Young and educated in Europe, but desperate for jobs

Recession has persisted for so long that new growth, if at all, will be enjoyed by the next generation.

Alba Mendez, a 24-year-old with a master’s degree in sociology, sprang out of bed nervously one recent morning, carefully put on makeup and styled her hair. Her thin hands trembled as she clutched her résumé on her way out of the tiny room where a friend allows her to stay rent free.

She had an interview that day for a job at a supermarket. It was nothing like the kind of professional career she thought she would have after finishing her education. But it was a rare flicker of opportunity after a series of temporary positions, applications that went nowhere and employers who increasingly demanded that young people work long, unpaid stretches just to be considered for something permanent.

Her parents were imploring her to return home to the Canary Islands to help run her father’s fruit business. It was a sign of the times, though, that even her own father probably would not be able to afford to pay her. “We’re in a situation that is beyond our control,” Méndez said. “But that doesn’t stop the feelings of guilt. On the bad days, it’s really hard to get out of bed. I ask myself, 'What did I do wrong?'”

The question is being asked by millions of young Europeans. Five years after the economic crisis struck the continent, youth unemployment has climbed to staggering levels in many countries: in September, 56 per cent in Spain for those 24 and younger, 57 per cent in Greece, 40 in Italy…

Those are Great Depression-like rates of unemployment, and there is no sign that European economies, still barely emerging from recession, are about to generate the jobs necessary to bring those Europeans into the workforce soon, perhaps in their lifetimes.
Dozens of interviews with young people around the continent reveal a creeping realisation that the European dream their parents enjoyed is out of reach. It is not that Europe will never recover, but that the era of recession and austerity has persisted for so long that new growth, when it comes, will be enjoyed by the next generation, leaving this one out.

Instead, many in the troubled south are carving out a simple existence for themselves in a new European reality. They must decide whether to stay home, with the protection of family but a dearth of jobs. Or they can travel to Europe’s north, where work is possible to find but where they are likely to be treated as outsiders. There, young people say, they compete for low-paying, temporary jobs but are sometimes excluded from the cocoon of full employment.

For the European Union, addressing the issue has become a political as well as an economic challenge at a time of expanding populist discontent with the leadership in Brussels and national capitals.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has called youth unemployment “the most pressing problem facing Europe.” Merkel flew to Paris on Tuesday to join other European leaders at a special youth unemployment summit meeting called by President François Hollande of France. Governments renewed a pledge for an employment-promotion program worth 6 billion euros (about $8 billion) starting next year. But economists said the program by itself was unlikely to put more than a bandage on a gaping wound.

For members of the generation that came of age since the financial storm of 2008, promises of future aid and future growth only highlight questions about when, or whether, they will be able to make up for the lost years. “We hope 2014 will be a year of recovery,” said Stefano Scarpetta, the director of employment, labor and social affairs at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. “But we are still looking at a very large number of youth who will have endured a long period of extreme difficulty. This will have a long-lasting effect on an entire generation.”

Crisis-hit countries

That question is weighing on European leaders. An estimated 100,000 university graduates have left Spain, and hundreds of thousands more from Europe’s crisis-hit countries have gone to Germany, Britain, and the Nordic states for jobs in engineering, science and medicine. Many others have gone farther afield to Australia, Canada and the United States. As part of the employment-promotion program discussed Tuesday, EU leaders promised to guarantee job offers and internships to jobless young people, and to bolster growth in innovation and research.

They also pledged initiatives to help young people find work outside their countries with cross-border vocational training.

In Madrid, Mendez said she had little faith in promises from government leaders. She moved there six years ago and graduated in the summer with her master’s in sociology. “I wasn’t expecting a great lifestyle, but I hoped to get a good job, where I could help society,” Méndez, a quiet, determined woman, said one morning in the apartment where a friend was letting her stay. But when she graduated, Spain was deep into its economic slump, and the government had cut funding for the type of social services that she had hoped would make her degree useful.

Like thousands of young people hit by the crisis, Méndez soon found herself underemployed, grappling with a revolving door of temporary contracts that came with few benefits, lower pay than permanent jobs, and the risk of being laid off with little recourse.

For many young people in Europe, especially those living in the most embattled economies, it has become a way of life: a series of so-called junk contracts for low- or no-pay work that often verges on exploitation, with long gaps of joblessness in between.
Young people caught in that cycle are at the edge of a growing category that economists call NEETs: those who are not in employment, education or training. According to Eurofound, as many as 14 million young Europeans are out of work and disengaged, costing European Union member states an estimated 153 billion euros (about $206 billion) a year in welfare benefits and lost production.

Mendez faced that kind of unsettling risk as she sought to secure any paying job. She went to a sandwich chain but wound up working a two-week tryout with no salary. A luxury Spanish hotel chain expected her to do unpaid training for two months, and then work another two-month trial period without pay or a guarantee of a permanent job. Occasionally it was overwhelming. “Sometimes,” she whispered, “it feels as if life is not really worth it.”

Her inability to forge a career worried Méndez, who could not even begin to think of making a home or a family. To gain experience, she was making plans to form a cooperative to study social issues like gender equality and sell reports to public institutions. She also volunteered to help abused women and attended meetings of the grass-roots movement Youth Without a Future to assist other young people exploited in temporary jobs.