The European Youth Guarantee: a reality check

Policy Study

Unemployment and youth unemployment in particular, are among the most pressing social problems in Europe. Delayed entry into the labour market is associated with long-term troubles in finding employment and pay differentials that may last for decades. It is also a problem mostly likely to befall those young people who already held the weakest positions in the labour market, like school drop outs. For them, youth unemployment effectively blocks their most viable road towards upward social mobility. In the context of an ageing society, a large group of young people failing to acquire stable jobs also adds up to an intergenerational problem. After all, the future of our social model greatly depends on this young generation’s ability to provide for a much more sizeable generation of retired people. High youth unemployment rates, in some countries up to nearly half of the labour force under 25, will have a detrimental effect on that capacity. Moreover, as high unemployment as this may have fundamental consequences to the moral and ideological underpinnings of the societies that, after all, is based on wage-work as the primary and the most desirable means of income.

This year, European social democrats launched a campaign for the European youth guarantee, effectively wishing to grant the right to work to young people. Those under 25 years of age, the guarantee holds, who have not found a job within three months, should be provided with a job, training or apprenticeship. The “guarantee” shifts the focus of unemployment away from individual problems of employability towards more traditionally social democratic ideals in which full employment is a societal responsibility. In a rather tautological way, the youth guarantee solves youth unemployment by simply not allowing for its existence. It is, as such, more an ideal than a policy and must be judged on the basis of the extensive operationalization at the national or even local level it needs to succeed.

This paper examines the state and nature of youth unemployment in the EU and the potential of the youth guarantee. The authors study the countries where a youth guarantee has been implemented or is in the process of being introduced. Analysing the measures, target groups, rights and reciprocities involved in the existing guarantees, the authors then assess the possibility of copying the policy design in other EU member states. They argue that while the youth guarantee was successfully implemented and uploaded to the European policy domain by a limited number of North-Western European countries, the concept has not yet been adapted to reality of those member states where it is most sorely needed. Conditions assumed as self-evident in countries like Finland and Austria, do not always exist in the member states that were most hardly hit by the crisis. There is a lack of stable labour market to integrate into, youth unemployment is not limited to lowly educated youth and the state of vocational education and training tends to lag behind. In order for the youth guarantee to be effective in Southern and Central Eastern European member states, its budget needs to be drastically increased and its focus needs to shift much more to demand side policies and job creation.

More information on the PES campaign “Your Future is my Future”

Background about the FEPS Young Academics Network