Low-cost generation?

On April 10th 2006, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin reluctantly agreed to scrap the youth labour law which allowed a two-year trial period for employees aged under 26, during which bosses could end a contract without explanation, after widespread opposition by students, workers and unions prompted strikes across the country.

Just as in 1994, when then Prime Minister Balladour facing a month of street protests by students and unions had to abandon a plan allowing employers to pay young workers below the legal minimum wage, the refusal by young people to be treated as second-class citizens and workers resounded throughout France. The cry was unanimous: “we are not disposable”.

“I feel I must be here [demonstrating] because I deserve a future and not just a job where I can be sacked at any time. These contracts are no good: they only promote precarity”, said Mark (26) during one of the daily marches that took place during almost 3 weeks in most French cities. Most of the demonstrators were university students and graduates who find it harder and harder to find jobs that live up to their expectations or qualifications: “I left university almost two years ago and I’m still looking for a decent job. I can probably find work flogging tires or soap, but I haven’t studied for four years to do that”, says Chaouki (24).

In France, 22% of people under 25 are unemployed –twice the overall rate of unemployment (9.6%). But unemployment is not the biggest threat facing French youth; what really is affecting the lives, expectations and future of young people is insecurity. The French National Institute of Statistics (INSEE) shows that while permanent jobs grew by just 2% in France between 1990 and 2000, there was an explosion of temporary jobs – an increase of 130%. In the same period, internships and subsidised contracts increased by 65% and fixed-term contracts by 60%.

“We won’t have a stable future with these contracts. We, young people, want real jobs” says Leticia –but these seem to be disappearing. In France, 90% of people under 18 and 2/3 of those under 26 enter active life with a precarious contract (short-term, low-pay), and only 45% of those with short-term contracts get permanent jobs within three years. Therefore, most graduates who do find work are caught on an endless treadmill of dreary short-term jobs, interspersed with unemployed spells. Life is even harder in the banlieues, home of the revolts in late 2005, where youth unemployment reaches 50% and the informal economy is sweeping.

A similar picture accross Europe

The situation is not much different in Spain, Italy and Greece, with youth unemployment rates of 22, 24 and 27%. In Germany, the existence of an apprenticeship system brings this figure down to 15%, which conceals a reality where precarity, unemployment and unfulfilled expectations are also widespread. Eurostat figures show how the share of employees with temporary contracts in the enlarged EU keeps rising every year. Overall, 14.9% of the European workers are currently working with a temporary contract. This average, however, hides deep disparities by age and Member State, since young people (15 to 24) are much more likely to have a temporary contract (43.2% do), and rates range from the less than 5% in Estonia, Malta and Ireland to the 20% of Poland and the 34.4% of Spain. According to the Spanish union Comisiones Obreras, though, this figure is really over 57%, and will keep growing, since estimates show 9 out of every 10 contracts young people sign now in Spain are temporary. “I’ve even had 2-hour contracts, when I worked in Iberia. Then I got a permanent contract in another company, but they fired me within the 2-month trial period, without warning and no right to claim unemployment benefits” says Maria. “Nowadays, even permanent contracts are disguised temporary contracts. They say they are permanent to motivate you and get State subsidies, but then they fire you within the trial period.”

Growing insecurity is also the norm in Eastern Europe, where economic liberalisation put an end to the comprehensive system which allocated graduate students to jobs in the centrally planned economy without any new measures to ensure that their trainig was not wasted and useful jobs were available for all. Here too unemployment is disproportionately high amongst young people. “In my parents' time things were much easier, Yugoslavia was a more or less planned economy in which jobs were almost guaranteed, and once you got it, you had it for life” says Aleksej.

Underlyng trends

What changes in the European labour market lie behind these statistics and personal experiences? According to the economist Emilio Faenza, the reasons might be found in the 70 and 80, “when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank promoted the liberalisation of work and capital markets, also precipitating a crisis in the welfare state.”

In the last few years, and despite the language used in the official documents (see Lisbon Agreements), the EU has urged all Member States to follow the Danish model of “flex-security”. Thus, in order to promote flexibility, social benefits have been cut back, pensions have been privatised, firing workers has been made easier and cheaper and new forms of temporary employment have been created, like the “Contrats Nouvelle Embauche” in France, the “Contratti per Progetto” in Italy and the “Contrats Actives” in Belgium. The flip side of the coin, though, ie. job security and access to training or career development opportunities, is yet to be addressed.

The result is a dual workforce with first and second-class workers, divided between security “haves” and security “have-nots” –mainly young people, immigrants and women, forced to pursue the treadmill of temporary positions and study courses, to accept dual-wage scales, to work in positions for which they are overqualified, to work as “false” independent contractors or self-employed; forced, at the end of the day, to give up any kind of social protection.

“Young people are the poors of the XXI century”, stated Louis Chauvel in Le Nouvel Observateur in August 2005 “I am an architect, I speak 3 languages and I make less than 1,000 euros a month, without a contract, in a private studio. I have never had a contract, nor holidays, nor a bonus; my car is 15 years old and this month I’ve had to stop buying the paper every day because I can’t afford 30 to spend 30 more euros a month. I rent an apartment with my girlfriend and I don’t feel cheated –I feel they are throuwing us in the bin.” These are the words of Daniel, a 29-year old from Seville (Spain).

According to sociologist Enrique Gil Calvo, “This generation is already realizing that the future is not like it used to be in the old novels anymore, where the main character would start at the bottom and end up at the top, triumphant. The future is not a straight line anymore. That’s why they seem to go around in circles, wandering continuously, unable to find a way out.”

The consequences of job insecurity and precarity spread way beyond the world of work to affect social and family models, since the lack of time, security and purchasing power has a direct impact on the decision or young people to leave their family homes, have children and lead independent lives. “We will live with our parents for ever. With these conditions we can’t rent an apartment nor buy an old car without their help”, says Bo, a student from Paris. According to Quim, a 29-year old from Barcelona with 2 jobs, “With such level of precarity, we can’t have long-term personal, family or collective plans.”
According to Isidro, a 33-year old activist from Ecologistas en Acción in Madrid, all this has immersed young people in an identity crisis, to which the system responds by creating a false sense of fulfilment based on consumption. Gabor, from Hungary, agrees: the “spell of consumption” is depoliticizing young people.

But is that so?

Resistance – open and beneath the surface

Talking to people involved in the French protests and surfing the Net for the feelings and opinions of young people affected by neoliberalism and the low-wage economy, it is striking to see how many people feel the urge to state that they are not “militants”, but “normal people”. “I'm a very normal person, not a ‘leader’ of the movement! Not a revolutionary, a curious student, that's all” wrote Jeff, a student from Nantes (France) on an Italian website, to then sum-up the French protests as a way to “take our place in society! We're not conservative, we know we need reforms and we want them! But not in this way. We only want a job, a flat and be respected by banks! It's not a utopic thing... so it's a very serious movement (…) We don't want to be a product, to be hired and fired each week.”

Distrust for mainstream “politics” is widespread, as well as a strong need to make oneself heard: “We are students and later we want to have jobs, but we see that the situation is getting worse in France on all fronts. We have to come here and make ourselves heard. The vote is not enough; they approve laws without even asking us our opinion. It’s not right.” (Anne, 21, Paris).

Surprisingly, and despite all the theorising about young people’s apathy, materialism and individualism, it seems that disillusionment and distrust is giving way to a new culture of political participation which is based on direct involvement on one-off issue politics. Studies show that interest in politics among young people is not decreasing at all, but that “the previously used indicators of voting and participation in political parties are no longer adequate for measurement of political engagement”. Young people show willingness to demonstrate, sign petitions and strike, as well as get loosely involved in new social movements and new political organizations.

Moreover, beneath the individualist surface it is not difficult to find signs that the way young people relate to politics and the outside world is producing new identities, new kinds of informal solidarity and transnational connection.

If you ask a young East European how they “resist” or avoid persistent unemployment, their answer is very likely to be “by getting out”: “If you travel 500 km westwards, you receive five times as much for the same amount of work. And if you dont see any chances to be able to build up your life, that's a tempting option”, says Gabor, a 25-year old from Hungary. In Romania alone, 2 million people have left the country to find jobs in the West. “Many of my friends already work abroad, although it is usually in seasonal jobs in the tourist industry in Italy. Many people think of emigrating and making a normal life. In Croatia it is almost impossible to live on your own, you always depend on your family” continues Aleksej.

However, finding work abroad is not only a popular option in Eastern Europe. More and more young people from Southern and Western Europe leave their county of origin seeking a better future, mostly to go to the UK and the US. The French population of London, for instante, is now estimated to be between 40.000 and 200.000; meanwhile, in the last 10 years, 36.000 Italians have chosen to settle in New York, according to the Metro New York emigration office.

Of course, this cannot simplistically be lumped together with the organized militancy of hundreds and thousands of French students demonstrating daily against a new temporary contract, but young people are clearly “voting with their feet” when they leave family and friends behind because they can’t find a future in their own countries. In France in the last few weeks, many of these young expatriates have walked the streets together with their the French youth.

We can thus see how individualism and consummerism don’t necessarily mean political apathy, but they do seem to change the ways people engage with political issues. Young people seem to feel more comfortable by expressing their political points of view individually and through their individual choices: be it on the Internet and through blogs where the personal and the political go hand in hand, be it by painting a wall and leaving a highly personalized political statement or through making political choices in the act of consumption (via boicots, for instance). Worth mentioning, for instance, is the “Generazione 1.000 Euro” blog, that tells the story of twenty-seven-year-old Claudio, who struggles to achieve an enjoyable lifestyle on a very limited budget, and has been so popular that has become a meeting point for a whole generation struggling to survive with less than 1,000 euros a month.

Therefore, it looks like instead of giving up their identity for a “theory” or “party”, young people seem to use social and political involvement to “express” their identity –thus the high level of creativity and play found in the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements, for instance.

The picture that emerges is that of a system that has created a framework designed to exclude large sections of the population, and specially young people, from a conventional way of life, and thus leaving them aside from a political process which insists on not delivering and disempowering. Whether the “riots of today are just a preface to the serious conflicts which are inevitable to break out in many democratic states”, as Boris Kagarlitzky says, is yet to be seen, but repression is breeding resistance (even if not in the ways we might be used to) and new social movements are being built on the basis of a strong level of political and social committment by a whole generation that refuses to hand their lifes and their world over to corporate-driven globalisation.