The great transformation and the punitive turn
The gradual retrenchment of the social welfare state after the mid-1970s is another major political cause of the continued deterioration of the life chances of the urban (sub)proletariat […]. Contrary to popular neoconservative rhetoric […], the last quarter of the century was not a period of expansion and generosity for welfare but one of blanket retraction.
(Waquant 2008: 80)
Introduction
Without a doubt, the experience of leaving school and starting work was transformed during the 1970s and 1980s, laying the foundations for contemporary education and labour market conditions. Changes that were already evident in the early 1970s escalated during this period: the employment landscape for young people changed radically, and political responses took on new, harsher forms as the neo-liberal project gained momentum, bringing in its wake fresh ‘civilising offensives’ (Mennell 2015) against young people.
As Elias would remind us, sociological approaches that lack a historical grounding are, inevitably, deficient, and it is clear that an adequate understanding of the contemporary youth labour market cannot be achieved without an appreciation of changes taking place over several decades. The 1980s, as we have already seen, was a period of severe recession and political repositioning; many of the current issues relating to youth employment and unemployment can be traced back to this period. Indeed, the beginnings of what we now view as a crisis in youth unemployment in the 1980s were starting to emerge as early as the 1960s when, in some parts of the country, the early consequences of large-scale industrial decline began to be felt by young people (Goodwin and O’Connor 2005). These trends have led us to question the extent to which the growth of insecure and fragmented employment for young people is a recent phenomenon.
In this chapter, we develop our argument that the experience of young people in the 1980s can be seen as a key starting point for where we are now. We begin by demonstrating how many of the contemporary debates around current youth unemployment have their roots firmly in the 1980s crisis. For example, the punitive turn of the state towards young people, the focus on blaming certain groups of young people for their predicament (teenage mothers; black, Asian and ethnic minority youth; etc.), the threat of civil unrest, the rise of the ‘underclass’ and the labelling of young people as a ‘lost generation’ all emerged during this period.
The subsequent focus of this chapter is on the findings from secondary analysis of data relating to youth employment in the 1980s. Access to raw data in the form of two datasets collected in the early 1980s has allowed us to revisit the period with the benefit of hindsight to begin to identify the emergence of what have become longer-term trends in the youth labour market. Both studies formed the basis of important work in the 1980s by Ashton et al. (1986) and Roberts et al. (1986) and provided an insight into the experience of unemployment during this decade.
The punitive turn
Young people leaving school in the late 1970s were the first cohort of the post-war period to experience, en masse, what has now become normalised for young people: a protracted, insecure and multi-step entry into the youth labour market and adult life alongside what Wacquant refers to as the ‘gradual retrenchment of the social welfare’ (2008: 80). The use of the term ‘lost generation’ to describe unemployed young people has its roots in this period of history (O’Higgins 2001; Nilsen and Brannen 2014).
During the 1980s, politicians warned of the consequences of long-term unemployment for young people leaving school during the recession. The Times (7 October 1981: 8), reporting on the Social Democratic Party (SDP)1 conference in October 1981, used the headline ‘Lost generation of young jobless could live to haunt society for years’, in an article that quoted from the SDP leader Shirley Williams’ opening speech:
The children born in the bulge years of the late 50s and early 60s are the children who have been losers all along the lines. They went to overcrowded schools, saw their chances of an apprenticeship or a college place savagely cut, and are now moving in to a labour market which cannot offer them jobs. They are in danger of becoming a lost generation.
This narrative of a lost and forgotten generation positions young people as being ‘victims’ of the economic situation and demonstrates a largely supportive and sympathetic approach to understanding the predicament of young people. However, this period also saw the emergence of what we now know was the coming of a punitive2 turn. Young people were increasingly demonised and blamed for their seeming inability to secure employment. Clarke and Willis noted this tendency in the early 1980s:
the predominant focus of commentary and explanation [on youth unemployment] has been on the young people and implicitly, young, working-class people, as the problem. Equally, government initiatives aimed at ‘solving’ this problem have also focused on youth and their failings.
(1984: 1)
Davies, writing in the Guardian, argued that planned changes to government policy, such as the removal of unemployment benefits, were evidence that young people were being ‘threatened with a particularly punitive mix of coercion and poverty for a further year beyond the compulsory school leaving age’ (1982: 9). He described the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) as ‘new forms of training [that] are at root deeply pessimistic, preoccupied with the failures and weaknesses of youth and are based on a deficiency model of the young’ (1982: 9).
A good example of the way in which the punitive turn began to emerge is found in the debates around the allowances young people would be paid for participating in YTS. One of the most contested suggestions of the period related to the planned withdrawal of the right of young people to claim supplementary benefit (‘the dole’) if they did not take up a place on the YTS. In June 1982, the then Employment Secretary, Norman Tebbit, announced that young people who were unemployed but refused to register for the schemes would not, as planned, have their benefits withdrawn, but ‘teenagers who unreasonably refused a suitable training place would, like adults, have their benefit reduced for six weeks’ (Guardian 22 June 1982: 21). Tebbit elaborated further on this point:
I still believe that the Government’s view of social security benefit for youngsters is the socially and morally correct one: to have an incentive to go on to constructive paths rather than an incentive to opt out.
Young people began to be accused of creating problems of unemployment themselves, and were criticised by employers for being unprepared for the world of work and for being ‘unreliable and irresponsible’ (Guardian 19 December 1983). The Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) and YTS were positioned by the government as being, in part, about improving young people’s employability rather than providing jobs, thereby subtly shifting the emphasis of blame from the economic situation and onto young people themselves.
The move towards apportioning blame on unemployed young people was visible from the early 1980s and set the scene for what was to come. In recent times, commentators such as Tyler (2013: 6.1) have argued that the concept of a ‘deficit model’ and the creation of an ‘underclass’ stem from New Labour policies of the late 1990s which ‘systematically re-scripted problems of economic inequality and stagnant social mobility into matters of individual aspiration, will and choice’. However, we argue that this punitive turn actually began far earlier and can be traced back to the early 1980s, when the previously sympathetic tone shifted to one of blame as economic problems became increasingly entrenched. This was underpinned by changing policies that became less about supporting young people and more about penalising them.
The public face of this more punitive approach demonised particular groups of young people more than others. Black and Asian youth suffered significant racism and discrimination and, as a consequence, were less likely to secure employment or quality training places than their white counterparts (Hollands 1990). Teenage mothers also became victims of a growing blame culture:
[There is] a kind of subdued moral panic simmering under the surface about young, unemployed girls becoming pregnant, staying single, and taking themselves out of the labour market by opting for full-time motherhood. These girls become dependant on welfare benefits rather than on a male breadwinner and it is this which has caused stories to surface in the tabloids about girls jumping the housing queues by getting pregnant, or by using pregnancy to get extra ‘handouts’.
(McRobbie 1989: 17)
A particular fear of the government focused on the perceived threat of civil unrest as a direct consequence of high and rising levels of unemployment in the early 1980s. In July 1980, the Times reported that
[T]he Labour group’s spokesman on Education repeated a warning that Britain was sitting on a time bomb; companies were closing, jobs were disappearing and the young unemployed were turning to drink, drugs, theft and violent crime.
A remarkably similar discourse was also evident in 2011:
Youth unemployment will fuel disorder on the streets as disaffected teenagers are starved of hope for the future, the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has warned. ‘Looking ahead you can see there is disquiet on the streets [I’m] really concerned about youth unemployment, unemployment generally; really concerned about signs of an increase in crime’.
(Daily Telegraph Online 6 December 2011)
Both of these articles, written some 30 years apart, also allude to the role of the family in creating problems of unemployment. The 1980s article quotes a Conservative spokesman who places the blame for the closure of firms on the parents of the young unemployed. Thirty years later, the perception that there are young people who have been brought up in homes where three generations are presumed to never have worked holds great currency among politicians, yet there is little evidence to support these claims (Shildrick et al. 2012).
The myths and stories created around the causes and consequences of youth unemployment in this period of recession have proved to be remarkably persistent and have been revisited and recreated in popular discourse during the more recent economic downturn. These myths perpetuate the idea that youth unemployment is largely explained by the individualised deficiencies of young people, thereby drawing attention away from economic causes and the lack of effective remedies through policy interventions.
Revisiting the 1980s: zones of (in)security
The collapse of the youth labour market and concerns about the impact of the recession on young people’s transitions from school to work led to increased research attention on the plight of young people living through these changes. With earlier research on transitions from school to work having taken place when the youth labour market was thriving, the new condition of youth raised great concern among researchers and policy makers. Teams led by both Ashton (1986) and Roberts et al. (1986) were funded by the Department of Employment to explore changes to the youth labour market as a consequence of the economic downturn. The data used in this chapter are derived from a secondary analysis of data collected for these two studies: Ashton’s Young Adults project carried out in four contrasting labour markets (Leicester, Sunderland, St Albans and Stafford) in 1982−3, and Roberts’s Changing Structure of Youth Labour Markets carried out in Liverpool, Walsall and Chelmsford in 1985.
The original project teams focused their attention on local labour markets to ‘offer insights in to the main variations behind the prevailing national picture’ (Roberts et al. 1986: 2) and to ‘represent different local labour market conditions’ (Ashton et al. 1986: 15). The specific local conditions ranged from those evident in the more prosperous, affluent towns of Chelmsford and St Albans, which offered opportunities for young people, to Walsall, Stafford and Leicester, each in a period of industrial change and decline and suffering increasing youth unemployment, through to Sunderland and Liverpool, which, as economically depressed cities, offered very few employment opportunities to school leavers.
For the purposes of our analysis we have combined the datasets and categorised these seven labour markets into three broad groups:
•Depressed: Sunderland and Liverpool (n = 874);
•Declining: Walsall, Leicester and Stafford (n = 870);
•Prosperous: St Albans and Chelmsford (n = 874).
This typology was not constructed to provide a robust geographical comparison, but as a starting point to enable a comparison with national-level data for the c. 2010s that can be found in the UK Household Longitudinal Study (Understanding Society), which is explored in Chapter 5. Such typologies are important, as they enable us to go beyond the national broad-brush picture to explore the variations in experience brought about by more local labour market conditions. As Ashton and colleagues suggest,
if local labour markets have an effect on behaviour independently of other factors such as type of job, social background etc. then the use of large, nationally-representative samples as a basis of research are likely to miss these effects … [and do not] reflect the full range of factors operating at the local level.
(1986: 105)
Neither of these datasets have previously been subject to secondary analysis. Yet, the re-analysis of this historic data has significant analytical value, as applying a contemporary conceptual lens that is more sensitive to the complexity of modern labour market experiences can offer significant new insights into changes taking place in the period. For example, the practice of conceptualising labour market position as a dichotomy between employment and unemployment (as reflected in the original analyses of these historic datasets) has been superseded, and there is now a far greater appreciation of the ‘shades of grey’ increasingly occupied by young people who are neither in full-time employment with stable contracts nor registered as unemployed.
Following the publication of Standing’s book The Precariat (2011), the concept of ‘precarity’ has become widely used a means of understanding labour insecurity, although it has a longer pedigree in French sociology. As we argue in later chapters, the Precariat is a term that over-simplifies a more complex set of positions. In the 1980s, there was also a tendency to simply define young people’s labour market status somewhat more starkly, as employed or unemployed. Much of the interest was in what was seen as an unprecedented level of youth unemployment and in understanding the experience of unemployed youth in contrast to that of the employed.
As Roberts (2010: 22) later argued, the categorisation of young people as employed/unemployed or ‘sinkers and swimmers’ (Wallace 1987) served to ‘exemplify how dualistic language permeates youth transitions discourses’, which, in turn, often neglects those in the middle. Similarly, by reducing our understanding of the youth labour market to dualisms we risk missing or underplaying the ‘shades of grey’ that were actually evident in the 1980s: part-time work, government training schemes, temporary or insecure work, zero hours contracts, unregistered unemployment.
Building on contemporary approaches to understanding the labour market, which go beyond dualisms in an attempt to capture non-traditional forms of employment, we created a new typology to retro-fit data from the two 1980s studies (Table 3.1). Here, informed by parallel analysis of the contemporary data reported in Chapter 5, the new categories have been framed to recognise what we refer to as ‘zones of (in)security’, supporting our argument that young workers in the 1980s can be understood, retrospectively, to have been among a new wave of workers in the post-war period to occupy non-traditional and insecure positions.
The three zones of (in)security we developed to understand the emerging features of the youth labour market can be termed the marginalised zone, the liminal zone and the traditional zone. Here (and in subsequent chapters focusing on the contemporary labour market), we describe these categories and explain how and why these zones provide a more accurate understanding of change than one based on a new dichotomy: the precariat versus seemingly secure workers.
Table 3.1 Derived (in)security variable
The traditional zone is made up of those individuals we regarded as ‘traditional employees’ from the interview schedules, being defined as those working in permanent, full-time jobs that they regarded as reasonably secure. This group accounted for nearly half (45 per cent) of the sample. The second category, the ‘liminal zone’, is occupied by just over one in ten respondents (12 per cent), including young people who, for various reasons, did not fit the traditional secure model of employment; specifically, those who were
•employed but in temporary or insecure full-time employment
•self-employed
•part-time (working for less than 30 hours but more than 10 hours per week).
The third category, the ‘marginalised zone’, accounted for just over four in ten respondents (43 per cent) who were in the most disadvantaged labour market positions; specifically, those who were
•on government schemes
•working in ‘fill-in jobs’
•unemployed but working3
•registered unemployed
•unregistered unemployed
•workless (not in the labour market at the time of the interview).
These zones are represented in Figure 3.1, clearly depicting a liminal zone in the 1980s as a relatively small but significant zone of ‘in-betweenness’, comprising those young people who, at the time of interview, did not neatly fit ‘positions assigned and arrayed’ (Turner 1969: 95) in other studies of youth labour markets and whose status has all too often not been fully understood.
Clearly, in these 1980s studies the largest zone, by a very narrow margin, is the traditional zone. There is always a risk in the field of youth studies of focusing too much attention on the spectacular experiences and the ‘extreme’ cases. Much existing work is concerned with those on the margins, and in studies of the 1980s the focus has tended towards the problems of unemployment. This, coupled with media representations of the 1980s, puts us in danger of having a somewhat skewed vision of the past and over-emphasising problematic or non-linear transitions at the expense of the more successful, ‘traditional’ transitions from school to employment.
The danger in privileging complex transitions in youth research is that we may miss details of the lives of those experiencing the more ‘ordinary’ and unexceptional transitions to adulthood. This hazard of youth research was acknowledged in the 1980s, exemplified by Brown’s study, Schooling Ordinary Kids, and his widely quoted description of this group of young people, ‘who neither left their names engraved on the school honours board, nor gouged them into the top of classroom desks’ (1987: 1). More recently, there has been a reigniting of interest in ‘ordinary youth’ at a time when much youth research has been characterised by research with young people situated on the margins of society and, possibly, at risk of becoming excluded or disconnected from it (Roberts and MacDonald 2013: 1.1). While we would not wish to downplay the unprecedented circumstances that 1980s school leavers found themselves in, there were, nonetheless, many who secured employment relatively quickly. As Roberts et al. (1986: 96) argued at the time: ‘traditional transitions from school straight in to jobs … have not become extinct’.
Figure 3.1 Zones of (in)security (1980s)
The third zone, the marginalised zone, is fractionally smaller than the traditional zone but does clearly show the decimation of the youth labour markets in some of the areas covered by the two 1980s studies. Those in this zone were unemployed, workless or in ‘fill-in jobs’ and had been unable to secure traditional employment. Young people from the depressed and declining labour markets dominated this zone and had the lowest prospect of being able to transition from this zone into either a liminal or traditional position.
Inside zones of (in)security
Using the zones of (in)security and the different labour market types as a basis for a secondary analysis of the combined datasets, we are able to cast more light on the complexities of the structure of the 1980s youth labour market. Of those who had secured jobs in the traditional zone, more than four in ten lived in one of the prosperous labour markets, while just over one in five lived in one of the depressed labour markets (Table 3.2). Conversely, while one in five young people in the marginalised zone lived in a prosperous labour market, nearly half of the group lived in a depressed labour market.
Perhaps surprisingly, the population who occupied the liminal zone tended to live in the more prosperous labour markets, which suggests that, in a period of national recession, different opportunities of a less traditional nature were opening up in the more buoyant, service-orientated labour markets. The two prosperous labour markets, St Albans and Chelmsford, were also areas with relatively strong service economies and, therefore, this provides an indication that the growth of liminality accompanied the growth of service sectors.
An analysis by gender shows that, within the marginalised zone, women were far more likely to be found in the workless category than men; but they were less likely to be registered unemployed, and more likely to be working part-time. These effects were found across all labour market types, suggesting that they were not due to local conditions and can be explained in other ways. The workless category, for example, includes women on maternity leave and those who were out of the labour market because they had dependent children. This mainly impacted on the Young Adults dataset which, with a higher age profile, had a far higher proportion of women with dependent children.
The over-representation of women among part-time workers can be explained by employment practices and conventions that were prevalent in the 1980s. Women with children frequently returned to work on a part-time basis, while employers often regarded part-time jobs as ‘women’s work’. Moreover, the 1980s saw the introduction of more flexible employment practices that suited the needs of employers seeking cost-cutting mechanisms. Among the respondents to the 1980s surveys, women were also strongly over-represented in the liminal zone, which itself was skewed towards part-time, rather than temporary or contract, workers.
Table 3.2 (In)security by labour market type (%)
In the 1980s, as today, educational qualifications were key to our understanding of young people’s labour market experiences. As highlighted in the previous chapter, during the period preceding the recession of the 1980s the majority of young people, particularly in areas dominated by manufacturing industry, left school with few or no qualifications and secured low-skilled, but often relatively well-paid, employment in local factories. Ashton and Field’s (1976) analysis of school to work transitions, illustrated in Chapter 2, showed clearly how young people’s school and post-school pathways were largely pre-determined by their social class and their educational experiences. While some of the higher achieving young people from working-class families were able to secure apprenticeships and routine office-based roles, the majority entered semi- or unskilled manual jobs in the local labour market. Thus, in labour markets with a traditional manufacturing base, the post-war period was characterised by buoyant labour markets where employers did not have any expectation that young people would hold qualifications on leaving school.
In these areas, employment opportunities for unqualified school leavers were plentiful, and young people could be reasonably confident that even without formal qualifications they would secure jobs relatively easily (Furlong and Cartmel 1997). In contrast, opportunities in some of the more prosperous labour markets were increasingly skewed towards service-sector jobs with openings for white-collar, clerical and office-based jobs that commonly required school leavers to have some educational qualifications.
Data from the 1980s surveys show the extent to which young people in the more prosperous labour markets were investing in qualifications, while those living in the depressed labour markets had maintained a more traditional qualification profile in which far fewer had high-level qualifications. Of course, the social class profile of respondents makes the picture more complex, as the depressed cities of Liverpool and Sunderland had larger working-class communities than St Albans or Chelmsford. The surveys show clear differences in the average qualification profiles of young people in the different labour markets. Of those who had gained some A levels, 46 per cent lived in the more prosperous labour markets, but less than three in ten (29 per cent) in depressed labour markets. Of those with no qualifications, around half (51 per cent) lived in depressed labour markets but just one in five (19 per cent) in prosperous labour markets.
These data provide an insight into the increasing relevance of human capital for young people in the 1980s in some areas, with young people being aware of the pressure to obtain educational qualifications to be better prepared to enter the labour market. At the same time, they were caught in a paradoxical situation: in depressed labour markets, holding qualifications made very little difference to employers who were either not hiring young people or did not demand qualifications. As one respondent in Hollands’ (1990: 31) study succinctly described,
‘It’s a vicious circle really ‘cos they say yuh gotta work towards qualifications to get a job. Then you see the real world outside and there’s no jobs around so you think I’m not doin’ this anymore. So you drop out and then you do find that if you have qualifications it’s an advantage, not much, but it is an advantage. But you can’t work towards that advantage ‘cos it’s too late’.
Studies from this period (e.g. Ashton et al. 1986) show evidence of the disruption ‘of time honoured patterns of social reproduction’ (Tomlinson 2013: 7), whereby the jobs that had been held by the parents of these 1980s school leavers were disappearing fast and were not being replaced, leaving this generation as the first to face what was becoming a less secure and more unpredictable labour market.
This leads us to ask how far qualifications gained by young people in the early 1980s served to offer protection from poor labour market outcomes in the form of a route ‘out’ to more successful transitions. Were outcomes more dependent on labour market conditions than educational qualifications? What we find is that local labour market conditions do play a key role in determining outcomes. In the prosperous areas, securing educational qualifications was worthwhile because there, the entry level white-collar jobs required applicants to have qualifications. In the depressed areas, such as Sunderland, qualifications offered little protection against unemployment, as entry-level jobs were virtually non-existent.
In Ashton and colleagues’ (1986) original analysis, they concluded that, even controlling for social background, young people in St Albans were achieving higher educational qualifications than young people in Sunderland. In combining both datasets, this pattern emerges even more markedly – young people in the prosperous labour markets achieved far higher qualifications than those in the declining or depressed areas. Ashton concluded that, although social class remained as significant in the 1980s as it had been in the 1960s, ‘the virtual collapse of some industries has … almost severed the relationships between social origins, school experience and the type of work entered that were characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s’. Of particular significance, here, is that Ashton extended this argument to suggest that ‘local pockets of long term unemployment appear to be creating a new underclass, the children of which are further handicapped by their poor employment prospects’ (1986: 32).
Table 3.3 Qualifications gained by labour market types and zones of (in)security
Looking at the association between qualifications and labour market outcomes (Table 3.3), it is clear that the protection against marginalisation offered by qualifications is strongly conditioned by labour market conditions. In the more prosperous labour markets, nearly half (48 per cent) of those with no qualifications and nearly one in three with a Certificate of Secondary Education (29 per cent) were in the marginalised zone when interviewed; the corresponding figures for those living in depressed labour markets were significantly higher: 69 per cent and 73 per cent, respectively. In prosperous labour markets, nearly seven in ten (68 per cent) young people who gained O levels were in traditional forms of employment, compared to just over four in ten (44 per cent) in depressed labour markets. In both labour market types, qualifications conferred advantages, but their overall purchasing power was strongly conditioned by local conditions.
There was very little discernible difference between males and females across the labour market types. We found no statistically significant differences in the distribution of males and females in either the depressed or declining labour markets. However, in the prosperous labour markets females did tend to occupy the more disadvantaged positions. In these areas, more males than females were in the traditional zone (63.3 per cent vs 55.6 per cent), while this was reversed for the marginalised zone (22.3 per cent vs 29.6 per cent). This over-representation of women in the marginalised zone is explained, in part, by absence from the labour market due to motherhood, but it is more difficult to explain why this only occurred in the prosperous labour markets. Perhaps the explanation lies in the ubiquity of disadvantage in other labour markets in this period of time.
Roberts and colleagues (1987: 134) suggest that although job seekers in prosperous areas tended to be better qualified, some actually found it as hard to secure direct entry to jobs as did well-qualified job seekers in depressed and declining areas. They found, for example, that ‘the best-qualified girls seemed to have the best job prospects not in Chelmsford but in Walsall and Liverpool’ (p. 134). This was due to the type of employment available in each labour market and a reluctance among the young women to accept jobs for which they were over-qualified. Given that they were operating in a prosperous labour market with job opportunities available, there was little risk attached to spending a period of time out of work.
Mobilities
So far, we have focused on the circumstances of respondents at the time they were interviewed. However, employment histories were also collected, which allows some analysis of changes of status over time; between first job and current job or between first status on leaving school and status at the time of interview. Beginning with first post-school destinations, we again find that labour markets are highly significant predictors of initial status. Whereas 46 per cent of those who moved straight from school to employment lived in prosperous labour markets, just 17 per cent of those following this trajectory lived in depressed labour markets (Table 3.4). Unemployment and government schemes were common first destinations for those living in declining and depressed labour markets, but much less common in prosperous areas.
Focusing on changes between first destination and status at time of interview (Figure 3.2), overall just over one in two respondents whose first labour market position was ‘traditional’ full-time employment had remained in such roles: in other words, what appeared on the surface to be a ‘good start’, as indicated by rapid movement to full-time work, turns out to be relatively insecure, as nearly half had moved to liminal or marginalised positions. Moreover, the overall picture hides variation by labour market. In the prosperous labour markets, the net move was from insecure to secure zones, with greater numbers in full-time jobs at time two than at time one. In the depressed and declining labour markets, movement towards the less secure zones was pronounced.
Table 3.4 First labour market status by labour market type (%)
Figure 3.2 First labour market status by zone of (in)security and labour market type (%)
With government schemes in the 1980s frequently portrayed as dead-end destinations (Mizen 1990), an experience that did little to improve job prospects, our data allow for further investigation of post-scheme destinations. Focusing on those whose first post-school destination was listed as a government scheme, in the prosperous labour markets nearly six in ten (58 per cent) listed their current destination as full-time employment (Figure 3.3). However, while schemes seemed to be relatively effective in buoyant labour markets, in the depressed labour markets just over one in five (22 per cent) had moved into full-time work, while more than one in two were subsequently unemployed. Interestingly, movement from schemes into insecure and temporary work or self-employment was much more common in the prosperous labour markets, again suggesting that those areas with strong service sectors were the first to witness a growth in non-standard employment opportunities.
Figure 3.3 Destination at time of interview of respondents whose first status was recorded as government scheme, by labour market type (%)
Youth schemes were the first destination of more than one in ten respondents, a figure that is broadly in line with national participation rates on YTS in the early 1980s when these data were collected.4 However, our data show clearly that the uptake of places varied widely according to local conditions and individual trajectories. For example, while just 13 per cent entered YTS as a first destination, this increases to 26 per cent when we consider the second labour market destination (reflecting the experience of school leavers who moved from education in to unemployment − first labour market status − and then moved on to a YTS scheme). Local-level data also show that scheme participation in the depressed labour markets (where participation was a majority experience) was double that found in the prosperous labour markets.
In both studies, the young people were asked to reflect on their experience of YTS. Respondents tended to provide mainly negative explanations for joining, such as being too young to claim unemployment benefit, rather than highlighting an expectation that training would lead to a secure job. Overall, perceptions of training schemes were, at best, ambivalent. However, where schemes were known to be ‘good’, which was usually defined as being well organised with clear learning and training outcomes, then the young people had far more positive views. Further, in the prosperous labour markets perceptions of training schemes were more positive; the young people were far less likely to attend multiple schemes, and there was a far higher probability that they would secure a job on completion of a single programme.
The experience of one of the young respondents in Liverpool illustrates some of the issues very effectively. After leaving school in May 1983, in August he began the first of a series of schemes. The first scheme, with a bookmaker, was described as ‘no good’ as it comprised ‘menial tasks, mostly making tea. Not much to do with training’. By October, he was unemployed again and was signed up for a second training scheme in November. The second scheme included 2 weeks in a college plus block release and proved to be slightly more successful. However, during the course of the programme the employer moved to a new location which proved too far for the respondent to travel, leading to termination after 8 months. The subsequent period of unemployment lasted 6 months and ended with a job as a full-time sales assistant − a position which lasted for only 2 months, at the end of which the respondent was made redundant.
YTS was seen by this respondent and many others who took part in the research as a ‘waste of time’ or, as in this case, a ‘load of rubbish’ and an experience not worth repeating. This case is not untypical of experiences in the most depressed labour markets. With the benefit of hindsight, we can describe these experiences as illustrative of the labour market ‘churning’ that has been described in more contemporary labour markets (Furlong and Cartmel 2004; MacDonald and Marsh 1995). Indeed, the description of the experiences on YTS has remarkable resonance with contemporary descriptions of graduate internships which, it could be argued, operate largely as a type of YTS for unemployed graduates (O’Connor and Bodicoat, 2016).
The experiences of schemes and unemployment in this period are powerfully inter-linked, as illustrated by the previous example. Moreover, the long-term impacts of early unemployment on the future well-being of young adults are well known. Young people who experience poor outcomes in the transition from education to work and enter unemployment or temporary insecure work on leaving education are more likely to experience the long-term ‘scarring effects’ associated with early periods of insecurity. Bell and Blanchflower (2011: 260) have shown how scarring occurs in two ways: first, an early experience of unemployment ‘raises the probability of being unemployed in later years’, and second, such experiences also lead to a later wage penalty and lower earnings in future life.
Our data reveal that the local labour conditions were an important factor in determining the quality of early transitions, and, therefore, scarring is a process driven by labour market conditions. Here, two-thirds (67 per cent) of young people who were initially unemployed in the prosperous labour markets had moved into employment, whereas less than four in ten (37 per cent) of those in declining areas and less than three in ten (27 per cent) in the depressed areas had moved from unemployment to traditional employee roles.
In sum, young people living in prosperous areas were clearly privileged both in terms of initial destinations and in the likelihood of them moving from insecure positions into relatively secure forms of employment. The odds were stacked against those leaving school in the hardest-hit areas moving into secure employment, regardless of whether or not they participated on government schemes. In the depressed labour markets, qualifications provided some advantages, but were not a particularly good investment. In the areas most adversely affected by high levels of unemployment, school leavers were forced to adjust to the idea that there were few employment opportunities open to them. This was often reinforced by the advice provided by teachers and careers professionals, which increasingly and necessarily focused on how to navigate unemployment rather than providing advice on securing non-existent jobs. As one of Hollands’ respondents put it,
‘Everyone was sayin’, everyone didn’t think we’d get a job. Everyone thought we’d go straight on the dole … Yuh had a career lesson, listen, yuh had a career lesson, instead of talkin’ about jobs, they talk about how to sign on the dole’.
(1990: 38−9)
The unprecedented rise in youth unemployment in the early 1980s began to take on more significance as it became clear that this had become a long-term problem. Young people who had left school and failed to find work in the early part of the decade struggled to reverse their fortunes in challenging economic circumstances, and concerns were raised about the future prospects of this ‘lost generation’. In 1983, the Times reported that not only were there gaps in provision for young people, but recurrent spells of unemployment were affecting many:
Long-term unemployment among a ‘forgotten generation’ is pointing to a wide gap in the provisions […]. More than 410,000 of those aged 18−25 have been out of work for more than a year … Recurrent spells of unemployment are a serious difficulty for a significant group among the unemployed.
(Times 21 July 1983)
As Ashton and colleagues had concluded, the local labour market ‘was important in determining the young persons’ chances of entering full-time work … and the likelihood of becoming and remaining for long periods unemployed’ (1986: 104). Among those in depressed and declining labour markets, the threat of long-term unemployment had started to become a reality. As we have shown, young people in the depressed labour markets were most likely to leave school and begin their ‘working lives’ as unemployed and fared worst in the long run. These areas were particularly hard hit by the decline in the manufacturing industry and the disappearance of manual jobs that previously provided routes into work for young, unqualified and unskilled school leavers (McDowell 2003). Our data show that the impact of these changes to the manufacturing base in the hardest hit regions, which impacted on men and women alike, had serious consequences.
Psychological well-being
Historically, researchers have paid little attention to either the physical health or the psychological well-being of young people. As West argues in relation to physical health, ‘twenty years ago, the health of young people barely featured on the social health and policy agendas… (re)affirming a widespread but fallacious assumption that youth and health go hand in hand’ (2009: 331). Yet, recent research has shown that young people are increasingly likely to suffer from poor health, both physical and psychological, which can be linked to broader socio-economic changes (Eckersley 2009). Indeed, Bell and Blanchflower (2011), using data from the 1958 National Child Development Study birth cohort study, have highlighted the negative long-term impacts of early experiences of unemployment on measures including life satisfaction, health status, mental health and job satisfaction.
Undoubtedly, adverse circumstances, such as long periods of unemployment, can have a significant impact on mental health, and the potential consequences of unemployment on the psychological well-being of young people was beginning to be recognised in the 1980s. Both Ashton and colleagues (1986) and Roberts and colleagues (1987) included questions about respondents’ subjective feelings about unemployment in their studies. While not focused explicitly on psychological well-being and mental health, these questions were intended to help the researchers understand the individual experience of unemployment and recession.
Lack of money and boredom were significant issues, and many respondents mentioned the difficulties of finding work and worry about future prospects as being problematic aspects of unemployment. An interesting geographical disparity found by Ashton and colleagues was that the negative impact of the difficulty experienced in finding work was more pronounced among young people in one of the declining labour markets (Stafford) than in the depressed labour market of Sunderland. This finding, they suggest, may have reflected the acceptance of the futility of seeking work in a depressed labour market. This sense of an adjustment by young people being made to local labour market conditions is reinforced by the findings of Banks and Ullah (1988), who reported that it proved difficult to identify a simple relationship between length of unemployment and psychological well-being of young people in the 1980s. This, they argue, suggests that ‘some form of adjustment to unemployment has been made, even though … the young unemployed report significantly more psychological distress than their employed counterparts’ (1988: 151).
The idea of young people having to adjust psychologically to an increasingly challenging labour market is further supported by their finding that young people who left school at the start of the recession (1981) were more adversely affected by the experience of unemployment than the later school leavers. This suggests that the younger group of school leavers had lower expectations of the labour market, having been exposed to the widely publicised experience of earlier leavers, and there had ‘possibly … been a collective adjustment to poor employment prospects’ (p. 70).
With a wide range of contemporary studies now showing clear linkages between young people’s labour market experiences and patterns of psychological malaise, we can probably assume that, although lacking visibility, labour market conditions in the 1980s took a toll on the mental health and well-being of those young people entering the labour market in this era. Indeed, Rutter and Smith (1995) have argued that psycho-social disorders among young people have been increasing since the 1970s (perhaps earlier) and suggest that there is a clear association between unemployment and psychological disorders, depression, anxiety and self-esteem as well as reductions in happiness and life satisfaction.
Conclusion
The 1980s was a watershed decade; some of the trends that were visible in the 1970s escalated and, under Margaret Thatcher, a neo-liberal agenda underpinned the policy response, which was transformed from one that was broadly sympathetic to the plight of youth to one that regarded young people with suspicion. While the immediate post-war decades represented what, in retrospect, was a boom period of youth employment (though not without some complexities (Goodwin and O’Connor 2005)), the 1980s saw in a spectacular rise in youth unemployment and a transformation of youth transitions which, with the rapid growth of schemes, meant that transitions for significant numbers of young people became multi-stage.
With the transition from school to work in the 1980s coming to be symbolised by two key themes − high levels of youth unemployment and YTS − we must be mindful that, while young people in some areas suffered extremely badly, others were minimally affected. Indeed, our academic preoccupation with the 1980s as a time of ‘spectacular’ youth transitions has meant that the ordinary youth of this period have often been ignored, and it is easy to forget that many young people continued to make one-step transitions into what we have termed the traditional zone. These transitions were certainly mediated by geography, class, gender and ethnicity, yet what we have seen from the 1980s data is that the origins of the current experiences of young people, so widely discussed by academics, policy makers, politicians and the media, can, as this chapter has shown, be traced back to this era. In this chapter, we have suggested that non-standard forms of employment began to increase in the more prosperous areas, labour markets where the balance of opportunities was already skewed towards the service sector.
Almost 40 years on, it is evident that the changes brought about by industrial decline, coupled with the increasing numbers of young people entering higher and further education, tightened benefit regulations and increasing levels of government intervention were already beginning in the 1980s. What we are witnessing now is, to some extent, simply an extension of what began almost four decades ago; the short-term, temporary and insecure work that characterises the current recession was also in evidence for these young workers in the 1980s (Furlong and Cartmel 1997).
There is some evidence to suggest that, over time, the position of these 1980s school leavers improved, and there was movement between the zones of insecurity and traditional employment. However, this was mainly evident among young people who had the advantage of living in a prosperous labour market. Here, young people had begun to invest in education in the realisation that new opportunities required qualifications. The most vulnerable youth faced far more problematic transitions, particularly in the most disadvantaged labour markets. In these areas the opposite trends were apparent, and transitions into unemployment, insecurity and precarious work alongside government schemes were well on the way to becoming established trajectories for young people. As Ashton and colleagues (1986) suggested, the 1980s saw the emergence of a strata of insecure workers: ‘of insecurities and fragmentation among those with the fewest cards to play in the job market’ (Fenton and Dermott 2006: 219).
Notes
1The Social Democratic Party subsequently merged with the Liberal Party to become the Liberal Democrats.
2What we refer to as the ‘punitive turn’ was marked by several pieces of legislation introduced in the early 1980s. See Mack and Lansley (1985).
3In this era, unemployment benefit regulations were framed so that it was acceptable to work for a limited number of hours a week while remaining eligible for benefits.
4The more widely quoted figure of one in four young people being engaged in YTS was not a reality until later in the decade (peaking in 1988−9 at 24 per cent (Deakin 1996)).