Abstract
The passage from education to employment is a significant milestone in everyone’s life. It marks not only the ingress to the labour market but transformation of our social status, in effect opening a new chapter of our personal, as well as professional, biography. Many of those who have already made their transition would recall this experience as a time of excitement, anticipation and hope, but, at the same time and perhaps to a greater degree, agitation, doubts and fretting. These vivid memories of longing and struggles, shared by many people, including the author of this review, make Youth, Jobs, and the Future: Problems and Prospects an unexpectedly – for an academic book – riveting and personal read.
Yet, these sentiments should not outshine the remarkable scholarly merits of this book, artfully edited by Lynn S Chancer, Martín Sánchez-Jankowski and Christine Trost. The book is arranged into four parts. Chapters in part one outline the broader employment patterns of young workers in the USA and examine some alarming tendencies regarding challenges in the youth labour market. The second part of the book discusses how young people navigate their trajectories towards what they understand as ‘good jobs’ and how their efforts are influenced by social and cultural conditions. The third part comprises chapters concerned with the issues of youth unemployment and contextual conditions that aggravate them. The fourth and concluding part features chapters that explore measures that could mitigate the problems identified in the previous sections. Together, the chapters convey an insightful and compelling narrative that undoubtedly expands our knowledge of youth (un)employment and contextual factors that shape it.
Youth, Jobs, and the Future makes three particularly valuable sets of contributions that differentiate the book from other publications addressing the precarious conditions of the youth labour market. First, it goes beyond the laudable initiative to draw more attention to the ill-famed, but somewhat overlooked in scholarly debates, hurdles encountered by young workers. The book goes further in advancing our understanding of the nature of these obstacles by conceptualising them as emerging from intricate relations between the context and individual agency of young workers. The authors elucidate the importance of structural and cultural factors that constrain and enable access to employment in general and to ‘good jobs’ more specifically. For example, the editors and some of the contributors pay tribute to the ‘American dream’ as a remarkably potent mechanism that has fashioned the ambitions and expectations of generations of young Americans. Yet, the book does not constrain itself to the analysis of contextual variables. Instead, it acknowledges that young individuals play an active role in negotiating their interests in the social landscape. By doing so, the youth repeatedly assess the contextual conditions, evaluate their own objectives and, ultimately, seek to reconcile the two of them.
Second, the book recognises young workers as a diverse category comprised of numerous subgroups, each with their own (dis)advantages. Some of the chapters look explicitly at young people with distinctive features and the findings suggest that different groups of young workers find themselves in dissimilar employment situations, owing to their class, education, migration status and other characteristics. On the one hand, this adds to the aforementioned complexity of interactions between people and their milieu, as individual properties are interpreted and ascribed – or denied – value in a given social environment. On the other hand, this challenges a common assumption that treats the youth as a homogeneous cluster, positioned equally unfavourably in the jobs market. Indeed, there is evidence that some young people enjoy more privileges than their peers and some are able to capitalise on their skills and experiences with more ease.
Third, the book makes a crucial step forward from elaborating labour market challenges to scrutinising various approaches that could facilitate the transition of young people to employment. Chapters in part four provide a fascinating assortment of recommendations for practitioners and policymakers, from education reforms and shorter working hours to guaranteed income and full employment. Most importantly, the authors do not present their ideas as a magic elixir which would solve all problems with youth (un)employment. Instead, they elaborate detailed proposals that examine practical opportunities to benefit from the suggested ideas, while also taking into account potential drawbacks.
Admittedly, Youth, Jobs, and the Future is a book about the difficulties of the US youth, which may be different to problems faced by their peers around the globe. Furthermore, as the editors acknowledge in the introduction, solutions to tackle youth unemployment are not easily transferable across borders due to the impact of broader societal factors. Thus, recommendations viable in the US may be less effective in other contexts, especially where significant social and cultural differences are observed. Nonetheless, the book must not be missed by readers outside the US. The account of youth employment as a complex phenomenon formed by both structure/culture and individual agency, as well as the innovative and holistic approach to talking about employment issues advocated in part four, will be inspiring and instructive for scholars and policymakers alike in different corners of the world. These debates will also be useful for the broader audience concerned about employment of young people, including young workers themselves.
