Abstract
In Youth, Jobs, and the Future: Problems and Prospects, edited by Lynn S. Chancer, Martín Sánchez-Jankowski, and Christine Trost, an interdisciplinary group of social scientists and policy analysts grapple with recent economic transformations that threaten youths’ capacity to successfully transition to adulthood. Drawing on wide-ranging evidence, including Census data, national surveys, ethnographic research, and interviews, the authors assess youths’ responses, both functional and self-defeating, to the challenges before them. They make far-reaching proposals to alter the conditions that diminish youths’ employment outcomes.
As Arne Kalleberg cogently argues, youths’ problems with precarious and nonstandard work (e.g., work that is temporary, contingent, insecure, and without benefits) are not short-term consequences of the vagaries of business cycles. Instead, they are rooted in long-term structural trends, including globalization, the decline of manufacturing, transition to a service economy, technological upgrading, union demise, deregulation, and shifts in the employment contract. These trends have reduced opportunities for all workers but are particularly devastating for youth, who have persistently high unemployment and underemployment rates and whose labor force participation has declined since the 1970s. Many have become “NEETs”—not in employment, education, or training.
How are contemporary youth cohorts reacting to this structurally induced crisis? Jamie McCallum refutes the conventional wisdom that millennials, coddled and entitled, eschew hard work. Instead, McCallum’s interviews and ethnographic observations in tech firms and retail establishments indicate just the opposite—youth want to work, even those in the low-ranking retail and service sectors. A “culture of overwork” prevails in technology firms. And despite all indications to the contrary, many young people hold on to the American Dream that hard work will lead to eventual success.
Clearly, differences in response to the decline in employment opportunity parallel youths’ locations (socioeconomic, race/ethnicity, criminal justice, and immigration status) in our highly stratified society. As Robert Kuttner notes, a rare few are destined to join the ranks of the 1 percent superrich through inheritance or access to elite institutions. In the next tier, highly privileged youth from well-off families receive enormous investments from birth onward; after graduating from prestigious colleges, they will move to the helm of the new “streamlined” economy as highly educated STEM and professional workers. Michael Hout demonstrates (with Current Population Survey data) the advantages of more highly educated youth in the heightened competition for good jobs with higher wages and sufficient hours. Yasemin Besen-Cassino describes privileged youths’ capacity to perform “aesthetic labor,” giving them access to jobs because their backgrounds and demeanor mesh well with brand profiles (white and affluent) that retail and other employers attempt to project.
However, the vast majority of young people have much poorer prospects. Given the earnings advantage of four-year college degree holders, and given the “college for all” mantra, the less privileged and their families make huge sacrifices, incurring considerable debt with uncertain returns. Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas describe the dark side of the stampede to higher education among those whose past academic achievement and academic proclivities provide little indication of success. Their interviews with college graduates highlight what happens when dreams of good jobs after college do not materialize, with some strapped with mountains of debt (up to $100,000), living with their parents, and languishing in jobs that pay $7.25 an hour. Despite the prevalence of this dismal scenario, high schools do little in the way of helping young people understand basic fundamentals of personal finance and the connection between college major choice and future earnings potential.
Most heartbreaking are Sánchez-Jankowski’s narratives of youth drawn to illicit activities (e.g., the drug trade, credit card fraud, and prostitution) that could gravely affect their future prospects. The lack of employment opportunity for “good” jobs that pay a livable wage makes these sources of income attractive. But, contrary to some accounts, his interviewees were not threatened with extreme economic deprivation (most were living with parents). While some were trying to maintain expensive youthful lifestyles, others were merely attempting to pay their way or get through college.
In a chapter by David J. Harding, Anh P. Nguyen, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Shawn D. Bushway, a causal analysis capitalizing on the random assignment of more or less punitive Michigan judges to cases, used as an instrument of the effects of incarceration versus probation, concludes that while whites’ labor market prospects are heightened by more lenient punishment, African Americans do so poorly in the labor market generally that their mode of punishment makes little difference.
Richard Alba and Nancy Foner’s international comparison (between the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain) finds that despite their distinct structures of education and employment, low-status immigrant youth in the United States and Germany do particularly poorly in the labor market, but for very different reasons. In the United States they reside in places with the poorest tax bases for public schools; in Germany they are quickly channeled into lower-level educational trajectories before they have had time to overcome family disadvantage. Both countries limit children’s time in school via a short school year (United States) or school day (Germany).
What, then, is to be done? The authors proffer a range of solutions involving both radical and incremental structural change. Stanley Litow and Grace Suh argue for the revival of career education in secondary schools to enable all youth to enter the labor force with a post-secondary degree. The successes of P-Tech—collaboration between school districts, community colleges, and corporate partners—invite replication across the United States. Katherine Maich, Jamie McCallum, and Ari Grant-Sasson point to a national strategy of shorter hours to stimulate labor demand and obviate the need for some to work 80 hours a week while others are unemployed. Sarah Reibstein and Andy Stern present a convincing case for universal basic income (UBS), given estimates that one-third of U.S. jobs will disappear with the application of advanced technologies. The UBS would not only give sustenance to all without stigma; it would provide opportunity for youth to pursue dream jobs, artistic endeavors, and social activism without perpetual dependency on kin or a grossly inadequate “welfare” system. Kuttner’s historical overview makes a strong case for a return to full employment as a national goal built on federal investment, not perpetual warfare. There is no shortage of needed work—repairing and developing new infrastructure, greening the energy system, educating future generations, and caring for the young, old, sick, and disabled. As Kuttner points out, such crucially important work is not adequately supported by the present operation of our neoliberal capitalist regime, which continuously seeks ways to reduce labor costs (e.g., via automation, artificial intelligence, robotics, and the freelance “gig” business model).
This book is necessary reading for social scientists interested in the future of youth, labor markets, and work. Its informative and engaging coverage of the root causes of some of the most pressing problems of our time will spark lively debates in both graduate and undergraduate courses on youth, work, stratification, economic sociology, and the nexus of social science and public policy. I would like to have seen the authors give more attention to strategies that might garner political support for their proposed solutions, in view of the historically unparalleled political and cultural divides in our society. But perhaps that is fodder for their next volume.