Structural Violence and Youth Un(der)employment

The concept of structural violence was first developed by Johan Galtung in 1969 (Jacoby 2008). Galtung’s contribution was to interpret the “damage that occurs to individuals or groups due to differential access to social resources and which is due to the normal operation of the social system” (Jacoby 2008, p.

The negative effects of un(der)employment are, it can be argued, a form of structural violence. The un(der)employment of the young men to be discussed in this chapter is affected by the onset, in 2008, of economic recession in the UK. This downturn was the most severe shock to the economy since the Great Depression (Bell and Blanchflower 2010). Not all workers were equally affected by the downturn, and analysis of labor market data reveals that unemployment is highest among those with lower levels of education, young people, and racial minorities. Black youth were particularly hard hit. Bell and Blanchflower (2010) show that while comprising only 19.5% of the UK working age population, 74% of the decrease in employment was shouldered by those aged 16-24. More recent unem­ployment figures for the UK show that young men are more likely to be without work than young women in the 16-24 age group (19.9% unemployed compared with 15.5%) (Dar 2014).

While the economic downturn and its aftermath continue to negatively affect the prospects of young people, it is important to note that youth unemployment was a problem in the UK even prior to the crisis. For the 10 years before the crisis, 7-9% of young people were reaching the age of 16 and could be classified as long-term NEET, “not in employment, education or training” (ACEVO 2012). Perhaps more important, however, was the widespread phenomenon of youth un(der)employment - that is, the situation of young people who are struggling to gain a stable foothold in the labor market. Youth scholarship has shown that over the past 30 years, young people have been less and less likely to experience linear, straightforward, and certain transitions out of education and into work (MacDonald 2013). Rather, young people are often forced to settle for part-time work, or work with inconsistent hours, and are frequently employed on a short-term or as-needed basis. In other words, young people are often not, strictly speaking, fully unemployed or employed, but typically cycle in and out of short-term, precarious employment and periods of unemployment as well as into, and out of, education and training programs (Furlong et al. 2006; MacDonald 2009, 2011a, 2013; Newman 2006; Shildrick and MacDonald 2011). Furthermore, for many young people, particularly those disadvantaged by class, these precarious jobs are not serving as stepping stones to enable a person to secure a better job as they gain more experience (Shildrick and MacDonald 2011). Instead, young people are trapped in a pattern described by some scholars as “churn,” in and out of low-quality jobs.

The prospects of young people with low levels of education have long been shaped by the broader social changes in the UK including the process of deindus­trialization. This is the restructuring of the labor market with the associated decline of manufacturing and the growth of the service sector.

McDowell (2009) argues that this is in part because in most British towns and cities the work available to young people is in the expanded service sector. It is often neither well paid nor secure, but rather at the bottom end of the labor market, typically in feminized, low-paid interactional service sector jobs (McDowell 2009). It is here that young people, men as well as women, without formal credentials increasingly are forced to search for work.

Young working-class men, in particular, can face acute challenges in securing service sector employment. They are often deemed not to embody the characteristics and attitudes perceived as appropriate and employable in the new interactive service sector in which deference and self-presentation are prized (McDowell 2003, 2007,

2012). Willis' (1977) classic work revealed the way in which working-class young men are socialized at school into types of male-dominated employment that rely on a particular version of masculinity that is constructed in opposition to an academically oriented middle-class masculinity. In the contemporary service-sector-dominated economy, the version of a “hard” working-class masculinity previously valued in the manufacturing sector is likely to result in young men's disqualification from service employment. In Swindon, where opportunities in manufacturing are diminishing and those that remain tend to require a degree of skill, young men who do not have high levels of education face difficulties securing work. For such young men, the performance of the social and embodied skills that are required in interactive service sector work, such as reverence, eagerness to please, and an ability to deliver “service with a smile,” is a threat to their sense of themselves as masculine. Research in Britain, the USA, and elsewhere has revealed that young working-class men, particularly racialized men and/or recent in-migrants, find themselves at a particular disadvantage in economies in which service sector employment is dominant (Bourgois 1995; McDowell 2009; Newman 1999, 2006; Nixon 2006).

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