forwards

The ‘golden age’

There really was a golden age when smooth and rapid school-to-work transitions were the norm. I left school in that era. This was at age 16 in 1957, when I was offered a job in every bank and insurance company to which I applied. In spring 1961 I quit the bank where I had spent nearly 4 years, having been accepted at university. I wanted an immediate boost in pay. The Monday after leaving my bank, I started work in a factory that manufactured floor tiles. The work was tedious and heavy, as were many jobs at that time, and we worked more hours per day than at the bank. We worked overtime into early evenings and on Saturday mornings whenever it was offered: the extra hours were paid at normal rate plus 50 per cent. But it was tough, so I quit and the following day started work in the despatch department of a confectionery factory. These jobs paid an adult wage irrespective of age, unlike the bank, which had a long incremental salary scale. My pay was 50 per cent higher (without overtime) doing manual jobs. My intellectual interest in the entry into employment began at that time. How was it possible to stick that kind of work for life?

Not everything was golden in those years. There was the 11-plus. This did not consign three-quarters of all children to a scrapheap (there was a genuine alternative route through further education), but it assured those who passed (and, more significant, their parents) that they were safe: they would not face lifetimes in hard, tedious jobs. Very few leavers from grammar schools (such as my own) progressed to university. There was plenty of talent for the ‘alternative route’ to recruit. Roughly half of grammar school boys left at 16 (or quit earlier at age 15), when most started apprenticeships. Grammar school girls went into office jobs.

There were men’s jobs and women’s jobs. The Youth Employment Bureaux had separate sections for boys and girls. Adult employment exchanges had men’s and women’s entrances, registers and jobs. When doing the same jobs, women were usually paid less than men. Race discrimination was normal and blatant prior to Britain’s first Race Relations Act in 1965. Homosexuality was illegal until 1967. So was abortion. The contraceptive pill became available from 1961, but its use by young single women did not become normal until the 1970s. The 1950s and 1960s were the decades of ‘shotgun weddings’. Young single mothers were told that they ‘had’ to have their babies adopted. This was the age when youth was described as a ‘brief flowering period’.

Today’s young people would not choose to recreate the conditions of the 1950s and 1960s even if they were able to do so, but those of us who grew up then did benefit from full employment, and most of us who went to university had our fees paid in full and lived on maintenance grants and vacation jobs. There was net upward social mobility, and even the immobile were able to enjoy superior living standards to their parents. All this was despite some abject policy failures during the post-war reconstruction of Britain. The 1944 Education Act did not lead to ‘parity of esteem’ between different types of secondary schools. This was the first of successive education policy failures that were supported by the left-leaning educational intelligentsia at that time. It was followed by comprehensive schools, which were introduced without developing a comprehensive curriculum, and unsuccessful attempts to remedy social class inequalities in outcomes through positive discrimination. Even so, young people’s education proved an adequate preparation for the labour market. Most of those who were affected could not understand why they were being detained in school until age 15 in 1947 (when the statutory leaving age was raised from 14), and likewise when it was raised to 16 in 1972.

There have been subsequent attempts to label to post-war decades as a dark age when the country was over-burdened with taxes, and when employers were held to ransom by powerful trade union ‘barons’ and shop stewards. No: it was a high point. At the beginning of this book, these years are presented as the high point of a century-long civilising of employment relations. I see the decades as high points in the achievements of organised labour and its political arm, the Labour Party, aided by the remnants of wartime social solidarity. I refuse to regard this brief episode in our history as a never-to-be-repeated past. Sure, with hindsight, there were mistakes. The nationalised corporation was made a too-dominant model of public ownership. The welfare standards set by Beveridge and his predecessors were so low that in an increasingly affluent society they meant poverty rather than security. The trade unions and their political representatives did not know how to address expanding sections of the workforce: women and white-collar employees. Even so, the decades are a reminder of what remains possible. No one wants to go back. This is impossible. Young people in the 1950s and 1960s knew little about the experiences of predecessors who grew up in the ‘hungry 1930s’ and had wartime youth experiences. Similarly, young people in the twenty-first century do not compare their circumstances with those who were young 40 or 50 years ago. Why should they? Most people live in and accept the present, whatever its flaws and merits. However, academics must be able to look back and understand how and why genuine full employment was possible, and how it might be recovered. It never meant jobs for life. Workers could and did move. There were plenty of young job hoppers. Some took breaks. They worked for a bit then did nothing for a while. Neither jobs nor unemployment were considered tolerable for long unbroken periods. It was jobs that had to wait, not job seekers.

The entry into employment was not a problem, and therefore was not a top issue for youth researchers at that time. The hot topics were delinquency (recorded crime had doubled in the 1950s) and the new youth cultures which most adults found both incomprehensible and vaguely threatening. Psychology was the lead discipline in youth studies and had held this position ever since the American psychologist, G. Stanley Hall, discovered adolescence at the beginning of the twentieth century. The standard explanations of delinquency and youth cultures were in terms of raging hormones, changing body shapes and the need to establish an adult identity.

All this changed in the 1970s. Youth and adult unemployment returned. They had not become things of the past. The economists who had taught me at university were wrong on this. Psychology had no explanations. Sociology became the lead discipline in youth studies; the entry into employment became, and has remained, the central youth research issue; and my own career in the research field had a solid base.

The 1980s

This book’s legacy datasets are from the 1980s, but the authors recognise that the trends which were then transforming youth labour markets had begun much earlier. Britain led Europe’s post-1945 economic recovery and consolidation of a welfare state; then, although it was not seen like this at the time, Britain began to lead Europe into a post-industrial and neo-liberal age. The immediate cause of the rise in youth (and adult) unemployment in the 1970s was the loss of orders, output and therefore jobs in Britain’s manufacturing industries. This trend had been noted in the 1960s. It accelerated in the 1970s, when quadrupled oil prices sent shock waves throughout the global economy. This was a shock from which Britain’s economy was expected to recover, and throughout the 1970s youth (and adult) unemployment were treated as a temporary problem which required special measures of finite duration, after which normality would return to the economy and labour markets.

The 1970s is Britain’s decade with no historical legacy. In the post-war decades, Britain (and other Western countries) created social democracies. The 1980s saw the dawn of the ongoing neo-liberal age. Apart from punk, the 1970s can be recalled only as the decade when monetary inflation reached record twentieth-century levels (it peaked at 26 per cent), when more days were lost to strikes than at any time since then or in the 1950s and 1960s, and when governments led by both major political parties struggled, ultimately unsuccessfully, to reach agreements with employers and trade unions to control rates of increase in wages and prices. Everything changed in the 1980s. Unemployment (which rose to new record heights) and monetarist policies (limiting the cash that was available for consumers and businesses to spend) brought inflation under control and, along with new industrial relations laws, sapped the power of organised labour.

This treatment of youth unemployment as a temporary problem changed in the 1980s. It was accepted that the former normality had gone for ever. Deindustrialisation (the new term for the decline of manufacturing) accelerated again. Unemployment rose to new post-war record levels. The pace of change was due to the government’s monetarist (what would now be called austerity) policies, and the deregulation of markets, which meant allowing ‘lame ducks’ to sink. The casualties included major steel plants, car assembly factories and, eventually, most of the country’s coal mines. It was accepted that the economy and labour markets were being permanently restructured. This led to the divisions of youth labour markets, identified in this volume (though not seen so clearly by researchers such as myself at that time), into traditional, full-time permanent jobs, a heavily constrained (basically unemployed) sector and an in-between zone of liminality. Showing that these three labour market sectors have persisted to the present day is the book’s most startling finding. This appears to be the new macro-opportunity structure that awaits Britain’s beginning workers. The persistence of these divisions is despite all the intervening changes in education and the economy. Looking back, it is particularly noteworthy that in the relatively buoyant local youth labour markets in the 1980s, unemployment was being contained mainly by the creation of ‘liminal’ positions rather than traditional, full-time permanent jobs.

More was changing in the 1980s than is evident in the legacy datasets. By the end of the 1980s, deindustrialisation had ceased to be the main trend that was responsible for all the restructuring. The use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) was spreading throughout the economy. Major service sectors (banks for example), as well as the remaining manufacturing industries, began replacing labour with these new technologies. Also, labour and all other markets were deregulated during the 1980s. Labour markets were deregulated by disempowering trade unions and abolishing the Wages Councils that had set minimum rates in low-paid, weakly unionised industries such as agriculture and retail. Capital was deregulated and allowed to flow freely into and out of the country. Financial businesses were deregulated in one ‘big bang’ in 1986. It took many years for the effects of these changes to become fully apparent. A short-term outcome was that new ‘masters of the universe’ working in the City of London’s financial services began receiving spectacularly high salaries and bonuses. Meanwhile, the UK workforce was growing, due partly to natural increase but mainly due to increased labour force participation by women, and immigration. There is little chance of closing the door. If workers are not allowed to enter higher-wage countries, the jobs can be offshored.

The 1980s brought a series of new education and training initiatives. These were led by employers, not a left-leaning intelligentsia. All the new initiatives failed. The Youth Opportunities Programme, then successive versions of Youth Training, turned out to be dead ends rather than stepping stones for too many entrants. Economists who advocated labour market deregulation were allowed to experiment. From 1982, the government began subsidising employers who reduced youth rates of pay. Youth unemployment was supposedly due to young people’s exorbitant wage expectations. Wages were encouraged to drift down to the level at which the labour markets would clear. Young people with little or no occupational experience were assisted in starting their own businesses. This was supposed to promote the spread of an enterprise culture. Most of the start-ups flopped. However, in the twenty-first century, ‘survival self-employment’ has continued to be a growth sector, and real wages beneath the middle have continued to decline. Another policy failure was the launch of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) in the mid-1980s. Operating alongside the Youth Training Scheme, these new qualifications were supposed to create a firm base for a new alternative vocational route into employment. Their reception in industry was made clear to me at the end of the 1980s, when an employer explained that NVQ stood for ‘not very qualified’.

The 1990s and 2000s

The 1980s was the decade of schemes, but these new routes were never genuinely accepted by young people. They could distinguish between good and bad schemes – those where training was by an employer with the prospect of a permanent job to follow, and those that were dead ends or slave labour − but schemes were never normalised, accepted as a useful first step into the workforce. The step might be accepted as unavoidable by an individual, but he or she could see that others were making transitions straight into proper jobs, probably, and increasingly so over time, after a period in extended, post-compulsory education. Government-supported training schemes are still operating today, but young people often need to be coerced on board by the threat of punitive sanctions (the withdrawal of unemployment benefit). There have always been more appealing routes towards employment. The legacy datasets show that throughout the 1980s many young people (how many depended on where they lived) continued to make traditional one-step transitions into proper jobs at age 16−18. Those who were staying in education beyond age 16 were often doing part-time jobs in which they could earn as much as the Youth Training allowance.

During the 1980s, economists joined sociologists in investigating young people’s new routes towards employment. The economists’ interest was in returns on investments in human capital measured in chances of avoiding unemployment and earnings when in jobs. A consistent finding was that qualifications earned in education were a better bet than government-supported training schemes. Young people were reading labour market signals correctly when they regarded schemes as a last resort. The economists also found that academic qualifications yielded superior returns to vocational qualifications. Again, young people appear to have read labour market signals correctly. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s comprehensive secondary schools were steadily increasing the proportions of young people passing General Certificate of Education (GCE) O levels then progressing to A levels. The numbers leapt from 1988 onwards, when GCE O levels were merged with Certificates of Secondary Education (CSEs). Then, at the beginning of the 1990s, there was a rapid expansion in the number of students progressing into higher education. This was followed by a steady rise throughout the rest of the 1990s and into the 2000s, so that today roughly half of each cohort has enrolled on a ‘tertiary’ course by age 30. In the 1990s, governments ceased promoting vocational qualifications (typically Business and Technology Education Council [BTEC] qualifications and then the General NVQs that became available from 1990) as an alternative routes to different careers and began claiming that they were the equivalents of academic qualifications, accepted for university entrance.

As well as learning to use new words such as deindustrialisation and globalisation and acronyms such as ICT, in the 1980s we were also told about the virtues of flexible firms and labour markets, and about a soon-to-arrive knowledge economy. The latest technologies were to eliminate swaths of routine jobs while an unlimited number of high-level, high-value-added, high-salary jobs would be available for all young people who were suitably qualified. The expansion of employment at management and professional levels that had been underway throughout the twentieth century was to accelerate. Advanced economies would do the world’s brain work because their advanced education systems would produce the world’s best-qualified workforces. How wrong can you be? Britain’s school leavers in the 1980s were the last cohort to enter labour markets in which the proportion of jobs at management and professional levels was increasing. During the 1990s, ‘emerging market economies’ began to outperform the West in producing university graduates. Yet, into the twenty-first century, UK governments continued encouraging young people to invest in their human capital by enrolling in higher education. Former polytechnics and colleges of higher education were upgraded to universities. Much of the old ‘alternative route’ through further education was absorbed into a new mass higher education system. Today’s graduates know the outcomes. Student maintenance grants have been replaced by loans. Maintenance loans are accompanied by fee loans. The UK government pays the ludicrously high rate of £9,000 per student per year in a mass university system. Students are encouraged to incur debts that they will never repay. Many graduates now struggle in the ‘zone of liminality’ before starting careers in jobs which once required just GCE O levels. Graduates in better-paid jobs find themselves being charged more in interest per month than they repay. They face 30 years in which they will pay a super-tax of 9 per cent on all earnings in excess of £21,000.

However, there is now a genuine, attractive alternative. Some employers have discovered that they can attract 18- and 19-year-olds with top A levels onto apprenticeships in which they will be trained in work situations, gain degrees through part-time study or sandwich years and join graduate career tracks in their early twenties with no debt. The problem is that, as in the 1950s, there are far too few of these higher-level apprenticeships to satisfy demand.

Looking forward

The main lesson I learn from looking back is that I did not foresee any of the last 50 years. So, all forward looking has to be tentative. The top probability is that change will continue. Britain is part of an inherently unstable global market economy. There could be an expansion of the ‘sharing economy’ – more Ubers. A citizens’ wage is possible, but less likely. There seems sure to be more government initiatives in youth education and training, and more projects for researchers to seek outcomes.

We are now deep into a neo-liberal era. This began in Britain when full employment ceased to be a top priority in economic policy. It was initially displaced by control of the money supply in order to suppress inflation, accompanied by progressive deregulation of all markets which were allowed to set levels of employment (and therefore non-employment). Since the 2007−9 financial crisis, reducing government deficits has become another priority throughout the European Union.

Labour market conditions are actually worse than in Britain for young people throughout most of Europe, not to mention North Africa and the Middle East. Britain has been rather good at creating ‘liminal’ jobs – self-employed drivers, cleaners, gardeners and so on, plus jobs in hotels, restaurants and other consumer services. Young people must now continue in full-time learning (attending school or college in practice) until age 18. Higher education participation could edge upwards towards 75 per cent. Universities have a financial incentive to recruit. Students may or may not believe that they are investing in their human capital and that this will pay off for them eventually, but for many the appeal is that they see no better immediate alternative to 3 years of student lifestyle. They may regard a degree as the minimum necessary to compete seriously for any full-time job of indefinite duration. Extended liminality in which they taste different jobs prior to settling down may also be normalised.

Youth researchers know, but young adults may still be unaware, that collectively they will fail to match their parents’ achievements. Age-for-age they are earning less, and they occupy inferior housing. Today’s young people will eventually face retirement on inferior pensions, which many will supplement with another extended period of employment in the liminal zone as their working lives stutter to a close. Our politicians and business leaders keep telling us that we have a strong economy, and these leaders may continue to define those who are struggling as the problem. Many voters still appear to find these messages credible.

There are winners. The proportion of GDP accounted for by wages and salaries has been declining since the 1980s. Top incomes have rocketed further upwards. Graduates from ‘top universities’ have the best chances of stepping directly onto career ladders that could lead to these dizzy heights. They feel underpaid when earning ‘only’ twice or three times the average salary. More people own more than one dwelling. More households are renting. Landlordism has returned to Britain. The country is producing more higher education graduates per capita than any other European country and more school leavers who are deficient in basic skills (around a fifth lack basic numeracy and literacy). Books that draw attention to these neo-liberal realities occasionally become bestsellers. This sparks bouts of media indignation. Meanwhile, most young people and their families continue doing the best they can for themselves under ongoing conditions.

This era will not last for ever. We have not reached the end of history, but at present it is impossible to foresee how and when the end will come. We need ideas with which to build a new political generation. We need an escape plan from neo-liberalism and a vision of an alternative future, hopefully one which returns full employment to the top of the economic policy agenda. This will squeeze the heavily constrained and liminal zones in Britain’s labour markets for job seekers of all ages, and empty what are really expensive waiting rooms, currently designated as education and training.

Ken Roberts
University of Liverpool