My career in the newspaper industry started at an early age. I was 11 years old when I had a paper round, getting up at dawn to deliver that day’s news and views to the good people of our north Manchester neighbourhood. I don’t know whether this prepared me for a lifetime in journalism, but it certainly helped me understand what work felt like.
These days, because of the decline in newspaper sales and obvious safety concerns, this particular line of employment for young people has sadly withered. Instead, today’s entrepreneurially-minded youngsters don’t have to leave home: they just flip open their laptops and sell those once-cutting edge trainers on Depop. Or find a gaming side hustle. Or become kidfluencers.
Others, however, may choose to spend all their time on social media. Either way, they represent what Alan Milburn, a former health secretary and a radical thinker of the Blairite school, this week called “The Bedroom Generation”, young people, atomised and insulated, who are neither prepared for, and some not particularly interested in, the more collaborative and structured endeavour that we may call the world of work.
There is very little criticism, direct or implied, of today’s cohort of teenagers in Milburn’s report, commissioned by this Government, into why almost one million of the UK’s 16 to 24-year-olds – about one in eight, and almost three times the general unemployment rate – were not in education, employment or training (the neat acronym is, in fact, “Neets”). Instead, Milburn blames the system, which, he says, “is trapping people in worklessness rather than enabling them into work”. Businesses must adapt to the new realities of the job market by offering greater flexibility and mental health support for young people, the report concludes. “We are at risk of a lost generation,” Milburn said.
Quite right, sir. And, moreover, Milburn is entirely correct to shift the narrative away from a denunciation of workshy snowflakes, who are culturally and psychologically unsuited to working life. In this interim report, he said that 84 per cent of Neets surveyed said they want a job or to be trained to get a job, but the most consistent complaint from unsuccessful applicants is “not rejection but silence”.
“The old contract in society was always you put in effort and got a reward, each generation would do better than the last,” Milburn told the BBC. “That contract has been broken for this generation.” His report pointed out that, as a nation, we spend 25 times as much on benefits for young people as we do on schemes to support them into work, and this concentration on welfare “exacerbates inactivity”.
Meanwhile, entry-level employment for young people has collapsed: 1.6 million low and medium-skilled posts have disappeared in the past 20 years, Saturday jobs have largely gone, apprenticeships have fallen by 35 per cent in a decade, and vacancies in the hospitality sector have halved in the past four years alone. And that’s before you take into account the robots, who will soon put many more of us out of work. It is a grim situation that requires urgent attention.
Milburn’s report, however, dodges one question that many of us would prefer not to consider. He talks about an “anxious generation”, and how the isolation of young people – a direct effect of Covid, and only magnified by an addiction to social media – has led to “a functional impairment” which precludes a traditional job. But, to what extent are we, the parents, the Boomers, the Generation Xers, responsible for this state of affairs?
Have we been too zealous in protecting our children from failure? Do we cauterise hardship for them? Things that were once seen as character-forming – stacking shelves, for example – are now viewed by parents as beneath their children’s dignity, or potential. We don’t want them to be bored. We keep them at home longer. We challenge their exam grades. We solve problems for them. We want their lives to be as frictionless as possible.
In all these ways, we undoubtedly mean well. But the result is that our young people have a complicated relationship with adversity. And the possibility of failure is another factor in creating this anxious generation, who some employers are all too quick to write off.
As parents, we may not have done enough to show them the way out of the bedroom, but still the essential conundrum persists: how do young people gain experience of work when the possibilities of employment are shrinking? Milburn should be congratulated for pointing out that this is one of the starkest issues facing us all today.
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