The ‘problem’ of young people’s transitions from school to work has been a significant feature of youth policy since the early 1980s, especially in Australia and many other developed economies. In a global economy structured by logics of neo-liberal capitalism, what is the future of work for young people?
Peter Kelly
Together with colleagues, I am currently working on an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project titled Creative industries pathways to youth employment in the COVID-19 recession. The project will work with a number of partners across the youth arts sector to build micro-credentials that capture the social, cultural, and/or economic ‘value’ of the skills that young people (16-24 years old) have developed by participating in creative practices. These partners include the youth music organisation The Push, Corrugated Iron Youth Arts, the Northern Territory’s leading youth arts organisation, and the Ibsen Award winning, Geelong based, Back to Back Theatre.
Micro-credentials (micro-creds or creds) are a relatively recent, digitally enabled, approach to the accreditation of skills development and training outcomes, often undertaken in non-accredited, informal, or non-traditional training contexts. I have written more about these micro-creds, and what they might offer in terms of creating and capturing value for young people here.
In a recent blog for the ARC project, I revisited some of the work that I have done over a number of years to think about Young People and the Future of Work.
At this time, I want to summarise some of that work to suggest new ways to think about young people and the future of work in a post-COVID ‘recovery’ phase – which shows very few signs of ‘bouncing back’ to the old ‘normal’.
The ‘problem’ of young people’s transitions from school to work, and how governments, businesses, schools, communities, and individuals can manage young people’s education, training, and employment pathways has been a significant feature of youth policy since the early 1980s. This is especially evident in Australia and in many other developed economies.
At various times this ‘problem’ has taken on greater importance, including during and after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09, and in the still unfolding context and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the social and economic lockdowns of the last two years.
The challenge at these times of crisis and disruption is to keep in mind the longer-term trends and trajectories that characterise this ‘problem’, and to reflect on the dominant ways in which this problem has been imagined, and why. In this context we should consider:
An individual’s skills, capacities, behaviours and dispositions, effort and enterprise are what ‘promise’ to secure participation in the world of work. A personal lack of these characteristics – particularly by those young people who have experienced profound marginalisation and disengagement – can result in being redundant. Can result in being surplus to requirements. Can result in leading what Zygmunt Bauman called Wasted Lives.
For many of these young people, the call to develop ‘21st century skills’ in order to make themselves more employable, is just one part of the problem of their education, training, and employment pathways.
In a recent blog post on the current debates about the 4th industrial revolution, young people and skills, I referenced an article in The Sydney Morning Herald from February 2018, in which Bruce Reed – a top domestic policy advisor to the Clinton and Obama White Houses – is cited claiming that:
‘…The so-called “gig economy”, symbolised by the explosion of services such as Uber, will rapidly expand the proportion of workers who are freelancers, while increasing automation in the workplace will reshape the skills and jobs for which universities will need to prepare students…’
‘But Uber and its like are only “the first inning of disruption”’.
For Reed: ‘“The question used to be, ‘what will you do when you grow up?’
The question now is, ‘What will you do when the robots grow up?’
One of the points I wanted to make there – in the context of the widespread debates about what the World Economic Forum calls the 4th Industrial Revolution – is that any discussion of these emerging trends, their trajectories, and their consequences for young people and the future of work, must involve using the ‘C’ word.
Capitalism is the main game in town, and we need to name it as such, and explore the consequences for organising all our institutions, all our relationships, all our activities through logics that seek to commodify and extract value and profit from all aspects of our lives – and to calculate value only in the terms set by these logics.
As recent critiques of neo-liberal capitalism – from Tim Jackson’s Post Growth: Life After Capitalism to various versions of a Green New Deal – highlight, all around us we are witness to the outcomes, the possibilities, limitations and consequences of the dominance of these logics.
All this talk of disruption – the 4th Industrial revolution, young people, labour markets and skills – only makes sense when we make explicit reference to capitalism and the ways in which labour markets are structured, the inequalities and exploitation that are such a feature of these markets, and the demands that are made on young people to develop what the dominant stakeholders in capitalism identify as employability skills.
The global economy, structured by logics of neo-liberal capitalism, continues to propel us further down the path of the climate crisis, and has us, differently, teetering precariously on the brink of the crises of COVID, Ukraine, the cost-of-living, and global food shortages. At the same time, and in ways that are connected to these crises of capitalism, we are witness to the rise of the far right and the push back against the recognition and acceptance of diversity. In these circumstances we need a fundamental reappraisal of the promise of education and its relationships to young people and the future of work – and not just a conversation about ‘skills’.