Young and without a future

A report for the Scotland Institute – The Changing Face Of Youth Unemployment In Scotland 1992 To 2012 – found that over the past two decades, youth employment has gone from being characterised as consisting of stable, relatively well-paid work with career prospects to short-term, part-time, poorly paid work with limited long-term prospects.


Report author Dr Roger Cook, the research director at the institute, said: “Twenty years of sustained removal of employment protection and the casualisation of work has created a situation where young people are becoming trapped in low-paid work with limited longer-term opportunities... This is the conscious outcome of an approach to the labour market over 20 years that has stressed flexibility and ignored the impact of this on people’s working lives or standard of living. Those who are relatively well educated are finding jobs but those jobs are less likely to offer a career, progression, security or a decent wage than was the case even in the depths of recession under the 1992-1997 government. Stagnation of wages and loss of security has wider implications than just inflicting hardship on individuals.”

A happy new year?

A third of young people in Scotland feel down or depressed either always or often, a youth charity claimed. 

One in ten young people feels unable to cope with day-to-day life.

28 per cent of young people believe their prospects have been permanently damaged by the recession.

21 per cent feel they have no  future as a result of the economic crisis.

The will to work

Following on from the previous post, the Prince's Trust has released a report that the vast majority of young people from jobless families have struggled to find work and many simply expect to live off state handouts. 73 per cent of youngsters with parents who do not have a job in Scotland have found getting work difficult, and one in five reported feeling anxious about their future prospects because of their parents' unemployment. According to official UK government statistics, 16 per cent of Scottish children live in a family in which nobody has a job and the new findings have led to calls for more to be done to end a "cycle of worklessness" among Scottish youngsters.

Geraldine Gammell, the director of The Prince's Trust Scotland, which works with young people to help them into work, said: "Too many young people in Scotland are facing a cycle of worklessness and can't see a way out. It is a tragedy to think that so many feel condemned to a life of unemployment when there is a real will to work."