“Let’s respond to the grim figures and assessments of the Milburn report by intensifying our resolve, campaigning on the structural and political issues that have driven this crisis.”
In our Red Weekly Column, Fraser McGuire looks at the Milburn Report’s troubling findings on youth unemployment — and what the trade union movement must do to fight back.
The Government’s new report into youth unemployment and economic inactivity, headed by Alan Milburn, was released earlier this week. It makes for pretty grim reading. The headline statistic is that the number of young people neither working nor learning (NEET) has passed one million, for the first time in 13 years.
The review makes clear that a decline in entry-level jobs has been a major factor in youth unemployment, with 1.6 million fewer “low and medium-skilled” jobs in the economy than in previous decades.
On the numbers – Milburn said that young people are now in “a hopeless catch-22 where employers ask for work experience but the opportunities for young people to gain it have narrowed or gone”, and that these numbers could rise further to 1.25 million within 5 years, leading to a “lost generation”.
The number of young people out of employment, training, and education must be treated as a national crisis, and trade unions must go beyond Milburn’s identified drivers of the issues, recognising the deeper structural issues and ensuring that discussion recognises that young people are not responsible for this crisis. The reality is that 84 percent of young people who are ‘NEET’ want a job or training.
Milburn points to mental and physical health challenges, declining numbers of entry level jobs, and a lack of support and investment for skills and education, but the wider context of deindustrialisation, privatisation and marketisation, and the impacts of austerity, must be recognised.
There are immediate demands that trade unions can and must make, but our responses to the current situation have to be underpinned by explicit understanding that these numbers are the predictable result of decades of job losses in manufacturing and production, asset-stripping of public services, deregulation of the job market, and the treatment of young people as a problem to be managed rather than a future generation of workers needing investment.
Diagnosing unemployment as a skills problem or a welfare trap avoids addressing structural issues, fundamentally the spending problem of a government that doesn’t spend enough into the economy to meet the non-government sector’s desire to accumulate financial assets whilst also compensating for the money flowing out of our economy through imports, there simply isn’t enough in the system to employ everyone looking for employment or paid training.
Aggregate demand is too low, as a result of constraining ‘fiscal rules’ and the Bank of England raising interest rates to cool the economy. Workers, especially those in workplaces without collective bargaining and strong trade unions, have the least power in the economy, disproportionately so for the younger, the precarious, and the newly employed.
One of the key demands of unions should relate to mental health. The challenges that Milburn links to youth unemployment and inactivity have without a doubt been exacerbated by austerity and cuts over the past fifteen years, which have seen many youth spaces and community centres disappear, waiting lists at CAMHS skyrocket, and the number of mental health professionals in schools decline significantly.
Trade unions should strengthen campaigns for mental health support for young people, specifically focusing on restoring CAMHS funding, ensuring school counselling in every school, and making community youth workers a statutory provision. This must go alongside resistance to framing that links NEET numbers to the benefits system, puts the responsibility on the individual due to a putative lack of motivation, or fails to address mental health issues as structural and linked to funding cuts.
Furthermore, trade union response to the figures in the Milburn Report must recognise that the collapse of secure and well-paid entry-level employment is inseparable from the collapse of trade union density in the sectors that used to provide it.
Unions must campaign for legislation mandating full union access to workplaces (regardless of number and percentage of employees who are trade union members) with high concentrations of young workers, for the removal of the minimum threshold of 20 employees for statutory trade union recognition processes, and for sectoral bargaining that sets minimum standards across hospitality, retail, logistics, and care, as these are the industries where young workers are most concentrated and most exploited.
Campaigns that recognise and fight decimation of further education funding also link directly into resisting the youth NEET crisis. Colleges cannot provide the quality of provision young people need on the budgets they currently receive. All trade unions, particularly those in education, must build (and in some cases continue) campaigns for a substantial, ring-fenced increase in FE and skills funding, free at the point of use, with trade union representation on governing bodies.
The trade union movement has a responsibility to fight for a better future for the young people who should be in work, training, and education, not just those currently in full employment. More secure industrial jobs will also mean more future trade union members, provided we organise across greenfield and low density sites.
Currently, the number of young people who are NEETs undoubtedly contributes to the lower rates of trade union participation among under 30s, as workers with higher rates of transience or shorter periods of employment will be less likely to join and engage with trade unions.
The need to build renewable and green industries in the face of the climate emergency must be linked with tackling youth unemployment, and should be accompanied by additional funding to expand apprenticeship numbers and training, such as through widening the number of employers that pay into the Growth and Skills Levy, which currently applies to just 2% of employers.
Priority should be given to industries in areas where carbon intensive jobs are being lost, to ensure a real Just Transition, and to prevent further decline in communities who have already experienced the catastrophe of deindustrialisation.
High unemployment isn’t an aberration of our economic system, indeed a large pool of surplus labour means wages are suppressed and inflation kept in check. The ‘free market’ will not solve this crisis, and neither will simply subsidising or incentivising the private sector to provide more employment.
Where the private sector is failing to provide the number of jobs we need, and failing to maintain genuine employment security and good wages, the Government must be able to step in as the employer of last resort, and ensure direct investment, rather than private subsidies, into public services, infrastructure, and green industries.
Let’s respond to the grim figures and assessments of the Milburn report by intensifying our resolve, campaigning on the structural and political issues that have driven this crisis, and doubling down on our organising efforts with young people.
- Fraser McGuire is the Young Members Officer for Unite Hospitality, President of Derby TUC, and an organiser for Arise: A Festival Of Left Ideas. You can follow him on Twitter/X and Instagram.
- The Red Weekly Column will appear each week on Labour Outlook from one of our regular socialist contributors.
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