Danger: Not Enough Young at Work

Why can 't they be like we were.

Perfect in ev 'ry way?

What's the matter with kids today?

One answer is that they cannot find jobs, at least jobs they want to stay in and grow in. The problem has swollen to pandemic proportions since Lyricist Lee Adams wrote Kids for the Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie in 1960. Massive youth unemployment--and the threat of social and political unrest that goes with it--now faces the world's industrialized democracies, adding to an already unnerving brew of mounting inflation, trade imbalances and looming energy shortages. So grave has the problem become that seven major world leaders, including President Jimmy Carter, resolved at the London economic summit to "exchange experience and ideas" on youth joblessness, a formal recognition that the issue has got too big for any one nation to handle.

Millions of jobless young people between 16 and 24 roam the streets of major U.S., Canadian and European cities, looking for work by day and cramming into bars, beer halls, sleazy pubs and pool rooms at night. "Hanging around" has become an occupation in itself, a dreary, unstructured existence with little money and even less fun. There is talk of sex, sports and cars, as usual, but the main preoccupation is with the hopeless job market and what governments are doing to stimulate employment. Those attempts range from President Carter's proposed $1.5 billion expansion of current youth employment programs to a French scheme that would, among other things, pay young people $970 in cash to leave the country and look for jobs elsewhere.

No Room for Guests. In some countries, more youths than ever are seeking work. According to the latest figures for the nine Common Market nations in Western Europe, there are about 1.8 million jobless youths; they make up 37% of all unemployed in the region. In Britain, more than 500,000 young people are out of work, equal to 35% of all the unemployed. French youths account for 37.6% of the jobless. West Germany's youthful unemployment of 24.8% of those out of work is the lowest in Europe, but that contrasts with conditions three years ago when Germany was importing labor (Gastarbeiter, or guest workers) to make up for shortages.

Italy is by far the worst off. There, official statistics place youth unemployment at 36.8% of all unemployed. But some Italian experts say the real percentage is probably closer to 65%, and soars to 80% for people under 30. Violence has flared, chiefly among frustrated students who know they will not be able to get jobs when they graduate. Riots this spring in major Italian cities have killed two policemen and two students. In Naples, where young people probably account for fully half the total of 250,000 unemployed, some 30,000 protesters marched through the center of the city last month demanding government job programs.

Conditions in the U.S. have improved slightly. Total unemployment for people 16 to 24 dipped slightly to 13.6% in April; that was still well above the overall total of 7%. It will be a good deal easier for college graduates to find jobs this June; corporate recruiters are again visiting campuses in large numbers. But for high school graduates the going will be tough, and tougher still for high school dropouts. One example: Rick Turner, an Oregon teenager who quit Franklin High School in Portland as a junior last year, has still not been able to find a job in the construction industry. Says he: "The contractors say you can't work unless you're a member of the union. You can't join the union unless you're an experienced worker."

For young U.S. blacks and other nonwhites, the picture is even bleaker. Their unemployment rate is double and sometimes triple that for white youths, depending on the city.

The biggest culprit in the youth employment glut is the high birth rates of the late 1950s and early 1960s in Europe, Canada and the U.S. This has thrust many young adults into the job market at the very time when the economies of the industrialized nations are still only slowly--in some cases, very slowly--recovering from the recent recession. The bulge of teen-agers and adults in their early 20s will ease by the 1980s, a consequence of the sharp decline in birth rates later in the 1960s. That still points to five or six additional years of more young people than most economies can absorb and put to work, perhaps ten to 15 years if the world economy continues stagnating. In Canada, where employment conditions are fairly typical, a gloomy government study says college-trained workers may face tough competition until 1990.

Another part of the problem is attitude. Most young people want careers not dull, menial work--"McDonald's jobs," as Harvard Economist Richard Freeman calls them. The result: more and more youths will not work at all, preferring to get by on public assistance (ranging from a weekly dole of about $15 in London to unemployment insurance of up to $95 a week in New York), or to take employment only when they run out of cash.

These job jumpers have become so common that in Britain there is a name for them: "minijobbers." A typical example is Kevin Cross, 16, who lives in Clapham, a middle-class neighborhood in south London. He wants to be a bricklayer but is not old enough to get into a government training program. He has had two jobs in the past five months, first in a hairdressing-equipment plant (the work was "grotty"), now as a porter in a good hotel. The U.S. has its minijobbers too. At 20, Phillip Curry of Boston has worked briefly at many deadend jobs, but has spent far more of his adult life looking for work than doing it. His goal is to go into business for himself and, as he says, to "get to someplace better than where I am."

Some U.S. critics feel that youth joblessness is healthy to a certain extent, a time of discovery, of winnowing, a "natural process of settling permanently into the job market," as Harvard's Freeman says. There is widespread agreement that U.S. jobless youths do not feel permanently shut out of the economic system, as do many of their counterparts in Europe, nor do most of them feel alienated from the work ethic. Thousands of New York City youths stood in line overnight last month to sign up for federally funded summer jobs. As M.I.T. Economist Michael Piore puts it, "In Europe, the young get mad about unemployment. Here, they just get scared."

The sociological consequences of high and persistent youth unemployment at their most serious are beginning to show up in Italy. There a class of "intellectual unemployed" is growing --a group of university-trained youths determined not to work until positions they deem worthy for themselves open up. It is a new phenomenon. It did not exist, says Catania University Sociologist Francesco Alberoni, "when people did not have such expectations and worried about earning enough to eat with whatever job they could get."

Part of the answer, at least for poorly educated youths, is in government-sponsored training programs or on-the-job subsidies to employers. The Canadian government helps pay for nine weeks of summer work for young people. France is working with private business on a program to create 400,000 jobs for youths. Italy is about to launch a $400 million job subsidy program. Britain pays employers about $17 a week for 26 weeks to train young people.

In the U.S., there are hardly any such subsidies, although some jobs are provided under various federal and local programs at the minimum wage of $2.30 an hour. That is too high, say critics, to encourage employers to train workers; the minimum should be reduced during training periods, perhaps subsidized by Government work "scholarships" to young people. They would receive grants from the Government, then turn the money over to employers who would use it to finance on-the-job training.

Despite such programs, the real problem is the resistance of governments, including the U.S., to stimulate their economies because of inflationary fears. The only way to cut unemployment among youth, says Harvard's liberal Economist Otto Eckstein, is "to get the economy going so we have more jobs." When the adults go back to work, the kids will not be far behind.

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