Le McJob

Anya Kamenetz

March 24, 2006

Anya Kamenetz is a columnist for the Village Voice and author of Generation Debt: Why Now is a Terrible Time to Be Young, about student loan debt, the job market, and other matters of generational politics, published by Riverhead Books in February 2006.

The current youth uprising in France has caught international observers off guard. The country is now under threat of a general strike on March 28. Over a million students and workers marched on March 18 and 19, not just against a discriminatory law—Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's new “First Employment Contract” would make it easier to fire workers under 26 during their first two years on the job—but against a society that seems to have no place for them.

“What the student demonstrations are saying is that the young refuse to live in the world as it is," the head of France's main student association told a South African paper.

The youth unemployment rate in France is 22 percent.

Even the country’s most educated children are finding little but unpaid internships or temporary jobs, to say nothing of the despair plaguing young immigrants in urban neighborhoods where unemployment has been clocked at 40 percent.

In the irony of all ironies, this new policy was introduced as a direct reaction to the riots and torched cars of last fall; and yet the fire this time is coming from the middle class as much as the poor.

Yet amid the debates about market forces, Muslim integration into Europe and the barricades of ’68, no one seems to be asking the most important question: Will increased labor flexibility actually improve youth employment? The numbers suggest not.

We have a name for the French phenomenon here in the United States: Generation Debt. Nearly every developed country has sky-high youth unemployment rates relative to the general population, and it is always working class youth and ethnic minorities who bear the brunt of the problem. According to Eurostat, France’s youth unemployment rate is a little over twice the 9.5 percent general unemployment rate.

In the United States, the unemployment rate for the general population was a low 5 percent in July 2005, but for people in the labor force aged 16-24, the rate was also more than twice as high: 11 percent. For young black men, it was twice as high again: 23.5 percent.

It could not be an overabundance of restrictions on employers in the United States that produces the high youth unemployment rate. We have the most “flexible” labor market in the West, including a historically record-low minimum wage, a prevalence of temporary and part-time jobs and no mandatory employer benefits such as health care. We haven’t officially made it easier to fire young people, but it’s already just about as easy as it could be. And still young people lag behind in finding work.

The single problem that can be found in all these countries?  Youth dislocation as the result of rapid social change. Educational requirements for many jobs have increased, technology moves faster, competition is global, a large baby-boom generation is living longer and healthier and staying at their posts and the old employer-employee lifetime contract is weakening just about everywhere. Thus, young people are facing many a slip ‘twixt school and work—what German sociologist Andreas Walther calls “yo-yo transitions.”

Youth unemployment is no trifle. Economists have shown through longitudinal studies that it leads to "scarring"—long-lasting wage effects for people who spend their formative years searching fruitlessly for work. A British study  from February 2004 found those who were unemployed in their late teen years and early 20s suffered a wage penalty of 8 percent 20 years later, even if they hadn’t been out of work since.

In the United States, a front-page New York Times article reported last week that high-school dropout rates for African-American men were over 50 percent in some areas, and that jobless rates for those without a diploma had climbed steadily despite an economic expansion, to 72 percent in 2004.

This bleak picture is not inevitable. Germany, nearly alone among developed countries, boasted low overall unemployment rates throughout the 1990s, with youth unemployment rates very close to the general rate. The secret? Sixty-five to 70 percent of its teenagers enter so-called “dual” apprenticeship programs—featuring on-the-job training combined with classroom time. There is a strong social consensus that all should take part in vocational training, and companies, the government and trainees themselves share the cost. 

By contrast, in the United States, high financial barriers and a debt-based financing system keep a disproportionate percentage of working-class youth out of college, and vocational programs are fragmentary. In rejecting any type of “tracking,” we have accepted an illusory image of freedom. Only half  of all young people receive any post-secondary training, and only 8.4 percent of the population earned an associate’s degree in 2004, the most common type of vocational education.

France has a more highly developed vocational track than we do, but with more of an emphasis on classroom time versus working hours, the system seems to produce more perpetual students than it does workers. 

Education is no panacea. But Germany’s example does show that the right kind of education system—one that represents a compact between employers, students and society at large—can indeed make a difference in the lives of people just starting out in the workforce. The United States would be wise to take note before our own “children left behind” take to the streets.