Young people’s disadvantages on the labour market in Italy: reframing the NEET category

Abstract

The worsening of young people’s condition on the labour market has been described as a long-term trend of contemporary advanced capitalist economies. In recent years, the NEET (not in employment, education or training) label has been increasingly used to assess the integration of young people into the labour market. Does the NEET category adequately grasp the complexity of the underlying processes? In this contribution we will try to answer this question considering the Italian case as an extreme example. Focusing on the features of the youth labour market in Italy, we show the heterogeneity that lies behind the NEET concept, as well as its relationships with the labour market, the education system and welfare institutions. We argue that the institutionalization of NEETs as an analytical category may prove to be problematic as it may fail to identify specific vulnerable subgroups clearly, thereby leading to ineffective one-size-fits-all policy responses.     

Weathering the Storm: Social Policy and the Great Recession

This review discusses recent challenges to the welfare state arising from the Great Recession (GR). The GR was a significant event for social policy analysts, as it tested the responsiveness of welfare systems in the midst of a recent trend toward austerity politics in advanced economies. Social policy changes were part of the toolkit advanced democracies used to respond to the GR, and the welfare state mitigated the consequences of the GR. However, a stark limitation of the social safety net in the United States was the failure to assist immigrant households. The nexus of immigration and social policy is likely to be a significant controversy as we consider the meaning of social citizenship.     

Unruly topographies: unemployment, citizenship and land settlement in inter-war Wales

Between 1934 and 1939, over 5000 people, mainly ex-miners and their families, were settled in government-owned land settlements in England and Wales. This policy emerged as a response to mass unemployment, and complemented other schemes for the unemployed developed by the inter-war National Government. This paper will consider the geographical conditions that were imagined, realized and contested in these settlements. Acknowledging the hybrid and liminal nature of these spaces, the paper mobilizes new work in cultural and historical geography and draws out the heterotopic potential of the settlement programme.     

Youthful Creativity in Regional Australia: Panacea for Unemployment and Out‐Migration?

This paper addresses the theme of youth out‐migration from rural Australia, in the context of recent policy discussions about creativity and its role in regional development. Ethnographic fieldwork in one rural location – the New South Wales Far North Coast – is drawn upon to highlight how creative industries are being cast as a potential way of promoting cultural activities and jobs for young people, and in turn, how they might be imagined as a means to mitigate youth out‐migration. Yet, creative industries have contradictory employment and social outcomes. Creative industries are likely to generate higher rates of youth participation in economic activities than public data reveal. However, strategies for future job growth should also consider the limitations and instabilities of creative industry employment. Second, and more broadly, the paper discusses those socio‐cultural dimensions of nascent creative industries that may have a more substantial impact when conceived as part of strategies to stem youth exodus from rural areas. Creative activities may contribute to rural development in indirect ways, especially if linked to policy goals of increased tolerance of youth activities, better provision of cultural services, and improved well‐being for young people. While formal job‐creation may be limited, creative industries could mitigate some of the impacts of youth migration to cities by enriching regional social life and mediating perceptions of the advantages and drawbacks of rural versus urban life. This kind of policy imagination requires a shift in attitudes towards young people and a more genuine commitment to encourage young people to feel that they belong in non‐metropolitan areas.     

People,Space and Place: a Multidimensional Analysis of Unemployment in Metropolitan Labour Markets

It is becoming increasingly apparent that, in order to understand a range of socio-economic outcomes, research needs to be focused on a multi-dimensional approach that accounts for individual characteristics and behaviours together with locality and activity within space and place. Within labour market analysis there is a need to situate empirical analysis within a conceptual framework that considers both the assets of individuals within the labour force and the social and local labour market contexts in which they find themselves. Using a broad notion of employability, this paper develops an analysis of unemployment in Australia's metropolitan labour markets. Specifically it uses a combination of individual survey data and aggregate labour market data to consider the associations between these multi-level factors. It finds that, while individual characteristics are important in understanding unemployment in metropolitan areas, it is equally the case that the strength of spatially distinct labour markets also plays a role. The paper reaches the conclusion that, while contemporary labour market policy tends to focus on individual characteristics, there is a need to widen the policy understanding of labour market outcomes so that other broader contexts, including the impact of space and place, are also seen as being influential.     

Post-industrial division of labour as a systemic barrier for immigrants in the Swedish labour market

Differences in labour force participation and unemployment rates between indigenous populations and immigrants are common throughout Europe, but the gap seems to be particularly wide in Sweden. Based on studies of workplaces that traditionally employed large numbers of immigrants, but where they are now declining, it is argued that a driving force behind this process of exclusion is to be found in technological and organisational changes. These changes seem to be more pervasive in the Swedish labour market than in other economies in Europe. What is sometimes called the ‘Swedish model of working life’ has turned into the systemic exclusion of immigrant labour.     

Equation and Adequation: The World Traced by the Phillips Curve

This paper considers the power of abstract formalization in capitalism, via an account of the politics and geography of an equation. The equation in question lies behind the Phillips curve, which describes the relation between price inflation and unemployment or output. I examine the evolution of the equation and its relation to macroeconomics' renewed emphasis, since the late 1960s, on long‐run monetary neutrality. Considering the Phillips curve and its theoretical and technical armature as social practice, I discuss some of the political and distributional questions that arise from the mode of spatial and temporal abstraction particular to modern macroeconomic analysis and policy‐making. The paper has three parts: a brief history of the Phillips curve, an examination of its modern equation‐form, and an analysis of its part in the dialectical process of “real abstraction”, through which logical space and time prioritize and produce both the spatial “macro” and the temporal “long‐run”.     

Mapping the New Deal: local disparities in the performance of Welfare-to-Work

In recent years, following the lead of the US, several OECD countries have introduced 'workfare' policies that link receipt of unemployment and related social benefits to compulsory participation on state-administered work and training schemes. The UK's New Deal (Welfare-to-Work) for Young People is one of the largest and most developed of these workfare programmes. Official evaluations of the UK's New Deal for Young People claim that it has been a national success, but overlook local variations in its results. This paper uses the Government's own performance measures, data on local unemployment flows, numbers of New Deal participants recycled through the scheme as second starts, and interviews with both local policy managers and participants, to demonstrate that these local variations have been substantial. These different indicators suggest that the programme has been noticeably less effective in many inner urban and depressed industrial labour markets. In such areas the 'recycling and churning' of participants through the programme are more significant, and suggest that local labour market structures play a significant role in shaping policy outcomes. The paper argues that recent additions to the New Deal to improve job search and matching fail to address this local variation, and that a longer-term approach is required that seeks to improve not only the employability of individuals, but also the local employment opportunities open to them. One key implication is clear: that local labour market conditions can exert a significant influence on the outcomes of national workfare type policies, not only in terms of geographical variations in the problem to be solved, but also in shaping and constraining the local nature of policy outcomes.