Young People Falling Behind Economically

[bord_du_rasoir]

Marian Wright Edelman
President, Children's Defense Fund

Release Date: February 11, 2011

While there is a lot of talk today about jobs, there has been far too little attention paid to the job prospects of young people. A new report prepared for the Children’s Defense Fund shows young people have lost more ground economically than any other age

Comments

[influencethis]

Neither the fact that us young people make zilch nor the fact that racism is a huge factor into who gets hired surprises me.

I'm living under-utilization right now as a white lady with a BA. I work part-time at a job that *might* require a HS diploma, at the most, and this is the department that works closest to the people with the actual power. The people in other departments are either non-white and have been here since God was a boy, or otherwise new hires who are all, coincidentally, white dudes out of high school or white ladies with bachelor's.

It makes sense in a racist society that companies, when faced with huge amounts of willing applicants, will take whoever makes the company "look best," i.e. whoever has the most amount of social privilege.

I think a lot of this ties into society-wide devaulation of workers. Part-time employment makes sense to companies only looking at the short-term bottom line--it saves them having to pay for health care and allows them to pay much less for the same amount of expertise and experience, at least in jobs that require it. Only accepting people with experience means that they can pick only the people they never have to do any hands-on training for. Only hiring people with a college degree or higher means that they are likely hiring people who won't press too hard to get the full-time employment or stay very long, since they will be leaving shortly for a job in their degree's career field.

But it totally wrecks the system when taken as a whole. Part-time wages means that people can't buy what their jobs are selling, and a whole society on part-time wages means very little flow of capital. It also fuels a whole host of discount stores, which drive wages down further globally. Part-time wages means fewer contributions to Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare, which plunges them into debt and continues the amount of older people working, which leaves fewer job openings for beginners. Requiring degrees means more people getting them and also more people in debt after getting them, which leads to payment of loans instead of buying of consumer goods and the devaluation of the degree. Requiring experience for jobs and having no ways to gain that experience for new people means you're constantly hiring out of the same pool of people--and when they retire, boy are you fucked.

[thecityofdis]

Boom, this comment made me pregnant.

[influencethis]

I have never had a comment cause mpreg before. I am very excited about comment babies.

I didn't even get into the rising costs of necessities like utilities, housing, and gas while wages stagnate, causing huge amounts of wage deflation. People earning X in 1960 used to pay something like 35% of their income on necessities, whereas now people earning X, adjusted for inflation, spend something like 60% of their income on it. So you can maybe buy food on a part-time wage, but you certainly can't *live* on it.

This is tied to discount stores and the housing bubble bursting, too. If you can't afford more than $100 for all your consumables, well then the Wal-Marts and Targets are there to help--all the while lowering the wages in the area and contributing more people who work part-time and can't afford anything else other than their products. If you can't afford the exorbitant cost of a house, you get a huge loan to help pay the difference. If you still can't pay for it, well then it's foreclosure time for you--but there still isn't anyone who can afford to buy your house.

(I just read Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture and I might be a huge stan for it in this comment )

[hinoema]

If this comment is any indication, I'm buying that book tonight.

[kyra_neko_rei]

I wonder what would happen if we instituted a living wage law, or if in some other fashion people got around to demanding more quality compensation for employees. You see big companies post billion-dollar profits while paying at least some of their employees minimum wage, or part-timing them as described above, and they certainly could afford to double the pay of their lowest-paid employees, or provide benefits for their part-time employees, but they don't. They pay what they have to to stay legal and competetive, and pocket the rest, and the result is a large population of people who are not compensated sufficiently to survive, whether from under-employment or from obscenely low hourly pay. And then there are the unemployed who remain unemployed because the businesses have learned to cut work-hours of human labor required to the point where they've as a group kicked currently around 10% of the labor force right out of the system as unnecessary.

The businesses, then, their executives and boards of directors and stockholders and everywhere else the profits go to, all get their extra profits by screwing over these populations. The narrative has been created that the companies "deserve" all that profit because they've managed to obtain it, with no mention given to any responsibility toward the other parts of the system . . . it becomes like a community space like a dorm kitchen where everybody uses it and nobody cleans up---there's no "you profit from your interactions with this market and this labor pool, do your part to help sustain both of them."

It's as if people exist to serve corporations, or the market, or the economy---not the other way around.