Breaking the unemployment habit
Nigel Williams, 22 August 2013
This morning (22nd August), Radio Gloucestershire (temporary link) broadcast a piece of thoughtful and constructive reporting by Heather Simons. The headline was that public money was funding training courses to teach basic skills like setting an alarm clock, dress for work and catch a bus. Rather than descend into outrage, the programme interviewed Prospect Training Services, who are running the course and a trainee who had acquired skills as a motor mechanic through his own assisted efforts. They reported stories of people still in their pyjamas at 2 in the afternoon.
Adding some detail was an interview with Civitas’ Peter Saunders. Within families or households, if no adults are employed it reduces the expectation to keep to other people’s times and rules. There is an element of children taking after their parents and of course a neighbourhood with few jobs for the parents will have few jobs for the offspring too.
Although the problem is worse for people growing up in households where no-one has the routine of preparing for regular work, unemployment can allow many people to lapse into bad habits even after a history of working. Marie Johoda’s classic study Marienthal: the sociography of an unemployed community examined an industrial district outside Vienna during the Great Depression. Nevertheless, even a deprived family background is not a complete bar to employment and, though it can be harder for them, most offspring still find a way into work. Ten or more years of attending school leaves some impression of the value of punctuality.
Targeted early intervention remains the most likely solution before habits become ingrained, even if it is slow and expensive. The government’s ‘Troubled Families’ initiative has a long-term target of assisting 120,000 families. By January 2013 it had worked with around 36,000 but only ‘turned around’ 1,675, none of them in Gloucestershire but 82 in Bristol.
It may look like painfully slow progress but it is important work and the potential rewards are great. A look at recent youth unemployment statistics shows some rates more usually associated with southern Europe. Of 16 to 17 year-old men in the UK in the second quarter of 2013, not in school but wanting work, over 100,000 or 42 per cent were unemployed . For women the rate was lower, at 34 per cent. In the South West, Gloucestershire included, the male average was 30 per cent, whereas in Yorkshire and the Humber region it was 57 percent and in London it was above 70. These figures, at the extreme end of British worklessness, show how great the gap can be between leaving school with few qualifications and finding paid work. A scheme like Prospect’s in Gloucestershire, that keeps people engaged and turns them into the people employers will be happy to take on, is well worth taking seriously.
