From the ‘golden age’ to neo-liberalism
Last month the Ministry of Labour told us that 38,000 boys and girls, who left school in July, had not found work. This figure, as we all know, excluded many who, unable to find work, had returned to schools unfitted and ill-equipped to take them back. It excludes, too, the many who found temporary employment in blind-alley jobs. That this country should not be able to find employment for boys and girls leaving school and going out into the world for the first time is an intolerable reflection on our so-called civilisation.
(Harold Wilson’s speech to the 1963 Labour Party conference)
Introduction
Much attention has been given to understanding the consequences of the casualisation of labour in the periods prior to and following the Great Recession (e.g. Standing 2011). While many commentators acknowledge that the roots of the changes were established prior to 2008, few appreciate that, in the United Kingdom and some other European countries, a significant turning point was reached as early as the mid-1970s, with some of the most momentous changes occurring in the early 1980s. To fully understand the contemporary employment contexts experienced by young people, in this chapter we first outline and consider the broader patterns of change and transformation in relation to youth labour markets by considering the employment situations faced by young people in the 1960s and 1970s (a time of relative prosperity with some strain emerging towards the end of the period), before moving on to consider significant changes triggered by the 1980s recession.
Rather than viewing changing labour conditions as an inevitable consequence of economic transformations, we argue that the British state committed a series of civilising offences against young people from the late 1970s, subsequently reinforcing and refining these offences in an ongoing attempt to make young people accept a new set of obligations. Similar actions were carried out in a number of other countries at around the same time as governments began to roll out a neo-liberal political agenda. Acting on behalf of employers, the state introduced a wide range of measures to force workers, especially young workers, to conform to a new set of conditions under which worker rights and welfare benefits were progressively removed to help mobilise the neo-liberal project and normalise emergent fragmented and precarious forms of employment.
To help contextualise and understand the contemporary youth labour market and its direction of travel, it is necessary to draw on an extensive historical canvas in which the post-war labour market is regarded as part of a deep-rooted historical process. Here, we suggest that Norbert Elias’s work on the civilising process (2000) and Robert Castel’s (2003) work on changes in the organisation of labour and social welfare from medieval to industrial society help us to locate our analysis historically and frame it sociologically. Castel’s rich illustration of what he refers to as the ‘jeopardization of labor’ (2003: 380) traces the demise of the indeterminate contract in France to 1975 and argues that, even before the Great Recession, over two-thirds of new contracts could be classified as ‘atypical’ (fixed term, part-time or offered under government-sponsored activation programmes): a trend that he recognises as having the greatest impact on women and young people.
To understand the changes that we focus on in the United Kingdom, we have to maintain an awareness that the labour process involves an ongoing subjugation of labour under which the degradation of work constantly evolves in ways that involve new and more exploitative forms (Braverman 1974). Here, the civilising process described by Elias involves changes in the nature of obligations between privileged and subordinate social actors that are held in place by the symbolic violence (Bourdieu 2002) that underpins civilising offences.
Enforcing conformity in labour relations
Although there is not the space in this volume to provide a deep historical analysis of the period before the 1960s, we would not dissent from Castel’s (2003) position regarding changes in the organisation of labour from medieval to industrial society and the relationship between changes in the relationship between welfare and work. Castel describes how in medieval Europe vulnerable citizens, who were often referred to as vagabonds, were brutally treated. In the sixteenth century, in parts of Europe, vagabonds could be subject to immediate execution and in the eighteenth century could be forced to man the galleys in perpetuity (Castel 2003). Then, as now, a distinction was often made between the deserving and undeserving poor, what Castel refers to as the ‘shameful poor’ and ‘able bodied beggars’, and favourable treatment reserved for those with strong local connections.
The Black Death (1348−50), which wiped out more than a third of the population of England, caused a labour shortage leading to strong demands for workers. Fearful that this new balance in the supply of and demand for labour may lead to wage rises, the Ordinance of Labour (1349) was passed to limit wages to their pre-plague levels. A series of statutes followed on working conditions and wages, including new attempts to regulate labour in ways that strengthened contractual obligations, such as acts restricting the freedom of workers to join together in an attempt to improve conditions. Following the Black Death, hiring fairs for agricultural workers emerged in many villages, where people would gather in one week at the end of November to seek work for the coming year. Employers had to commit to provide employment for the full year and were, therefore, unable to dispense with the labour they hired in periods of the year when there were relatively few tasks to be carried out on the farm. However, the Master and Servant Act (1823) imposed penalties of up to 3 months’ hard labour on any employee who left service before the expiration of the contract. According to Craig (2007), 10,000 people a year were prosecuted under this act. The Master and Servant Act was not repealed until 1867 so, in effect, criminal law underpinned labour relations until that time.
For most of the past 500 years, employment relations in Britain was governed by the traditional master and servant relationship. Breaches of these contracts were punishable by imprisonment, whipping, fines, forfeiture or compelled labour.
(Craig 2007: 2)
The industrial revolution brought with it new strategies to enforce work discipline, creating obligations for employees to work long, regular hours in return for subsistence wages. Welfare was seen as a key strategy, and employers and politicians were of the view that over-generous provision would make employees reluctant to submit to the harsh working conditions that were common in the manufacturing industry. Indeed, such sentiments were not confined to capitalists and right-wing politicians but were subscribed to by ‘liberal’ reformers like Beveridge and the Webbs. The Webbs, for example, went as far as to argue that ‘an institution where individuals must be criminally regulated and maintained under constraint … [is] absolutely essential to any effective program of treating unemployment’ (Webb and Webb 1911, quoted in Castel 2003).
The Beveridge Report that underpinned the Labour Party’s approach to developing a welfare state in the post-Second World War era was also concerned to ensure that workers conformed to employers’ demands, and the insurance-based system he proposed was to provide a fairly comprehensive safety net to those who acted in accordance with his model of the ‘good worker, regular in his labor and disciplined in his morals’ (Castel 2003: 308).
For centuries, welfare and labour discipline have been two sides of the same coin, and the evolution of the forms of obligation between employer and employee and between state and citizen represents a core component of the civilising process proposed by Elias. However, for Elias, civilising processes are seen as ‘long-term, intergenerational, unplanned and unintended processes, involving changes in the balance of the typical social habitus’ (Mennell 2015: n.p.), whereas the history of labour relations is littered with what Elias refers to as civilising offences. As discussed in the previous chapter, civilising offences are planned processes and may take the form of an offence against those who rely on welfare (Clement 2015) or an offence against younger citizens to force them to conform to a form of labour discipline favoured by the state.
Conformity is also underpinned by a hegemonic discourse that shames groups of workers who are regarded as problematic. A process of shaming has underpinned approaches to welfare since the middle ages and continues to this day, as governments and the popular media link unemployment to what they claim to be deficits in attitudes, ethics or skills. Examples include a speech by Norman Tebbit, a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, claiming that a reluctance on the part of the unemployed to ‘get on their bikes’ in search of work outside their locality was evidence of a culture of welfare reliance. Similar claims were made by Chris Grayling in the Cameron administration, who argued that in some families several generations had never worked, while contemporary discourses accuse immigrant populations of coming to the United Kingdom to claim benefits rather than work.
There are also discourses that centre on the idea of employability, whereby individuals are seen as lacking in various attributes demanded by employers. The focus here tends to be on a deficit of skills, including soft skills, which make someone unemployable. Clearly some people lack the skills to perform certain tasks or display traits that employers feel will not be conducive to maintaining the customer-focused image they wish to project. At the same time, we must recognise that demands for skills and behavioural standards are not fixed, but are differently defined according to predominant modes of production and levels of employment. In agrarian society, employability was defined in terms of physical ability; in industrial society, it was about the ability to conform to the demands of regular monotonous work and long-hours cultures; in contemporary society, it may be about an ability to manage complex and fragmented working lives and cope with an all-pervasive sense of insecurity. Moreover, it is important to appreciate that the same person may be regarded as highly employable in a buoyant labour market but seen as unemployable at times or in places where jobs are more scarce.
The 1960s: Young people and work in the ‘golden age’?
The 1960s is often considered to be a ‘golden age’ (Vickerstaff 2003), in which jobs were plentiful and unemployment short-lived. According to Roberts and colleagues, in many parts of Britain ‘virtually all school-leavers stepped directly into jobs’ (1986: n.p.): a situation that he illustrates using his personal experiences in the opening chapter. With low levels of geographical mobility among young people, the sorts of jobs available to them varied considerably from one locality to the next, and, as Goodwin and O’Connor (2005) showed in their reanalysis of data from the period, not all local labour markets were characterised by their prosperity: indeed, they argue that the use of the term ‘golden age’ to refer to the 1960s is misleading. Prior to the 1980s recession, many openings involved manual work, with conditions and prospects varying according to the industrial make-up of an area and opportunities for training.
In the 1971 census, overall, more than six in ten males and four in ten females worked in manual occupations, and the professional sector offered relatively few opportunities, especially for females. Among 15- to 19-year-olds, seven in ten males and one-third of females worked in manual occupations (Table 2.1). The 1960s and 1970s was an era where minimum-aged school leaving was the norm, especially among those whose families worked in manual occupations, and the very small numbers who went to university were all but guaranteed careers in the professional and managerial sectors (Ashton and Field 1976).
In the 1970s, around one in four young people entered apprenticeships, while one around one in five entered clerical occupations (Banks and Ullah 1988) that typically involved some firm- or sector-specific training and offered the possibility of a degree of career advancement (Ashton and Field 1976). However, during the 1970s, and linked to the decline of manufacturing industries, the availability of apprenticeships declined, removing many of the traditional opportunities open for young people from working-class families to develop marketable skills and enhance their future job security.
Table 2.1 Employment of the economically active population, 1971
Writing in the early 1970s and drawing on data collected in the 1960s, Ashton and Field (1976) focused on the ways in which young people adjusted to the world of work. They argued that social background had a major impact on the meanings that people attached to work and, with expectations conditioned by social class and educational experiences, few young people experienced severe problems of adjustment. They suggested that
most young people do not experience the transition from school to work as a period of particular stress or as involving them in traumatic problems of adjustment to their new position in the adult community. Rather, it appears that the previous experience of the young people in their home, school and peer group prepares them well to fit in or adjust to the demands imposed upon them on starting work.
(Ashton and Field 1976: 12, original italics)
For Ashton and Field (1976), transitions from school to work were highly stratified, with most young people following clearly defined tracks through education into different sectors of the labour market: tracks which were strongly conditioned by their social class background. Drawing on economic and cultural resources, young people from middle-class families learnt how to exercise initiative and were taught to defer immediate rewards in order to focus on long-term gains.
The possession of middle-class cultural capital, Bourdieu (1977) asserted, helped ensure that those from advantaged social backgrounds received a privileged education either in the state sector or in the private sector. In turn, the qualifications gained from this privileged educational route helped ensure that the majority were placed in either managerial and professional or white-collar professions, either directly or following an additional period of study in further or higher education. In contrast, young people from the middle and lower working classes tended to be channelled through the lower streams of the school into semi- and unskilled manual jobs at the minimum leaving age of 15 or 16, while those from upper working-class families were often placed in the upper streams of the school, where they gained the qualifications that would help them secure apprenticeships for skilled craft work or else they found routine white-collar positions (Figure 2.1).
Under these conditions, there were clear linkages between the family, school and labour market, with employment prospects being highly predictable. Indeed, sociologists like Paul Willis (1977) outlined a process through which young men effectively embraced subordinate positions within the labour market. For Willis, manual occupations were an opportunity for young men from working-class families to assert their masculinity, while white-collar jobs were rejected due to a perceived requirement for obedience and conformity. For Ashton and Field (1976), the labour market was clearly segmented, with little movement between sectors; managerial and professional, lower white-collar and skilled manual employment required fairly specific educational credentials and job-specific training. For those without qualifications or job-related (usually apprentice) training, most opportunities were in semi- and unskilled forms of employment, and the chances of mobility to other, more secure and better paid segments were relatively poor. In the early 1970s, around a third of young people entered jobs that offered little or no training, with many of these jobs being low-paid and insecure (Banks and Ullah 1988).
Figure 2.1 Social class background, school experience and ‘occupational choice’
Source: Ashton and Field 1976.
With transitions from school to work in the so-called golden age often regarded by contemporary commentators as smooth and predictable, and marked by relatively full employment, the era is sometimes used as a benchmark to highlight the complexity that characterised experiences from the late 1970s onwards. However, this has to be qualified by the acknowledgement that mobility was severely restricted, while opportunities for lower working-class youth were heavily concentrated in low-skill, low-paid work. Moreover, both Goodwin and O’Connor (2005) and Vickerstaff (2003) have argued that employment in this era was often more complex than previously thought, with job changing frequent and periods of unemployment not uncommon. Goodwin and O’Connor, for example, showed that some of the young workers in the Leicester area were changing jobs as frequently as monthly. Despite relatively full employment, for some, the fear of unemployment was an issue that shaped their actions. As Goodwin and O’Connor argue, ‘Past transitional experiences were not uniformly simple, linear or as single step as previously suggested and many transitions were characterised by individual level complexities similar to those of contemporary youth’ (2005: 218).
While Goodwin and O’Connor provide rich examples of young people’s movements between semi- and unskilled jobs, around a third of male school leavers secured apprenticeships which were associated with lower levels of job changing. Apprenticeships tended to involve a 5-year commitment which, for many, was regarded as an awfully long period in which they were relatively poorly paid (Vickerstaff 2003). Young apprentices were often treated harshly and regularly encountered behaviour from older workers that today would be regarded as unacceptable. The idea that young people moved smoothly and untraumatically from the school into the workplace runs counter to the evidence that emerged from contemporary sources. To quote from one of the apprentices cited by Vickerstaff,
It was the worst six years of my life. Every morning I used to dread getting up and going into this place … It was name-calling. Taking the Mickey – ‘Long streak of piss’ and all this sort of thing because I was only about ten and a half stone and already six foot three. I became a nervous wreck in a way. And I never told my Mum and Dad about it because you didn’t do. I used to come out in the lunch break to cycle home and the bike would be turned upside down, the tyres let down, two or three times a week.
(2003: 278)
Moreover, although employment was relatively full, this did not mean that young people were able to exercise choice. Young workers were constrained by local opportunity structures, and demand for apprenticeships was always higher than supply. Young people who entered the labour market at 15 or 16 were often treated as children, both by their families and by fellow workers – male apprentices were commonly referred to as ‘the boy’ – and parents frequently made career decisions on behalf of their offspring (Vickerstaff 2003; Goodwin and O’Connor 2005).
While young people frequently entered the type of employment that they had said that they had wanted while at school (Maizels 1970), their aspirations were clearly shaped by local opportunity structures and their position in the stratified world of the school (Roberts 1975). Indeed, West and Newton (1983) were highly critical of schools’ use of a developmental approach to careers guidance which encouraged greater occupational ambition. Such an approach, they argued, subsequently led to a downward adjustment and disappointment. West and Newton argued that a ‘developmental approach merely aggravates and exacerbates the difficulties faced by adolescents in adjusting to the opportunity structures which exists in the world of work. [It] ignores the reality of high levels of unemployment, of the stress and drudgery of work’ (1983: 183).
Despite the predictability of occupational attainment, starting work was a time of surprises; good and bad. Studies report initial surprise at the some of the freedoms of the workplace (such as being able to smoke and walk about to talk to others) but also surprise at the level of boredom to be tolerated, the physical strain of some of the work and the long working hours (Carter 1962; West and Newton 1983). Young people often had very little idea of what to expect on their first day at work and were provided with scant formal inductions. In West and Newton’s (1983) study, around 45 per cent of respondents said that their introduction to the work and the firm was either non-existent or lasted less than 30 minutes. Maizels (1970) found that half of the new workers were shown what to do by a fellow worker − a common form of training sometimes described as ‘sitting next to Nellie’.
While relative wages of young people in the 1960s have been regarded as healthy and linked to the emergence of the teenage consumer (Abrams 1959), by the late 1970s average wages for school leavers were quite low. In West and Newton’s (1983) study, for example, 9 months after leaving school nearly six in ten 17-year-olds were paid between £21 and £30 per week: adjusted for inflation, a point midway through this range equates to £136, which is about what a 17-year-old on the minimum age would be paid in 2014. Moreover, female wages were significantly lower than male wages (one in four females earned less than £20 per week, compared to one in ten males, and while 16 per cent of males earned more than £39 a week, no females in their study earned this amount) (West and Newton 1983).
Another important point to make, especially when reflecting on debates concerning the emergence of a so-called precariat (Standing 2011) in the late modern era, is that piecework, where employees’ wages were directly determined by personal productivity, was extremely common in some sectors of the economy, such as the textile industry. In West and Newton’s (1983) study, more than three in ten females were paid on a piecework formula. A long-hours culture was also common, with many young people working regular overtime to secure reasonable wages levels.
From the oil crisis to economic recession
Although writing in the early to mid-1970s, Ashton and Field were effectively describing a context that characterised the 1960s (they were drawing on data from the 1950s and early 1960s) which was about to be severely disrupted. The 1973 oil crisis, triggered by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in an attempt to use their control over oil prices to enhance the economic development of their countries, led to a fourfold increase in oil prices, triggering a wage-price inflationary spiral in the West that resulted in manufacturing uncertainty and reduced production which, in turn, had a detrimental impact on levels of employment.
From the 1970s onwards, the manufacturing base of the UK economy was eroded with a reduction in output and jobs. This trend was particularly severe from the late 1970s and in the recession of the early 1980s. From 1978 to 1983, manufacturing output declined by 30 per cent (ONS 2006), while between 1980 and 1983 a third of the manual jobs in engineering were lost (Maguire 1991). While the same period saw an increase in jobs in the service industries, the rise was of a lower magnitude, with many of the posts being created being part-time and filled by women (Maguire 1991). These trends led to an increase in the proportion of females in employment and the narrowing of the gap in participation between men and women.
Economic uncertainty, new sources of competition and industrial restructuring led to a rise in all-age unemployment from the early to the late 1970s. Youth unemployment also began to rise in the 1970s stimulated by the demographic bulge caused by the coming of age of the baby boomers (Berger 1989) but, as among older people, also affected by the impact of the oil crisis on labour demand and by the acceleration of a shift from manufacturing to service-based employment and the associated demand for better educated and customer-friendly workers. All-age unemployment, which stood at 2.6 per cent in 1970, had risen to 6.9 per cent by 1977 (Jackson 1985), while youth unemployment rose from 2.9 per cent in 1970 to 15.3 per cent by 1980 (Jackson 1985) (Figure 2.2). Long-term unemployment among young people more than doubled between 1979 and 1982, accounting for just over one in five of those registered unemployed (Junankar 1987).
Figure 2.2 School leaver unemployment, England and Wales, 1974/5 to 1980/1
Source: Derived from figures in Jackson 1985.
A rise in unemployment is always a serious issue for young people as they are more likely than older people to be affected and likely to experience a longer duration. Indeed, for a variety of reasons, youth unemployment is usually far higher than among older age groups (typically three times higher) (Makeham 1980). Makeham has argued that young people experience higher levels of unemployment because
•They are more likely to be seeking work than older people as they display higher levels of job changing and may be trying to secure a first job after leaving education.
•They may be excluded from a range of occupations, some of which have age restrictions.
•When employers shed labour, young people may be affected by ‘last-in, first-out’ policies.
Moreover, young people with few qualifications are far more likely than their qualified peers to experience unemployment and tend to be unemployed for much longer periods of time.
The industrial changes that were occurring throughout the 1970s and which were accelerated in the 1980s recession had been predicted in a speech made by Harold Wilson to the Labour Party conference in 1963. In what was commonly referred to as the ‘white heat of technology’ speech, Wilson drew attention to the growth in youth unemployment and warned of the need to develop ‘a totally new attitude to the problem of apprenticeship, of training and re-training for skill’ (1963: 7), and of the need to provide enhanced and more socially just education for young people so as to prepare a ‘Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution’ (1963: 7).
The Wilson government placed a high priority on education: committing a higher proportion of GDP to education, his government drove through an ambitious programme of university expansion, established 29 polytechnics and the Open University and began to replace grammar and secondary modern schools with comprehensive schools in an attempt to reduce the early stratification of educational experiences which was regarded as reproducing working-class disadvantage (Jackson and Marsden 1962; Douglas 1967). Despite these moves, in the early 1980s, the United Kingdom was still a country where minimum-age school leaving was extremely common and in which higher education remained a minority experience. In Scotland in 1981, for example, 57 per cent of males and 52 per cent of females left school at the minimum age, and a minority obtained the five plus O grades that are considered to be an indicator of a satisfactory secondary experience (Furlong 1992). Among those born in the United Kingdom in 1958, upon reaching the age of 23, in 1981, just 10 per cent had obtained university degrees (Fogelman 1985).
Recognising that the United Kingdom was lagging behind other countries, such as the United States, in school retention, the school-leaving age was raised to 16 in England and Wales in 1972. However, the increase in educational participation, which extended to upper secondary and tertiary education, was already on the rise and was largely driven by external factors rather than policy. Changes in opportunities, which included a growing shortage of employers recruiting young people for both low-skill jobs and apprenticeships, together with demands for more advanced qualifications, helped encourage higher levels of educational participation. The so-called discouraged worker effect can be linked to rising levels of unemployment and to the introduction of new types of government-sponsored work experience and training schemes (Raffe and Williams 1989).
Youth schemes: responding to growing youth unemployment
Coming after a long period of relatively full employment, the rising level of youth unemployment from the early 1970s onwards was very visible, fuelling calls for political action. Indeed, moral panics linked to prevalent youth cultures led to a heightened concern about ‘idle hands’. In a sense, government intervention in this period was linked to fears about increasing levels of hooliganism and delinquency triggered by unemployment (Sinfield 1981). As Osgerby noted, the mid-1970s were marked by ‘an air of crisis and social polarization’ (1998: 104).
Despite Harold Wilson’s earlier acknowledgement that adverse economic conditions were not fully captured by formal unemployment rates but extended to temporary employment in ‘blind-alley jobs’ and reluctant returns to education, the focus of policy makers and the media was on visible unemployment rather than on young people in insecure jobs or out of sight and off the political radar in full-time education.
With a clear focus on those formally unemployed, in 1975 the Job Creation Programme was established to maintain and enhance young people’s employability through the creation of short-term jobs of social value. This scheme, which was the first in a series of schemes developed to cater for young people without work, was underpinned by the view that the rise in youth unemployment was temporary and that measures needed to be introduced to occupy school leavers and provide them with some experience until an economic upturn made the measures redundant.
This interpretation was challenged by the publication of the Holland Report in 1977 which promoted the view that youth unemployment was structural and linked to changing patterns of demand. While Holland was clear that youth unemployment was primarily caused by a deficit in demand, the report also carried a message suggesting that new skill sets were needed which unemployed young people often lacked. In response to the Holland Report, the government introduced a new programme, the Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP), which was designed to ‘enable the individual to do more things, achieve a higher level of skills, knowledge and performance, and adapt more readily to changing circumstances or job requirements’ (Holland 1977: 33).
YOP was a 6-month programme of work experience targeted at 16- and 17-year-olds who had been unemployed for a minimum of 6 months. Participants were paid an allowance which was set marginally above the unemployment rate. While Holland had hoped to steer the government towards the introduction of enhanced training provision for a post-industrial age, in practice the programme provided little in the way of ‘hard’ job-related skills but focused on the enhancement of ‘soft skills’, particularly those related to workplace discipline and conformity, thus reinforcing the view that youth unemployment was linked to poor work-related attitudes and values.
Representing an early civilising offensive against young people, YOP marked a real sea-change in transitions from school to work, as YOP soon became a majority experience. In Britain at the time, around 700,000 young people moved from school to the labour market each year; of these, by its fourth year of operation, around 550,000 entered the programme (Raffe 1981).
For Holland, though, unemployment was not a personal failing but could be linked to the poor state of the national economy. Indeed,
Success or failure in getting the job is often a matter of luck and frequently determined by factors well beyond the control or achievement of the individual such as the state of the national economy, the local industrial structure or the kind of preparation for work available at school. Unemployed young people are not failures: they are those whom others have so far failed.
(Holland 1977: 33)
However, Raffe (1981) has argued that implicit in the Holland Report was an acceptance of the basic tenets of human capital theory:
that individual productivity and labour market success are determined by personal qualities which can be created by investment in education or similar provision. YOPs approach is therefore based at least partly on an individualist explanation of unemployment which attributes it to the individual deficiencies of the unemployed’.
(1981: 217)
The ways in which the debate on youth unemployment, its causes and its remedies is framed have clear consequences for the actions expected of young people. If unemployment is seen as linked to personal shortcomings, then there may be a legitimate expectation that they take advantage of any opportunities provided to address these deficits. However, if unemployment is regarded as structural, as a matter of luck, then individuals may rightly feel an entitlement to unconditional compensation.
The period of relatively full employment that existed prior to the mid-1970s, in which periods of unemployment tended to be short-lived, was marked by a fairly sympathetic benefit culture in which assumptions about entitlements prevailed. For those who had worked long enough in the previous financial year, unemployment benefits were linked to National Insurance contributions, with supplementary benefits providing additional support to meet specific needs (such as dependents). There was also an earnings-related supplement (introduced in 1966) which provided additional sums to claimants based on the level of their past earnings. With a sense of entitlement to levels of compensation that would provide those without work with a reasonable standard of living, in the 1960s and 1970s claimants unions were formed in many parts of the country, often affiliated to the Federation of Claimants Unions, which held an annual conference. The aim was to support ‘claimants helping each other to claim what we can from the welfare state’ and demanding ‘a basic income for all’ (Radical History Network 2009: n.p.). Although involvement was not widespread, their existence highlights a broader culture under which people expected that the state would meet their basic needs if they were unable to find work.
Although young people were often ineligible for anything other than basic-level benefits, prior to the introduction of YOP unemployed 16-year-old school leavers were eligible to claim benefits more or less as soon as they left school. Relatively few did so, because in many parts of the country jobs were relatively plentiful. In Carter’s (1962) study, which was carried out between 1959 and 1960, and in a later study by West and Newton (1983) using data collected from 1976 to 1979, around half of all school leavers found jobs before they left school: and around four in ten said that they had a choice of jobs. Moreover, the availability of benefits and the existence of a relatively lax regime did not encourage young people to sign on rather than accepting a job considered to be second best or of poor quality. In West and Newton’s study, around 30 per cent of school leavers accepted a job for negative reasons, such as a perception that there was nothing else available or because they were frightened of not being able to get a job.
The introduction of YOP marked the beginning of a new era for youth benefits: although there was no evidence of abuse of the system or of large numbers of young people opting to remain on benefits in preference to entering even poorly paid jobs, from here on young people were expected to demonstrate their willingness to work by taking part in programmes without marked financial gain, without being provided with quality training and without evidence that participation would improve their future prospects. Understandably, this led to widespread resentment among young people who often described YOP as ‘slave labour’ (Stafford 1981). Young people often begrudged working for an employer who made no contribution towards their allowance, made no commitment to offer them paid work in the future and provided them with very little in the way of credible training or the development of marketable skills.
Beginning with YOP, but intensifying under later schemes, punitive regimes were implemented whereby refusal of a placement, even where travel was difficult or the placement showed no respect for their interests or qualifications, led to sanctions in the form of benefit withdrawal. A relatively sympathetic system of support for young people without jobs had been transformed into one underpinned by suspicion and sanctions − a move we refer to as the ‘punitive turn’, representing the first of a series of civilising offensives in the post-war era committed against young people to force them to accept a new set of obligations.
Hence, the deterioration in conditions for young people observed as recession that set in during the early 1980s led to an acceleration of trends already visible by the end of the 1970s. Unemployment was already an issue for young people making the transition from school to work, and many were forced to spend time on government training programmes before moving into ‘proper jobs’. Benefit regimes had already become more punitive, and the state had begun to take a more directive role in shaping opportunities and setting expectations. While young people themselves had begun to regard education as a refuge in a difficult labour market, the government had also learnt that pushing young people into education and training schemes was a very effective way of reducing politically sensitive youth unemployment rates.
The shift to the political right
Against a backdrop of economic and industrial turmoil in the 1970s, underpinned by the 1973 oil crisis, the emerging impact of economic globalisation and the significant decline in the United Kingdom’s traditional industries, national politics took a drastic shift to the political right. It is important to understand this shift to the right, given the consequences it would have for work and employment − consequences that are still experienced today − and the fact that industrial and employment policies from 1979 would provide the basis for future precarious forms of employment. As previously discussed, traditional forms of work and employment were clearly changing from the early the 1970s; however, this transformation was to accelerate dramatically in the 1980s with the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979. The ongoing industrial disputes towards the end of the 1970s, the perceived monopoly of the trade unions, the drastic impact of government spending cuts, imposed and insisted upon by the International Monetary Fund in 1976, and increasing inflation lead to a weary British public seeking political change. As the Conservative Party (1979) suggested,
This Election is about the future of Britain − a great country which seems to have lost its way. What has happened to our country, to the values we used to share, to the success and prosperity we once took for granted? During the industrial strife of last winter, confidence, self-respect, common sense, and even our sense of common humanity were shaken. At times this society seemed on the brink of disintegration … by enlarging the role of the State and diminishing the role of the individual, [The Labour Party] have crippled the enterprise and effort on which a prosperous country with improving social services depends … by heaping privilege without responsibility on the trade unions, Labour have given a minority of extremists the power to abuse individual liberties and to thwart Britain's chances of success.
(Conservative Party Manifesto 1979)
Thatcher’s analysis of the period from the mid-1960s, a period in which the Labour Party had held power for all but 4 years, was that the balance of power had shifted in favour of the ‘state’ at the expense of individual freedoms, that the state was too involved in the lives of ‘ordinary people’ who, instead, should be encouraged to become part of a ‘property owning democracy’. It held that the trade unions had become too powerful and required reform, that social welfare was too expensive and that government policy should shift away from the state underwriting the welfare state and promising full employment while maintaining control of inflation and spending. Further, it asserted that deregulation, de-nationalisation and industry based on the pursuit of profit were essential for future prosperity rather than the state and taxpayer trying to preserve existing jobs through subsidies. The electorate returned the Conservative Party to power with 43.9 per cent of the popular vote, and a majority of 70 members of Parliament, ensuring that their radical, right-wing, monetarist policy reorientation would mean that the next decade came to be characterised by unprecedented social and economic transformation that would impact on the lives of all those living in the United Kingdom. Such trends were repeated elsewhere, such as in the United States, where Reagan’s neo-conservatives adopted fully the neo-liberal mantra that combined the further ‘rolling back of the state’ and a greater emphasis on market forces and consumerism.
At the forefront of these change were young people, who were seriously affected as the old certainties of relatively straightforward school-to-work transitions disappeared and the number of apprenticeships were dramatically reduced as manufacturing industry was decimated. Young people were at the vanguard of economic and social change due to a ready acceptance by the state that unemployment, and particularly youth unemployment, was a necessary ‘corrective’ to the supply and demand problems experienced in the UK labour market throughout the 1970s (a corrective that was regarded as likely to be a short-term one). During the 1980s, young people were to be subject to the vagaries of Special Employment Measures and the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) that embodied ‘the essence of Thatcherism … that aimed to give school leavers opportunities to price themselves back into jobs’ (Lee et al. 1990: 3), essentially by lowering wages and offering remedial interventions to change youth attitudes to work, forcing them to take personal responsibility for their unemployed status. Where jobs were available, they were increasingly part-time, temporary, short-term, low skilled and low-paid, laying the foundations for the following decades. In short, the traditional work undertaken by young people and the seemingly ‘usual jobs’ they entered, plus the routes via which they transitioned to the labour market, were being replaced by something increasingly precarious.
The consolidation of youth training schemes
Between 1951 and 1981 unemployment rates for young people under eighteen years increased from 1 per cent to about 25 per cent. Without the Youth Training Scheme and Special Employment Measures, the current youth unemployment rate might well be nearer to 50 per cent.
(Hart 1988: 1)
A key response to the significant growth in youth unemployment by the Conservative government, elected in 1979, was the introduction of a variety of YTS as an extension and refinement of the YOP introduced by the previous political administration (see Finn 1987; Ashton et al. 1990: Lee et al. 1990) and which ran between 1978 and 1983. As discussed earlier, YOP was introduced in order to provide employment preparation through work preparation courses, training courses and employer-based work experiences spread over a 12-month period (Finn 1987: 111). In return, the young person received between £18 and £19.50 per week. As Ryan (1989: 175) suggests, by 1980 a place was guaranteed on the scheme for all jobless 16-year-old school leavers, and Ryan highlights that by 1980/81, 98 per cent of all 16-year-olds in the labour force were on YTS (which equates to 39 per cent of the total population of 16-year-olds). Yet, as Conservative minister Alan Clark (1993) recognised in 1983, the programme was seen as little more than ‘tacky schemes’ designed to massage the youth unemployment figures. Moreover, Morgan (1981) and others report that bodies such as the Trades Union Congress had begun to question the value of YOP in terms of the quality of the training being delivered and as a mechanism for lowering wages, despite their initial support for the scheme. As Mizen (1990) elaborates,
It was being increasingly claimed that YOP was no more than a cosmetic measure, designed mainly to keep young people off the unemployment statistics, raising their aspirations only to return them to the dole …. The quality of work experience and training came under sharp scrutiny as over 3,000 accidents were recorded during YOP’s lifetime, including five fatalities and 23 amputations.
(Mizen 1990: 18)
Widespread dissatisfaction with the YOP led to a re-working and re-branding of the scheme as the YTS in 1983 following the Youth Task Group Report of the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) in 1982. The Youth Task Group Report signalled a break with the past (Lee et al. 1990), and YTS became positioned as a ‘new deal’ for both the young unemployed and employers, and as an employer/market-led training programme increasingly free from the interference of trades unions. It also represented something of a staged transition from school to work (see Raffe 1990), replacing the relatively single-step transitions of the 1950s and 1960s.
Despite government claims that YTS represented a real break with earlier approaches, like previous schemes YTS was a substitute for ‘real jobs’ and, like YOP, was perceived to offer little benefit to participants beyond moving them from the unemployment register (in return for minimal financial gain). Likewise, it was dogged with the perception of being about cheap labour and poor-quality training, with the Trades Union Congress labelling YTS as a ‘youth training swindle’. These limitations were also well understood by the young people themselves, and one does not have to search very far within research from that time to find the negative impact that YTS was having on young people.
Contemporary research also shows that, for many, participation often provided little in the way of new opportunities. As Ashton and colleagues (1990) showed, the introduction of free labour through youth training had little impact on the range of jobs available to 16-year-olds: those that were marginalised before the training remained marginalised afterwards. Nor did the scheme help address social divisions, and many have suggested that YTS actually served to reinforce processes of marginalisation. According to Cockburn (1987), YTS did little more than underpin existing patterns of sex-based occupational segregation, with young women being heavily concentrated in YTS occupational areas associated with caring, health, personal services and sales. Likewise, the social divisions built up around race and ethnicity with regard to employment were exacerbated by the scheme, whereby those from ethnic minorities were often placed on poor quality programmes.
Young blacks in inner London are being forced into a Youth Training Scheme ‘ghetto’ while young whites from the suburbs get most of the jobs in the City and West End, according to the Inner London Education Authority. The figures show a much higher take-up of YTS places by young Afro-Caribbeans, than other ethnic groups.
(The Guardian, 26 January 1987)
In relation to social class, YTS offered little to those young people from working-class families. Underpinning the rhetoric around YTS was a belief by the Conservative government that young working-class youth, in particular, had to lift their horizons beyond the decaying industries and become more entrepreneurial, aspirational, self-reliant and industrious. If they were none of these things then they were characterised as lazy, idle; as scroungers who had nobody but themselves to blame for their unemployed status. Yet, young people themselves frequently resisted attempts to blame them for being unemployed (Lee et al. 1987; Mizen 1990), recognising that their unemployment was in part due to the very existence of YTS as a substitute employment scheme. Ashton’s analysis went further, arguing that YTS reinforced and replicated class division as ‘middle class youth continue in higher education and the YTS becomes a measure utilised by working class youth’ (1986: 181), with the skills they obtained simply replicating those they had already acquired through part-time working, through school or via interactions with their parents (Mizen 1990).
The poor training and poor work offered through YTS was no substitute for the quality training previously available relatively widely through apprenticeships. Indeed, McKie (1989) concludes that ‘the nature of that training was markedly different in content and outcome when compared with the apprenticeship programmes of earlier decades. Job specific skills and opportunities to undertake widely recognised qualifications are available to few YTS trainees’ (McKie 1989: 382). For the majority, YTS did not offer meaningful work, and the scheme did little to address the real problem of the lack of quality jobs for young people in the labour market.
Participation on YTS also had a long-term impact. For example, using a sample of 2,000 low achievers (those with academic qualifications equivalent to the three lowest National Vocational Qualification levels) from the 2000 British Cohort Study longitudinal survey, Dolton and colleagues (2004) found that the wage and employment effects were large and negative for men, with the mean earnings for ex-YTS participants being over 8 per cent lower and employment rates 8.5 per cent lower than a comparable low-achieving cohort of men who did not participate in the YTS scheme. They also suggested that the ex-YTS males had all spent a longer time unemployed than the comparator group. The short-term labour market interventions of either YOP or YTS enhanced precarity rather than resolved it.
The growth of non-standard employment
By the early 1970s, in many industrialised economies of the West, early school leavers had lost the prospect of transitioning to permanent full-time paid employment, with one or two life-time employers. Although in the 1980s it was still the case that the majority of those in work were engaged as full-time, permanent employees, there was, alongside, a significant increase in the numbers of workers who were employed in a ‘non-standard’ way. If the standard during the ‘golden age’ of employment can be defined as full-time and permanent, then ‘non-standard’ typifies part-time, temporary, flexible zero hours contracts as well as a variety of forms of self-employment. This trend towards non-standard working accelerated in the 1980s, with non-standard forms of work starting to become a substitute for permanent full time work.
In many respects, the growth of non-standard working was a direct consequence of government polices since 1979 and the desire to improve economic performance through deregulation and increased flexibility for employers. This trend had significant implications for young workers who, in a context of rising youth unemployment, were increasingly under pressure to take non-standard forms of employment. Indeed, figures from the Labour Force Survey show that the number of part-time workers aged 16−19 trebled between 1979 and 1985, with more than 400,000 young workers in part-time work by the mid-1980s (Youthaid 1986).
There has been a 250 per cent increase since 1979 in the number of teenagers in part-time work. […] By 1985, one in four teenagers could find only a part-time job. Nearly half the teenagers in part-time work have jobs that are temporary.
(The Times, 18 December 1986)
Drawing on later figures from the Labour Force Survey (Figure 2.3), Felstead and colleagues (1997) show an increase in non-standard employment among 15- to 24-year-olds between the late 1980s and early 1990s. The numbers in non-standard employment increased by around 10 percentage points, with a particularly pronounced increase in the numbers of females holding multiple jobs, suggesting that many of those in part-time employment wanted more hours.
Figure 2.3 Young people aged 15–24 engaged in non-standard employment: 1989, 1994
Source: Derived from Felstead, A., Krahn, H. and Powell, M. (1997) using data from the Labour Force Survey 1989 and the Quarterly Labour Force Survey Spring 1994.
Conclusion
Without an appreciation of the changes occurring in the 1970s and 1980s, we could believe that the conditions experienced by young people today can be linked to current economic conditions and a transformation of employment contexts that occurred in the last 10 or 20 years. There is evidence, as we shall discuss in later chapters, of an escalation of trends at around the time of the Great Recession, but in reality the insecurities faced by young people today have deep historical roots. Although the ‘jeopardization of labour’ (Castel 2003) can be traced back to antiquity and moved through various phases, we can identify a new phase that began in the 1970s, linked to the emerging neo-liberal project championed by Margaret Thatcher. While this involved a laissez-faire approach to the economy underpinned by privatisation, deregulation and a reduction in the tax burden, it also involved an unprecedented level of government intervention in the youth labour market. These interventions were not limited to the provision of training schemes, but also involved the introduction of increasingly punitive welfare systems under which benefits were made conditional on demonstrations of obedience, conformity and ‘positive’ attitude.
Of course, even without the political drivers, the 1970s and 1980s was a period of substantial restructuring involving the virtual decimation of the manufacturing industry with the loss of traditional jobs for working-class young men, the growth of a feminised service sector which challenged conventional masculinities and demands for emotional labour that placed new pressures on young women and men. The era was also characterised by the introduction of new contractual arrangements, largely in the form of an increased prevalence of part-time contracts in the service sectors, as the routine use of simple technologies, such as electronic cash registers, made employers much more aware of the ebbs and flows in customer demand.
The politics of the period was marked by crisis management. Economic decline and inflation were causes for concern throughout much of the 1960s, with the loss of export markets and problems with balance of payments leading to the devaluation of the pound in 1967 and squeezes on consumer credit. The United Kingdom entered the 1970s with low unemployment rates, but following the 1973 oil crisis the economy was under strain, and industrial relations were fraught. The measures introduced in the mid-1970s to address growing concerns about youth unemployment set the scene for a progression of largely ineffective measures which tended to have a common thread: a tendency to see youth as at fault for their predicament, introducing a series of civilising offensives against young people in the form of increasingly harsh sanctions to deal with those who experienced difficulties moving from the unemployment register to employment and the development of underfunded and unambitious forms of training running in parallel with lucrative opportunities for privatised contractors. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 led to an escalation of these trends and a new set of assaults on the rights of workers that had been won since the early nineteenth century.
The 1970s and 1980s was also an era in which experiential divisions opened up within families, with forms of youth culture making visible contrasting interests and orientations that can be linked to different experiences in education and the labour market. While the parents of those entering the labour market in the 1970s had often grown up in a period of relative affluence and employment stability, young people entering the labour market at the end of the period were having to negotiate a different set of circumstances to those experienced by their parents. Whereas their parents had made transitions within relatively tight parameters, on both objective and subjective levels, for their children who left school from the mid-1970s onwards, the negotiation of pathways, many of which were new, had started to become more confusing and complex. Old road maps had become unhelpful, the signs were more difficult to interpret and parents were less able to offer effective guidance to their offspring (Furlong and Cartmel 1997).