The stolen jobs no one wants. Redefining expectations

As I write, a 54 year old Romanian lady is cleaning my garden (a tiny piece of dry earth where no grass grows and only fallen leaves lay). She came to Italy 18 years ago, alongside the italian man she had fallen in love with, full of hope to find a good employment with her Ph.D. in engineering. As it happened the man died before they managed to put together the necessary paperwork to get married.
At the time Romania was not part of the EU and her possibilities for any type of legal work where slim to say the least.
I met her back in 1998, when she started being our housekeeper and eventually became my beloved nanny. Since then she has regularly worked in different Italian households with a wage of about 7/8 euros/hour, with which she had to pay her own pension, taxes, etc. (she had become legal after starting to work for us).
The point of this article, though, is not the sad story of a remarkably honest, sweet, hardworking and humble woman, but rather our (wealthy, western-society people) tendency to identify part of the labor market crisis with the extensive presence of an immigrant and/or illegal workforce in our countries. So the question that I think we should honestly address to ourselves is: would we really be willing to take up the jobs of these immigrant/illegal workers, or are we only using them as scapegoats?

At a time of high unemployment, many Americans are convinced that these aliens take American jobs. As a test, in the summer of 2010 the United Farm Workers (UFW), launched a campaign called "Take Our Jobs" (http://www.takeourjobs.org/) inviting willing Americans to work in the fields. In the following three months 3m people visited takeourjob.org, but 40% of the responses were hate mail, says Maria Machuca, UFW's spokesperson (as reported by "The Economist").
Only 8,600 people expressed an interest in working in the fields, says Ms Machuca. But they made demands that seem bizarre to farmworkers, such as high pay, health and pension benefits, relocation allowances and other things associated with normal American jobs. In late September only seven (I MEAN 7!!!!) American applicants in the "Take Our Jobs" campaign were actually picking crops.
So the point was proven: most Americans did not want those jobs!
Coming back to my Romanian lady: my friends and I often are worried about our employment perspectives but it never occurs to us to actually "downsize" and contemplate a "regular" job. The type of job that is commonplace for the vast majority of people in the planet whilst we, by some type of "natural birth right" seem to be exempted from them.
How many of us complain about the labor market crisis and still pay people to clean our homes, iron our clothes, baby-sit our siblings or relatives, take care of our elderly?
So are "our" jobs (which is difficult to define anyway in this time of mobility) really getting stolen? Is there really a crisis in the labor market or is it mainly that our expectations about what a professional position should be like are not realistic?
Why is it that a Romanian women, with a Ph.D. can clean homes for 20 years without needing therapy or attempting suicide and our young generation cannot even contemplate the idea?

Shakespeare? That Will Be 40000 Dollars Please

This week’s Economist featured a leader on the indebtedness of American students and the grave implications this could have on society as rising unemployment persists. The article as a whole made many ingenious suggestions to reverse the trend of over-burdening students with debt, however from the last sentence it transpired that the newspaper holds a very commercial view of education. This is something I touched upon in a previous article, namely that education has become a mere variable in the job market, rather than being a function in itself. The Economist suggests that “those studying less lucrative subjects would have to pay more, or be subsidised more”, implying that the value of a degree can almost be quantified in crude numbers. This looks over the fact that the value of a degree is mostly qualitative, and that the future salary that a student can expect is but an infinitesimal percentage of the host of other benefits that accrue from pursuing education. The only reason for which a scientific degree (which usually is considered more employable than a humanities one) ought to benefit from more government funding is because it is usually more time-intensive and more expensive to teach because of the practical elements involved. An English degree does not involve all the experiments and labs which undoubtedly cost more money than simply lecturing for 9 hours a week. 

However, to render “more employable” degrees cheaper through greater government funding produces a distorting disincentive to pursue a humanities degree, something which would be regrettable for society as a whole. It reinforces the mistaken notion that education does not have any intrinsic value in itself, but that it ought to be pursued solely to land a lucrative job. This belief is in turn based on a fundamental flaw in society, namely that society benefits solely from money-making automatons and exhorts individuals to chart the course of their life accordingly. On a more banal level, it could be argued that Shakespeare did not find a cure for cancer nor contribute monetarily to the economy, but does it follow from this that the study of his work is any less important for society? Where would we be today without philosophy? A student with an in-depth knowledge of literature or philosophy may not have an identifiable price tag attached to his head, but the value he would bring to the intellectual and cultural facets of society would be priceless. Unhappy is the society that marginalises intellectual pursuit in favour of purely economic proclivities.

Society: the Great Conveyor Belt

Today going to university is not just about learning, it is mainly about entering the swelling pool of graduates who are now categorized as "employable", having a piece of paper that attests to this and consuming copious amounts of alcohol in the process. It is implanted in us from our early school years that the natural thing to do after school is to go to university and get a degree so that it may all culminate in a job. We are pawns placed on a conveyor belt that inexorably takes us through the various stages that society has pre-determined for us; to deviate from this track is looked down on as a failure to achieve what has already been decided for us. How can that be considered a failure if we were not even given the chance to set our own objectives? More importantly, what kind of success is it to merely achieve a life that is not truly our own because we were never at the helm of it?

Going to university is an enrichening experience. Learning is multi-faceted and does not only involve poring through endless books; one would not need to rack up a lifetime's worth of debts if that were the case. Whilst some of us may feel that we solely slave away in the library for 9 months a year, there are a host of other experiences that make us more knowledgeable and open-minded at university. First of all, meeting people from all walks of life ensures that there is a healthy exchange of opinions which may serve to either strengthen one's existing ones or shed light on different lines of thought. This is something achieved mainly through debate. Secondly, university teaches us the important skills of acquiring and processing knowledge through academic writing and research. The feedback from experts in the field is of invaluable use to our development, and not just for the grades. Thirdly, there is no doubt that whilst the formal conferring of the degree is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to education, it is still of immense use when attempting to enter the job market.

However when that tip of the iceberg overwhelms what lies beneath and what really should be valued in a university education, then it all becomes a waste of time. One should not go to university just to get a job as it means education is not an end in itself but a means to an end. When ones goes to university to learn, as well as getting a job eventually, then one is more prone to take a proactive stance in the educational process and engage with it so as to derive some form of satisfaction and personal direction in life. When one goes to university with the sole aim of landing a job then university becomes a conduit to something else, it blurs into the background and one has no incentive to actually think about the experience, let alone engage with it, because the conveyor belt of society has luckily pre-determined the outcome. When I was still in school I wanted to take physics and mathematics at a higher level because I enjoyed them despite the fact that I was almost 100% sure I would not be pursuing a scientific subject at university. Most people advised me not to go ahead with this "madness" because it was useless; in their opinion the subjects I chose to study should be completely determined by what I wanted to study later, therefore rendering school a mere conduit to university such that the latter could then lead to a job and so on so forth.

But what should a job lead to? At university we are rushed into choosing a career path when we often have no work experience whatsoever. This could have catastrophic consequences. A job description does not allow one to make a decision based on the work "experience" as a whole including the work environment and very importantly one's colleagues. We are expected not to stray from our field and have a choice of possible career options which are foisted upon us; however we are not encouraged to contemplate other paths. Everything a graduate does is expected in some way to feed back into that ubiquitous CV rather than being an end in itself. Volunteering, for example, should not be undertaken to enhance one's CV but to develop as a person, meet new people and to give back something when we are normally used to a one-sided relationship with the community. When contemplating a gap year we are asked "how will it look on the CV?" before being asked what benefit will accrue to us. The onus is on employability and not personal development, which falls into second place. If one were to spend a gap year travelling different cultures whilst reading serious books on topics of interests and thus learning a great deal, this would not be recognised on the CV because it is not a tangible form of learning; it does not translate directly into greater employability. But it is in many ways of greater value than participating in a structured volunteer program as there is more room for initiative and one is working towards a self-determined goal. It also becomes an  experience in itself, whose value lies not in the future benefits but in its present.

One need not become a social recluse to add value and direction to one's life; becoming aware of the inexorable conveyor belt is the first step. It is grotesquely simplistic that today's society is pervaded with the idea that a person's achievements can be reduced to two A4 sides, if that, and rather than letting the experiences naturally lead on to the job, we are persuaded to work backwards and apply criteria which are not our own to our life. Our lives are fluid and the only mould being applied to them should be intrinsic to us, not that of a vague job description and accompanying competencies.

A two-tier job market

With the world economy sputtering forward at a snail’s pace and Europe mired in its sovereign debt-crisis, the issue of youth unemployment has acquired a new prominence on the front pages. This is not a novelty, however, and youth unemployment has been festering in southern Europe for around a decade. As the Economist points out, Mediterranean countries (in particular Italy, Greece and Spain) share a similar plight: that of a two-tier job market characterised by an older generation of insiders with permanent contracts and a younger cohort of outsiders who are either unemployed or fumbling along on short-term contracts.

This is largely due to an excessively rigid job market in which it is too costly to fire workers and payroll taxes are overly cumbersome. The upshot of this system is that firms are loth to hire full-time workers and only offer short-term contracts which offer no protection to the worker, as the New York Times reports. Temporary contracts had been introduced to render the labour market more flexible, yet they are now the bane of southern Europe’s youth. The example of Francesca Esposito, who despite her excellent credentials had to work as an unpaid trainee lawyer for Italy’s social security administration, is but the tip of the iceberg.

Couple a job market in a straitjacket with an economic crisis and sluggish growth across much of the Western world, and you end up with entrenched youth unemployment. The Economist makes the point that the young are often the first to suffer when the economy hits a standstill because they are less skilled and easier to fire. However, this was usually redressed in the subsequent upturn as the young had better prospects of re-entering the job market. Not so this time around. In the words of the Economist, the "rigging of the labour market in favour of incumbents and against the young makes what new jobs there are inaccessible”.

This is why southern Europeans often live at home until their thirties, a phenomenon which is too easily attributed to men being “mammoni”. It is not necessarily a choice for the more than 7m Italians aged between 18 and 35 to live at home. On the contrary, when faced with endless temporary contracts which pay little and provide no security, young people feel they cannot take on the obligation of a rental contract, let alone a mortgage. This is a vicious circle for the stay-at-homes were more likely to be unemployed than those who had moved out.

Faced with such a bleak and inaccessible job market, scores of young people choose to emigrate. Italy is in the paradoxical position of being the only net exporter of graduates among rich European countries. The brain drain phenomenon is more commonly associated with developing countries which have not yet developed a satisfactory education system, or a skilled job market. In fact Italy is not exporting blue-collar workers, but a well-educated elite. Sadly, I count myself as one of the many young Italians who opted to study abroad for better job prospects afterwards.

There is no panacea to youth unemployment and what works in one country cannot be used as a blueprint for job creation. It has been plastered on every newspaper that one of the main priorities should be fostering growth. If the economy continues to plod along weakly as it has done so far, then new jobs will not be forthcoming. Italy in particular has had a decade of lethargic growth and the political class has done precious little to alleviate the problem (it is not a coincidence that politicians can count themselves as belonging to the “insiders”).  As bond markets have put politicians under increasing pressure, these have rushed to hash out draconian austerity measures that will strangle what little growth there is. This is not to say that the balance sheets ought to be left to gather dust in a corner, but there is no hope for a country to balance its budget if it does not grow.

Yet even with a re-kindled growth, the young will not be able to benefit from it if structural reforms are not implemented across much of southern Europe. These include an overhaul of the pension systems, deregulation of the labour markets and eliminating red tape so that businesses will be more willing to invest in the region. The latest austerity budget passed by Italy showed that its politicians would be more adept at haggling over prices in a fruit market than being put in charge of solving the myriad of problems that afflict it.

Entrenched youth unemployment marks the deviation from a trend in the developed world which has been taken for granted for decades, namely that the younger generation was almost guaranteed a better quality of life than their parents through hard work. Not only does the sense of betrayal felt by many of today’s young engender a deep sense of malaise and resentment, but this “lost generation” is brewing and bound to reach boiling point at some stage. It is a veritable hollowing out of society encouraged by the two-tier labour market. As the older middle class approaches retirement age, there is no new generation to fill the gap; it has been left behind on the slow speed train.