Youth unemployment - a lesson from history
Release Date 25 November 2011
A historian at the University of Reading has said today's £1billion government plan, announced today by the deputy prime minister, is unlikely to change the long-term problem of youth unemployment.
With a record one million 16 to 24-year-olds out of work, the government hopes the scheme to pay half the wages of youngsters taken on by private-sector employers for six months will provide hope for the one-fifth of young people who are currently not in work, education or training.
But Dr Matthew Worley, Reader in History, University of Reading, said lessons from the past showed that such schemes were likely to fail to reverse a long-term trend of increasing youth unemployment in the UK.
"The shift away from full employment as an objective of all parties and governments was part of the collapse of the post-war consensus during the 1970s," he said.
"Since then, the economic policies pursued by both Conservative and Labour governments have accepted a pool of unemployed labour as a built-in product - indeed necessity - of free market capitalism.
"Full employment meant strong trade unions, high wages and, it was argued, limited business dynamism. As a result, youth unemployment has been a problem for some time, though obviously worsening at times of economic downturn.
"The measures introduced today, like in the 1980s, will have a minimal effect. Last time, schemes like YOP (the Youth Opportunities programme) and YTS (Youth Training Scheme) helped some young people gain work experience, but too often allowed employers to take on cheap labour for a limited time before replacing one YTS worker with another. It does nothing for the structural unemployment and wider problem of long-term unemployment which has become a depressing norm."
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For more information or interview requests please contact Pete Castle, University of Reading press officer, on 0118 378 7391 or p.castle@reading.ac.uk.
Dr Worley is a historian and Director of Research in the School of Humanities at the University of Reading and has researched the effect of the policies of 1970s and 1980s governments on young people, and the resulting impact on society and culture.
The University of Reading is one of the UK's top research intensive universities, and is ranked as one of the top 200 universities in the world. The Department of History is a well-resourced for both teaching and research. The Department is also linked with the University's Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), one of three museums owned and run by the University of Reading.