Bill Jamieson: Youth job market needs innovation

Unemployment among the young is about more than a reluctance to face the realities of a working life, writes Bill Jamieson

Unemployment among the young is about more than a reluctance to face the realities of a working life, writes Bill Jamieson

Feckless, unemployable youth? Unable or unwilling to work? Let them lie till they awake on a bed of nails!

Form an orderly queue to join the large club that goes along with this. But before we climb into the pulpit to rail against these traits we should first visit the confessional of our repressed memories.

Reading the latest searing report on Scottish youth unemployment and observing yesterday’s “jobs summit” at the Scottish Parliament, we should qualify our condemnation a certain amount. Little of this is new. Nor, I would say, is the recoil of so many when first presented with the realities of a working life.

My first “job” was as a would-be carpet salesman in the grim environs of Edinburgh’s East End. I was hired to deliver sales promotion cards to thousands of council flats. Just before the large bundles of cards were handed to me for delivery, the manager produced a green felt tip pen and ran it with a flourish down the edges of the bundles. “The average reply rate to each distribution”, he explained, “whether it’s furniture, encyclopaedias, or carpets is 3.75 cards returned for every thousand delivered. So we’ll soon know, sonny, whether you’re delivering or skiving.”

After ten days delivering in pouring rain, I was unmasked as a skiver.

My second career opportunity was with the Inland Revenue above the ABC cinema in Lothian Road. I was a junior clerk in an office handling charity returns. A large room filled with rows of desks at which clerks sat silently toiling through bundles of forms. I started on the back row. Every time someone left or retired, we shuffled forward to the next desk – a slow motion promotion, or attrition.

I could not imagine doing this for the rest of my life. But at least it was warm and dry. Within three weeks, I remember holding forth to a weary supervisor on how the work could be better organised, the files arranged more efficiently, etc. This was not warmly received. The vacuity of the work and the sense of embarking on a clerical prison sentence soon had me struggling for excuses for no-shows. But I really had no excuses. I had been given a privileged education and had a home to retreat to. After a few months, having shuffled forward just one place, I collected my weekly pay packet and left.

I could excuse my lack of staying power on the grounds that I was determined to break into journalism and that all else was infill till that big break came along.

It was the start of the Roy Jenkins recession of the late 1960s. A university degree appeared to confer no benefits. After months failing to open a single door, I wrote to the National Council for the Training of Journalists, starting my letter with the attention-grabbing number “39!” This, I explained, was the number of unsuccessful letters of application I had written for jobs.

The reply was stark and immediate and awoke me to the realities of job hunting. It began with: “104!” That, the head of the NCTJ explained, was the number of applications he had filed before getting a break.

I met my wife at university, at about the time of her memorable encounter with the careers officer. She was summoned to a crowded lecture theatre where the head of careers memorably began his introduction to the world of work thus: “Those of you who are male and have a science degree will find a job. Those of you who are women and have a science degree will almost certainly find a job. Those of you who are male and have an arts degree will have trouble finding a job. Those of you who are female and an arts graduate should either get married or” – and here he might as well have donned a black cap, so funereal was the pronouncement – “go into teacher training”.

The rite of passage from education into “the world of work” is a fraught experience for each and every generation. It is nothing new. Equally, however, there is clear evidence that it is more acute than it has ever been. The reasons are complex but two figure prominently. The first is a notable weakening in the work ethic – by that I mean the desire, or drive to be occupied in a manner that raises our self-worth. The second is the context in which this is unravelling. Not only are western economies being hollowed out by the competitive challenge from Asia Pacific, but we are also trapped in the most prolonged post-boom economic hangover since modern records began – longer even than the 1930s Great Depression.

The result is an appalling level of youth unemployment, leavened only by a telling counterpart: a persistent growth in the numbers of those aged 65 and over in full or part-time work.

There is powerful evidence to back the point of entrepreneur Adrian Beecroft that employment regulation and protection is scaring off many companies – particularly small companies – from taking on staff. But the fact that the numbers of retirees in work is heading towards a record one million speaks both to the availability of work and the employers’ preference for older workers who are seen to be more conscientious and reliable.

We should not despair over some perceived lack of talent among young people. How can we, this week of all weeks, when Jonathan Ive, a British-born, British-educated, British polytechnic graduate who went to California and rose to become the brilliant designer of Apple computers, iPads and iPhones, has just been accorded a knighthood?

The big questions we should ask are: why did he have to go to California for his talents to be discovered and developed? And what is it we can do to learn from this and replicate this opportunity here?

Less – considerably less – focus on welfarism and “inequalities”, and more – much more – on helping small companies to innovate, invest and grow would go a long way towards rekindling the will to work. But on this, I fear, neither our political masters nor today’s parents and teachers have the will or ability to change. And until they do, that bed of nails for tens of thousands of young people will grow harder to avoid.