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Youth week - the future of the trade union movement (3)

October 30 has been declared the world day of action for young workers. The ICFTU and the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY) are marking the day with a series of initiatives to be carried out in over 100 countries, aimed at promoting the rights of young people at the workplace. ICFTU OnLine, the ICFTU’s dispatch service, will distribute articles throughout the week on the situation of young workers. To join the campaign, see the new Youth page on this site.

Exclusion
(By Natacha David)

Brussels, November 03, 1998 (ICFTU OnLine): "Young people who arrive on the job market lack experience and all too often have a low level of education, either because they left school too early, or because the education they received was not adapted to the needs of the labour market. Often, when they do find work, they are in low paid, insecure jobs with very little social protection, which leads them into a spiral of exclusion. The logical consequence is that in many cases the young workers feel dissatisfied, frustrated...". That is what Castillo Cardona, the rapporteur of the resolutions committee, told the annual ILO Conference last June.

The frustration begins at the school gates. Although the ILO underlines the need for countries caught up in the rapid globalisation of the economy and greater competition to invest in the training and skills development of their work force(1), education is an ever more inaccessible privilege for many workers in the developing countries.

Without the money to pay school fees or buy school supplies, or even to pay the cost of the journey to go to school, more and more young people in Latin America, Africa and Asia have dropped out. The Asian financial crisis has resulted in 20 per cent of Indonesian students dropping out of school.

Exclusion from school is a predominantly female phenomenon. Two thirds of the children in the world who don’t go or have stopped going to school are girls, victims of the prejudices that give priority to their brothers. In Africa, the problem of early marriages and motherhood is an additional obstacle to girls’ education.

Young people in the industrialised countries are not spared the problems linked to poor or inadequate training. For example, although the education and training of the young, in the context of rising unemployment, was much debated during the recent elections in Germany, Martin Debener, the head of an advice bureau for the unemployed in Rhineland North Westphalia recently told the "Figaro" that "about 70 per cent of young Germans don’t reach baccalauréat (certificate of secondary education) level, and there are more and more illiterates in the 30-40 year age group." Figures which speak volumes about the gap between young people’s training and the ever more specific demands of the labour market. A gap which economic transition has further exacerbated in Eastern Europe.

According to the ILO, some 60 million young people aged 15 to 24 are looking for work but cannot find any (and with the international crisis this figure is rising daily). In the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, urban unemployment among the young often exceeds 30 per cent and they have no choice but to turn to the informal economy. In sub-Saharan Africa, the problem is exacerbated by a demographic trend which will between now and 2010 increase the number of job seekers per year by no less than 8.7 million. In Asia, the young are the first to be hit by the social disaster resulting from the financial crisis, which has led to fewer and less stable jobs. In most OECD countries, youth unemployment is around 20 per cent, although there are considerable differences between countries. In many European countries, one of the key political approaches to the problem is to give financial advantages to enterprises that hire and train young workers. In the mid-90s these "youth contracts" accounted for nearly 25 per cent of youth employment in Italy, 20 per cent in Greece, and 12 per cent in France and Spain.

Part-time work, short-term contracts, temporary jobs, alternating training/work contracts, "youth" contracts, work experience in an enterprise... the "atypical" forms of work reserved for the young are multiplying, all the more so given that they respond to the increasing demand for flexibility, but at the same time they usually mean insecurity for the young worker. "Unstable, more precarious employment, often the first step to exclusion, has become a crucial problem in the developed countries confronted with economic crisis" notes the ILO(2).

Juvenile crime is on the increase virtually throughout the world. Feeling excluded from society, the young unemployed, particularly in the towns, are very vulnerable to different forms of violence and crime, particularly drug trafficking. As Austin Liatyo, vice-president of the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions said in the "Times of Zambia", "Criminality is linked to non-productivity". In Asia too, the crisis is pushing young people to live outside the law. "Those who want to penetrate the employment market can no longer get work, and more and more young people have no choice but to turn to crime to survive, to drug trafficking or prostitution" was the depressing observation made at the trade union seminar in Bangkok on "the impact of the financial and economic crisis on young workers and women".

In the developed countries, despite relatively high living standards, young people in the nineties are experiencing more psychological, social and physical problems. Alcoholism, drug addiction, heavy smoking, poor eating habits, a lack of physical exercise and high suicide rates are among the serious problems affecting young people in the developed world. In Australia, for example, suicides among the young have reached such alarming proportions that a national council was created this summer specifically to deal with this problem.

The ILO underlines the link between youth unemployment and social problems such as drug addiction and vandalism, and concludes that the exclusion of the young is a threat to social cohesion and democracy.

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