6. Jobless Youth

Liverpool – Until several years ago, the West European labor movement, as well as governments and business communities, did not even recognize youth unemployment as a major problem, or one that should be dealt with separately from adult joblessness.

But there are now over 10 million residents of the European Union without jobs, and people under 25, most of them with little or no employment experience, account for more than 40 per cent of their ranks.

In France, Britain, and the Netherlands, youths are three times as likely to be without jobs as adults are. In Italy, youth unemployment rates are a startling seven times those for adults. Among the EU countries only Germany, perhaps because of a combination of strong apprenticeship programs and low wages for teen-agers, has brought youth unemployment down to adult levels of joblessness.

As the problem of jobless youth has moved to center stage – through international conferences, demonstrations, or riots like those that recently exploded in Liverpool and other British cities – the trade union movement has been under almost as much scrutiny and criticism as government officials and employers.

Labor leaders have been forced to concede that the economic crisis is often pitting the interests of older workers, struggling to hold on to their jobs, against those of younger people seeking employment for the first time. Businessmen and government officials, who once whispered their reservations, are now loudly proclaiming that past trade union successes in raising wage levels, social benefits and job security have priced young people out of the labor market.

Only belatedly have labor leaders recognized that their impressively organized unions are not particularly endowed to help people leaving school and applying for their first jobs.

A sign of growing labor concern in Britain, where youth unemployment is among the worst in Europe, was the decision of the Trades Union Congress to launch a campaign with the country's main youth organizations to mobilize public concern over the young jobless.

Labeling youth unemployment “the most serious crisis since World War II”, the TUC general secretary warned that more violence would erupt in British cities unless action is taken on jobs.

In Liverpool, whose total unemployment rate is at twice the national level and has reached 40 per cent among young people, trade unions have only recently considered establishing centers to advise school leavers where to seek job training and how to claim unemployment benefits.

“It doesn't sound like much, and we're not at all certain we can take on such costs,” a division officer for the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, said a few weeks before the upheavals in Liverpool. “A lot of us still feel we are talking about something that should be government's job. But the situation is appalling. Just a few days ago, there were 69 applicants for one secretary job in these offices – all of them 18- to 20-year-olds who never worked in their lives.” That ratio is not much worse than elsewhere in the city:

The Liverpool Employment Offices recently listed 51,000 job seekers for 1,000 vacancies.

In a now-famous speech, the Prime Minister suggested some time ago that people should be prepared to move away from their communities in search of jobs.

But with few jobs available anywhere in the country, moving offers no solution to Liverpool's unemployed youth.