1:51 pm
Huw Phillips
The ACTU recently released the Insecure Work, Anxious Lives report which highlights the rise in precarious employment in recent decades. There are now more than 4 million Australian workers engaged in jobs that are not permanent or ongoing. For young people especially, the immediate economic future is one of uncertainty and risk.
The idea of youth in its contemporary form is one that has been structured by the industrialisation and urbanisation processes which accompanied the rise of capitalism. Over time, young people became largely redundant in the industrial capitalist mode of production. With the rise of the economic paradigm of neoliberalism, the relationship of young people to the labour market has become characterised by greater job insecurity and unstable employment opportunities.
Since the 1970s successive governments have not actively committed to full-employment and an unemployment rate of 4-5% is politically tolerable. In this post-Fordist industrial economic regime, youth unemployment and underemployment is increasingly accepted as an unavoidable reality. Rather than being understood as a socially constructed and historically contingent phenomenon, the inadequacy of the labour market to provide for young people simply is.
As the ACTU report makes clear, there is now a demographic of workers classified as “Insecure Youth” (that’s if they can get work). But, there is nothing natural or neutral about the socio-economic relationships of capitalism. One example is the inequality reproduced by opportunity in (and for) education which can actively reinforce structural disadvantages for young people already marginalised due to their class, gender, and race.
For the disposable youth in the labour market, the situation is both palpable and immediate. I now want to turn to three tentative ways social democratic parties can start to address the structural inequalities of post-Fordist societies and challenge the discursive power of neoliberalism. Note, these are not new ideas, but ones that governments of the Left seem to be in need of a reminding.
Firstly, social-democratic parties cannot be afraid of social engineering. Indeed, if they do not bring an approach to government that seeks to be actively transformative, they can only function to facilitate, and at best mediate, the ongoing operation of a socio-economic system of exploitation, marginalisation, and exclusion.
Secondly, they cannot shy away from left-wing economics. This is simple re-distribution of wealth from the haves to the have-nots. Economic policy should be directed not towards the facilitation of capital, but the democratic control of capital so that there can be economic and social justice for all.
Thirdly, they can no longer allow for the discourse of neoliberalism to dictate the terms of political debate. Whenever the left allows for the language of market efficiency to dictate understandings of productivity and employment, let alone the fields of education and health, they are bound to reinforce the status quo.
With reference to disposable youth in the labour market, social-democratic parties can apply these principles in government, but they also must include young people themselves in the creation and implementation of policy to address youth unemployment and underemployment.
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