The Youth Unemployment Bomb

[JME2]

Oh no! It's okay! We'll just make more McDonalds' and more Wal-Marts! That'll make enough jobs for everyone!

Sure, you'll have to work two of them to maybe make ends meet, assuming you don't get sick...

Please don't make jokes like this. I'm terrified this will be the fate of me and most of the millennials.

[Zaune]

The UK population grew by 8% in this period and average inflation was about 2.5%, so in real terms we spending roughly 45% more per pupil than we were in 2000. Would you say that the UK education system was horrible in 2000? Are we barely escaping from the utter horror by dumping buckets of money on it, and if we stop dumping at any moment or even stop increasing the size of the buckets everyone will become illiterate? Only in the world of ever-growing ever-less-efficient civil service beurecracy is 'temporary freeze in spending growth' equivalent to 'massive cuts'.

He has a point there, actually. I'm not saying the increased funding wasn't a welcome improvement in a lot of ways; when I started secondary school in '97 the place hadn't had any classrooms added or even seriously renovated since the mid-1970s, and upkeep maintenance had been limited to one fresh coat of government-issue pale green emulsion once a year. But there were and still are problems with our education system that have nothing to do with budgetary constraints, starting with the sorry state that training for skilled manual work is in.

[Starglider]

But there were and still are problems with our education system that have nothing to do with budgetary constraints, starting with the sorry state that training for skilled manual work is in.

Companies are much less prepared to invest in training workers than they used to be, partly due to employee mobility and partly due to simple cost-cutting and insane focus on short-term profits at any cost. Though there is also the simple fact that there is less skilled manual work around, as a faction of the economy, than there used to be. In any case it is reasonable for the state to be the primary investor in individual skills as it is ultimately the state that will get the lifetime benefit (in terms of tax revenues and economic growth) regardless of how often the employee changes jobs. This should be a combination of state-directed training to cover the areas where companies think too short-term, with tax incentives to train employees as companies see fit, in areas where state workers are woefully incapable of judging what skills industry actually needs.

Clearly though right now any available money would be better spent on job creation programs than further increases in primary/secondary per-pupil funding. Since the deficit is maxed out and the national debt is climbing into dangerous levels, that money would have to come from tax rises or government spending cuts, and every civil servant salary increase takes money away from job creation efforts.

[Zaune]

Companies are much less prepared to invest in training workers than they used to be, partly due to employee mobility and partly due to simple cost-cutting and insane focus on short-term profits at any cost. Though there is also the simple fact that there is less skilled manual work around, as a faction of the economy, than there used to be. In any case it is reasonable for the state to be the primary investor in individual skills as it is ultimately the state that will get the lifetime benefit (in terms of tax revenues and economic growth) regardless of how often the employee changes jobs. This should be a combination of state-directed training to cover the areas where companies think too short-term, with tax incentives to train employees as companies see fit, in areas where state workers are woefully incapable of judging what skills industry actually needs.

That's not entirely accurate. Staff turnover is a fact of life, and has been for over a hundred years; family circumstances change, people receive better offers elsewhere or just feel like a new set of challenges. And what goes around comes around: When one of your internally-trained personnel moves on, chances are someone trained by someone else will mail in a CV, so in practical terms nobody loses anything.
And demand for skilled manual jobs isn't slacking off in every sector. The need for plumbers, electricians and the like is mostly independent of the state of the economy, and we can't asset-strip eastern Europe indefinitely.

[JME2]

Companies are much less prepared to invest in training workers than they used to be, partly due to employee mobility and partly due to simple cost-cutting and insane focus on short-term profits at any cost.

Broomstick made a similiar argument over in the "Jobless Need Not Apply":

...American companies used to routinely provide training to new employees - I know this directly both from having been through such, and from helping to run such programs. Not any more - they were seen as too expensive when you could just poach someone else's workers, and now that the trained/experienced people are getting old enough to retire companies are freaking out because - OMIGOSH! - such people don't hatch out fully formed and since the training programs have all been dismantled there are no new people in the pipelines.

Again, I wonder how much more of this the American millennials are going to take. I've had it and I would very much like to get the fuck on with my life, thank you.

[Starglider]

And what goes around comes around: When one of your internally-trained personnel moves on, chances are someone trained by someone else will mail in a CV, so in practical terms nobody loses anything.

This is a Prisoner's Dilemma situation. The first company to defect, by poaching staff and free-riding on other company's training, makes considerable savings that translate into higher profits. Inevitably at least some companies do this, which forces everyone else to cut training to the bone to be competitive (or in some cases, other boards of directors see that they can get away with it and do so to meet shareholder expectations). It is also the dark side of employees taking more responsibility for their own career development and training; companies feel they don't have to do it. This part would be fine if salaries were growing fast enough to let employees pay for vocational training courses and certs, but of course salaries are stagnant so in practice it's just another effective pay cut. Again, if you want most companies to provide training beyond the bare minimum necessary to operate, you have to incentivise company boards to make the appropriate decisions.

Again, I wonder how much more of this the American millennials are going to take. I've had it and I would very much like to get the fuck on with my life, thank you.

Remember that a large proportion of shares are held by pension funds, in trust for workers, mainly baby boomers in the last decade or two of employement. There is huge scope for most of the middle class to directly influence corporate governance if they ever cared to instruct their investment managers to directly pressure corporate boards. Of course in reality there is near-total apathy in this area, and most people nearing retirement would prefer to maximise their pension payments, rather than have the companies they own shares in invest the money in training / hiring instead.

[Big Orange]

The question that I keep wondering is, will things get bad enough here to produce young adults leading protests and riots ala the UK and Egypt?

While corporations and politicians based in the USA and UK are storing up a lot of trouble for themselves in the not so distant future, I think it's in bad taste to draw a direct comparison between the opportunist anarchists gatecrashing London's student protest and the massive Egyptian insurrection like I did, since as spiteful and detrimental to social/economic mobility the raising of student tuition fees are, at least the UK's youth are not literally having their genitals directly plugged into the power mains and in much more abject poverty. But then again the sky high tuition fees, ontop of everything else already aggressively slanted against British born people under the age of 30, London could eventually be a dole payment away from blowing up like Cairo anyway, if the current economic stagnation carries on for many more years and deepens.

And Iain Duncan Smith assumes there are many job vancancies, even though the conservative number of unemployed is around 2.5 million and there's job vancies of only 500, 000 (an ugly bottleneck), with most of these jobs likely only part time, constrained with crappy pay and cost of commuting.