Being young, educated and jobless in France

Justine Forriez wakes up early to go onto the computer to look for a job. She calls university friends and contacts; she goes to the unemployment office every week, though mostly for the companionship, and has taken a course in job hunting.

She has met with 10 different recruiters since May and sent out 200 resumes.
Forriez is not poor or disadvantaged, and she holds a master’s degree in health administration.

But after a two-year apprenticeship, she is living on state aid and working at off-the-books jobs like baby-sitting and tending bar. She cares for a dog for $6.50 a day. She paints watercolours in her spare time to keep herself from going crazy.

“I don’t feel at ease when I’m home,” she said. “You find yourself with no work, no project.” With the extra $45 for dog sitting, she said, “I can go to the grocery store.”

Forriez, 23, is part of a growing problem in France and other low-growth countries of Europe – the young and educated unemployed, who go from one internship to another, one short-term contract to another, but who cannot find a permanent job that gets them on the path to the taxpaying, property-owning French ideal that seemed the norm for decades.

This is a ‘floating generation,’ made worse by the euro crisis, and its plight is widely seen as a failure of the system: an elitist educational tradition that does not integrate graduates into the workforce; a rigid labour market that is hard to enter; and a tax system that makes it expensive for companies to hire full-time employees and both difficult and expensive to lay them off.

The result, analysts and officials agree, is a new and growing sector of educated unemployed, whose lives are delayed and whose inability to find good jobs damages tax receipts, pension programmes and the property market.

There are no separate figures kept for them, but when added to the large number of unemployed young people who have little education or training, there is a growing sense that France and other countries in western Europe risk losing a generation, further damaging prospects for sustainable economic growth.

Louise Charlet, 25, has a master’s degree in management. She worked as an apprentice at the Kiabi clothing company for more than two years, but was not given a permanent job; she’s also worked for three months at a hotel.

She prowls the Internet for job offers, goes to the unemployment office and lives with her unemployed boyfriend in a neat, tiny apartment. “You see,” she said, pointing to the computer, “there’s only one job offer today, and it’s a temporary contract.”

The crisis makes companies doubly reluctant to hire, she said. “In our parents’ generation, you had a job for life; now we constantly have to change jobs, change companies, change regions.”

Yasmine Askri, 26, majored in human resources and after a year of unemployment, she got a business school degree. She was promised a fixed contract after an internship, but it never came.

She left the Lille area for Paris to find a job, and spent another year on unemployment, finally finding an interim job for 18 months at GDF Suez. But that contract ended in June. Again unemployed, she has sent out nearly 400 resumes, she said, but has had only three interviews.

“It’s a disaster for everyone,” said Jean Pisani-Ferry, who runs the economic research centre Bruegel in Brussels. “They can’t get credit and they’re treated awfully by employers. And then there are all those young people in jobs that don’t match their skills.” The labour market, he said, is “deeply dysfunctional.”

Throughout the European Union, unemployment among people ages 15 to 24 is soaring – 22 per cent in France, 36 per cent in Italy, 51 per cent in Spain. But those are only percentages among those looking for work.

There is another category: those who are “not in employment, education or training,” or NEETs, as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development calls them. And according to a study by the European Union’s research agency, Eurofound, there are as many as 14 million out-of-work and disengaged young Europeans, costing member states an estimated 153 billion euros, or about $200 billion, a year in welfare benefits and lost production – 1.2 per cent of the bloc’s gross domestic product.

In Spain, in addition to the 51 per cent who are looking for work, 23.7 per cent of those ages 15 to 29 have given up looking, said Anne Sonnet, a senior economist studying joblessness at the OECD. In France, it’s 16.7 per cent – nearly 2 million young people who have given up; in Italy, 20.5 per cent.

As dispiriting, especially for the floating generation, is that 42 per cent of those young people who are working are in temporary employment, up from just over one-third a decade ago, the Eurofound study said. Some 30 per cent, or 5.8 million young adults, were employed part time – an increase of nearly 9 percentage points since 2001. That trend is especially evident in France, where 82 per cent of people hired today are on temporary contracts, said Michel Sapin, the labour minister.

Reduce unemployment

Sapin notes that president Francois Hollande campaigned on promises to reduce unemployment among the young. The challenge, he said, is to “adapt education to the needs of the economy.”

The Socialist government is engaged in a difficult “social dialogue” with companies and unions to reshape work rules, ease entry into the labor market and make French companies more competitive by gradually shifting the cost of social benefits.

The heart of the negotiation, Sapin said, is to build more trust between unions and companies, to reduce “the culture of conflict” and create a more cooperative and flexible system, as in Germany, one that will allow for more “partial unemployment” in difficult times. But he noted that France’s budget to subsidise partial unemployment is 30 million euros, while Germany’s is 15 billion euros.

Such “structural” change, if it happens at all, takes time, providing little consolation for those caught in the trap of prolonged adolescence, with cycles of temporary work and unemployment.

Olivia Blondel had to go to London to find a job in her chosen field, textile design, after getting a master’s degree and paying for night classes in computer graphics, textile design, management and dressmaking. To get work experience, she did an internship on the black market.

“I tried to do 1,001 things with the pole emploi,” the unemployment office, “but it wasn’t working.” From 2006 to 2009, she could find nothing. “I feel like there are so few jobs, or that there is a huge gap between what is offered and our skills,” she said.

Now, at 32, she is back in Paris after several months in Vietnam, aided by the unemployment office, but she has been without work since June, and she is still getting financial help from her retired parents – both of whom spent their entire careers at the same company.

She gets around $1,100 a month in unemployment benefits, but they will run out in a few months, and she lives in a tiny room in social housing. “I’m convinced I’ll have money one day, and I’ll pay everyone back,” she said. “I’ll buy a house, even if it’s in the middle of nowhere.”