parents found work, but the survey found that two in five were still in “material deprivation”.
The other story hidden in the youth worklessness data is more troubling. The proportion of young men who are inactive (neither working nor looking for work) has climbed steadily from 5 per cent in 2000 to 9 per cent last year. The UK isn’t the only country to see men drop out of the labour market: in the US, economists have mooted a number of explanations including the allure of video games(opens a new window). But Louise Murphy of the Resolution Foundation says the UK data suggests a major reason for rising inactivity among young men is ill health, particularly mental health. The same trend is evident for young women too, though not as strongly.
Is mental health really worsening among the young, or is there a greater awareness now of mental health problems that people struggled with for decades but weren’t willing to talk about? Tony Wilson of the Institute for Employment Studies says the consensus is that “it’s a bit of both, but it does appear young people’s mental health is getting worse”.
Helping these young people to recover will require mental health support and treatment to be more widely available. Local authorities and charities might need more resources to find and support them. They might also need more specialised help to find their way into the labour market. But many of these young people are not “in the system” because they are not claiming benefits: only 44 per cent of workless young women and 32 per cent of workless young men were on income-related benefits in 2019. While that saves the taxpayer money in the short term, it also means they are harder to reach.
In Britain, you get career advice at school (though many young people complain about its quality) and job-hunting support if you are on benefits. Outside that, there is little help available from the state. Most other European countries, Wilson says, have public employment services that extend job hunting and career support for people who aren’t on benefits.
There is a case for the UK to follow suit with a modern public employment service open to all. Young people wouldn’t be the only ones to benefit, since the pandemic has triggered a swathe of older people to drop out of the labour market too. But for the young, a bad start is particularly hard to recover from.
Britain can’t afford to let anyone slip through the cracks; its young people least of all.
I need to know if they are white before I dispense my amount of care. Xox
Another garbage article blaming young men being out of work on women in the workplace and women not having kids
Shock!
What do these people want exactly? A return to the fucking 50’s?
So to summarise: job amount is the same, less stay at home mums, jobs divided fairly so less men are working?
I don’t really see a solution here outside of ‘create more jobs’ or ‘let women be able to afford to stay at home again’.
Edit: to the boomers reading and have their heads in the sand
https://theweek.com/us/1001987/men-losing-close-friends?amp
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/08/andrew-yang-boys-are-not-all-right/
A large number of young men are out of school , men are quitting college and are large number are staying at home with parents this coupled with other issues destroys their social life ( which women is gonna go back to a 23yr olds moms basement )
This makes it harder for their social life causing them to seek friendships online and elsewhere where the stigma wouldn’t hurt as bad or exist , they meet Nazi or incel groups violent crime/gangs , religious terrorism that tell them it’s ok and their problem is caused by such and such ,
months years of that propaganda can culminate into timmy feeling that society is moving on without him and has left him behind in a dead end job with no prospects and living at home with his mom that coupled with the mockery (dead end job living in moms basement ) and stigma he faces can cause hateful thoughts to emerge
He then decides to hit back at those he feels “robbed him” of his life and mock him for his fate ,
We as a nation can solve this but our leaders have us fighting culture wars over immigrants , we are facing a growing epidemic of millions of young men going down this incel/violent crime/gangs , religious terrorism /Nazi pipeline and we need to solve this asap
The mental health explanation doesn’t hold water with me. This has a structural component. Some college-required jobs (such as teaching and nursing) were gendered for much of the 20th century in order to keep pay low. However, traditionally male employment has decreased along with’masculine’ jobs (like manufacturing). This combined with acculturation (men do not teach or care for people) produces the desired outcome.
I struggled with both being NEET and mental health issues from 2006 – 2008. It was a dreadful time all around really.
I think the mental health issues were mostly anxiety related. I hadn’t done great at school, not because I was stupid mind you, I squandered much of my youth playing video games. I got bullied quite badly for about a year when I went up in to a different school, and that really changed my outlook on school from something I enjoyed to something that had to be endured until I come leave.
Anyway, upon reflection, I feel as if my education was somewhat neglected by both my parents and my teachers. I didn’t know my alphabet until the age of 7 when my elder half-sister basically found out I didn’t know it and sat me down and taught me it. This education neglected, mixed with a love of video games was absolutely corrosive to education.
This all culminated when I left school at 16. My grades weren’t great (but not terrible either), but my parents refused to allow me to go to sixth form. Made it clear in no uncertain terms they wouldn’t support me while I studied. I think leaving school with no plan, no (decent) education, no prospect, and very unsupportive parents really affected my mental health. I developed an anxiety disorder. This practically just compounded the issues I was already dealing with and made matters worse.
Anyway, I ended up basically losing two years to bouncing from meaningless job to being NEET to another meaningless job while trying to deal with anxiety issues, and unsupportive, and quite frankly cunty parents.
Eventually, I got the anxiety order under control and I finally got to go to culinary college, but only after my half sister and sister basically argued with my parents for a good while that simply leaving me no real education or training was a fucking dreadful idea, and boy did my parents push back on that.
That whole experience basically cost me two years of essentially doing nothing, and had lasting effects on my self-confidence, self-worth, etc that still affect me today. I still hold a bit of a grudge against my parents for it. My mother has tacitly admitted fault, but neither have apologised. I can’t help but feel those years were a major turning point in my life, and not in s good way.
(tl;dr: I suffered from mental health issues and unemployment between 2006 – 2008, and it’s had a lasting negative affect on my life.)
Must be a war coming.
Quietly? Young people have been struggling in the UK for years, it’s only been quietly if you’ve been ignoring it.
Completely unrelated:
But when I say “Author: Sarah O’Conner.” I thought.
“I wonder if she is being hunted by the Term O’Nator.”
Honestly the amount of job in UK is inormus in my 14 years here i observe that young lads are just lazy spoiled kids and social media just made the tings worst.i came from not rich EU country and in my teens i was working in food factory that pay 0.30p per hour i was doing 12 hours shifts.Now thinkig about that time iam not feeling exploited but happy becouse this help me to build my work etic.What we observe now and in the future is if the 18-20 years old lad dont get 30k-50k job they think the job is not worthed the time.this is very dangerous becouse if you lake work etic it dosent metter the pay,you will always feel not in your place and will be unhappy.
As a man who just hit his 30s, if you didn’t enter into the labour trades or digital industries as part of my generation, you are now screwed for financial hope. You are part of a vast pool of individuals fighting for scraps of management positions for companies that seem less sustainable by the day, below that you are unskilled labour for warehouses, and below that we have the gig economy.
Retraining requires money you just cannot earn and save to pursue a job in a field that might not even be that interesting to you, but you do because it pays better. There is no motivation in that, no reason or ability to sink thousands into a course that guarantees nothing. Instead, we get to sit as solutions are described for the generation after us, knowing that even if something manages to get sorted for them, we’re done for. That leaves a lot of angry individuals with nowhere to go and a lot to lash out at.
We’re going to end up with an entire generation of people in poverty. It’s madness.
The elites will whine about the poor when they’re not having kids; and whine about the poor when they do have kids. I’m starting to think that they just hate the poor!
De-professionalisation and de-skilling are the problem.
The concept of training for a skilled function and then being valued for performing that function has ceased to exist, and even “management” jobs are expected to be permanently filled by unpaid interns.
To provide a feminist analysis of the mental health hypothesis for this change, there’s likely something to do with patriarchy (when isn’t there? If you have a hammer every problem is a nail et cetera.)
Under traditional patriarchal structures the trajectory is thus: work, get married in your early-mid 20s, if you’re a woman stay home with kids, if you’re a man bring home the money for the family.
What we’ve been seeing over the last 30 years in unemployment is the fruits of the labour of feminists over the last 50 years. Women have built an alternative life in the working woman. Instead of having to leave work to have children (or if you look earlier, marry) there are now many long term career options, and plenty of women gone before you who have proven you can do it. The stereotype of the “old maid” is not a spectre over women in their 20s in the same way it was. Women find worth in their work and friends who support them. Sure, many want to have a family and find a partner, but it is no longer the panic it was for women of an earlier age. Unfulfilled young women see many paths open for them, and hence do not blame their lack of men for their woes.
Men have not moved with the program.* There is a lot of patriarchal masculine worth still attached to “having a woman.” Hence, as young women feel less pressured to settle down, or provide themselves to a man who is not up to their standards, many young men feel left behind and unfulfilled. They blame women for this, naturally, but in reality it is a wider social issue of men not having alternate social models of fulfullment. Men are still shackled by patriarchal identity in a manner women are not. Unfulfilled young men see few options open to them when it comes to self actualisation, and hence possibly have more trouble heaving themselves to fulfillment.
There needs to be a transformation of purpose for young men. They need new rolemodels who can show them alternate ways to be. Women cannot provide this, it has to be a sea change in the “man-o-sphere” as I’ve seen some “sigma male gurus” put it. These gurus almost get it, but they still predicate a lot of their advice on women, rather than on ways men can find fulfillment.
*Obviously “nOt AlL mEN.” Finding happiness is a process, and those who find their niche early on are far less likely to fall into these misogynistic ways of thinking. What’s not happening is the process of helping young men find their niche.
Hmm, I’ve often thought that there is a ticking timebomb of young, white, working class boys heading for the scrapheap.
Now of course I’m not pretending for a second that white privilege doesn’t exist and that young, black, working class boys don’t have it even harder. But here we have a very large group who have been ignored by successive governments and have already fallen through the cracks