Youth Unemployment blights Boomer lives

In the 1970s and 1980s, youth unemployment skyrocketed among young Boomers born at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s – “late” Boomers if you want. Hundreds of thousands of young people were leaving school and months later had not found any work.

The Labour government of Prime Minister James Callaghan in the late 70s began to dread the end of the school year when pupils were tipped out of the education system and into a shrinking jobs market. The Manpower Services Commission, a body that oversaw the labour market, reckoned in 1977 that since the start of the decade, youth unemployment had trebled compared to the general trend. Among Afro-Caribbean youth, the situation was far worse.

These young people were part of the post-war baby boom. There were lots more youngsters than ever before – but industry was shrinking. And the global economic situation was dire from the mid-70s. Add to that the protections workers had won through trade union struggles, and employers were retaining staff instead of firing older workers and hiring younger ones.

Plus the overwhelming majority of young people in the 1970s and 1980s didn’t go to university and many were unskilled. Not a problem when a local factory, mine, or the docks could soak them up. But that was a receding prospect at the dawn of the 80s. Britain was beginning to move away from being the workshop of the world and becoming an increasingly white collar economy.

Things only got worse after 1979 when the Conservatives returned to power under Margaret Thatcher. Her priority was curbing inflation and going to battle with the trade union movement. If that meant rising unemployment in the short term, well…that was collateral damage to achieve the greater good. So – youth unemployment soared as the UK economy tanked in the first two years of the Thatcher administration.

By mid-1981, half a million young people were on the dole – and that was a cautious estimate. I lived in Liverpool in the early 80s when unemployment was by far the norm among young people in the inner city. It became a rarity to find a young person in full-time work.

They were more likely to be in a further education college scrambling for relevant qualifications or on one of the government’s dubious youth training schemes – the YOP (Youth Opportunities Programme), followed by the equally detested YTS (Youth Training Scheme). There were anecdotal stories I recall of young people being asked to cut a lawn with a pair of scissors, just to give them something to do on this ‘training’ scheme. Whether or not this was true – the value of the scheme was generally held to be worthless.

Joblessness among young people was a global phenomenon. In countries with young populations, like India, there was increasing anxiety about the inability to get young people into work. In the early 1980s, many developing countries were only beginning the path to mass industrialisation so the jobs simply didn’t exist to soak up all that unemployment.

European countries like Spain had endemic youth unemployment all the way through the 1980s with a quarter of young people officially unable to find any work at all.