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Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

• lignuist 13y ago
  Interesting, how Germany decoupled itself from the rest of Europe in this graph.
  • douglasisshiny 13y ago
    Considering that Germany is essentially the ECB -- no, it's not. As a lender of last resort, the ECB has failed. It has failed to acknowledge to lessons taught by history; and it has failed to look itself in the mirror now. Germany reaped the benefits of having small economies join the EU; now they refuse to take full responsibility; hell, they refuse to even allow, say, 4% core inflation for a couple of years to help the struggling economies.
    • claudius 13y ago
      Yes, because they learnt the lessons from history and if there is anything that Germany wants to avoid then it is inflation. Furthermore, the ECB is controlled by a money-printing Italian and last time I checked, German influence in the ECB was extremely low, especially compared to the relative size of Germany within the EU.
      • disgruntledphd2 13y ago
        I don't know if that is particularly true. The ECB has been obsessed with inflation since its inception, which is a particularly Bundesbank-like set of priorities. While the official political authority is delegated on a country basis, I suspect that most of the civil servants (i.e. the people who mostly make the decisions) are if not Bundesbank, somewhat influenced by that school of monetary thought.
  • pachydermic 13y ago
    It is. I think the reasons for it are pretty simple: They didn't experience a huge housing bubble (like Spain) They don't have a big productivity problem (like Greece) Their government's finances weren't totally unsustainable (like Spain or Greece) They don't depend a great deal on tourism (like Greece). No one seems to want to go on vacation to a rioting and unstable country. Hopefully things will improve for those countries... but it's pretty easy to be a pessimist given the situation.
    • douglasisshiny 13y ago
      Spain's government finances were not unsustainable prior to the recession. In fact, they were in pretty good shape. Spain did, however, face a crippling housing bubble due to the surge of outside investment.
    • hkmurakami 13y ago
      The issue with Spain lies is the (private) banks, not government finances. Unlike Greece, where the government needs to get bailed out, in Spain it is the banks that are in trouble.
      • toomuchtodo 13y ago
        The banks were in trouble in Ireland, and Ireland stood behind them (which destroyed them). The banks in Iceland were in trouble and Iceland walked away from them. Much less pain in Iceland compared to what Ireland is going through. When in doubt and able, default.
        • kalleboo 13y ago
          Iceland had their own currency though, and from the looks of a graph I googled up they inflated the ISK 100% since before the crisis. Ireland and Spain don't have that option.
          • toomuchtodo 13y ago
            They do have the option; walk away from the Euro.
  • jcrites 13y ago
    It seems like it should be possible to run some economic analysis, at least at a high level, based on this type of data and the actions of the countries involved. I also wonder if Europe has higher unemployment due to a lower frequency of "at will" employment. Hiring someone seems to be a much greater consideration in countries where it's difficult to let someone go. Poor performers are likely to stick around longer and impact the team much more. Would employment be lower if at-will employment were more commonplace and lawful in Europe?
  • dnu 13y ago
    This might be misleading. Germany has something named "mini job" or "400 euro job", where you are paid exactly 400 euro which barely covers the groceries and the rent for a room. A lot of young people have such a job, and this keeps the unemployment rate low.
    • claudius 13y ago
      The amount of people employed in such jobs has actually decreased in recent years and nowadays, more people than ever are employed in full social security jobs in Germany.
  • derda 13y ago
    In Germany it is common for young people to go from school to a apprenticeship (paid (but extremly little), Apprentices spend half the week at school the other half at the company), these can be anything from plumber, salesman to software developer. So they enter a company at the age of 17 and will often be employed full time when they finish, if not they still have a degree that will enable them to enter the job market on good terms. This is kind of a win-win situation, youth that did not qualify for university or dont want to go can jump right into a job and learn a profession. They will receive a dimploma from the chamber of commerce and even earn a little bit of money. For the companies, the workers are relatively cheap while they are trained, and they will not only receive pratical training in the company, but also a scholarly curriculum worked out by the chamber of commerce. In the last years we actually had the situation that companies cannot fill all their places for apprentices and some are actually looking to hire some from Spain.
  • piokoch 13y ago
    This is direct result of Euro currency - the strongest economy gets even stronger. Greece, Spain, etc. were producing low quality goods, but they were cheap. Now they are as expensive as better German products. That's why sane governments (UK, Sweden) stay away from Euro - not to kill export. Clever move from Germany and prescription for the disaster (collapse of EU - that' optimistic and would help Europe to recover, or less optimistic like war) when people realize how they were cheated. Greece, despite misarable situation, is still buying war ships... from Germany.
• 422long 13y ago
  Is there a correlation between high-unemployment countries and the availability/quality of off-shore tech labor? Sure the local market may be in shambles, and the level of effort/risk to bring on new permanent employees may be out of whack. Assuming the talent and drive exists, shouldn't this drive the freelancing segment?
  • zanny 13y ago
    As someone trying to get into freelancing out of college, it really blows without a portfolio, and can take years to make one, and most of my freelancer friends left 9-5 (more like 6-10) jobs in the industry to do freelance, and used their years of experience and connections from the job as a jumping off point.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  • stock_toaster 13y ago
    that data is employment, not the lack of.
  • edmccard 13y ago
    The percentages on that page are labeled "Youth Employment Rate" (not unemployment), which would explain why they are higher in the "No Disability" column than in the "Disability" column.
  • pyre 13y ago
    That says the youth employment rate, otherwise numbers like: April 2013 ~~~~~~~~~~ Disability: 28.9 No Disability: 62.3 would mean that ~91.2% of 20-24 year olds are not working.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • mapmeld 13y ago
    The 60% figure is the employment rate, so unemployment would be less than 40%. That 40% might include full-time students and others who might not be unemployed.
• pyre 13y ago
  The graphs and the unemployment stats seem to be about people 25 and under, but then when talking about how educated the workforce is, the author talks about 20- and early-30-somethings. The 26 to early 30's part of that stat means it's not directly comparable.
• hkmurakami 13y ago
  This is scary, yes. But there's more to any unemployment story than just the stats. What are the prospects of an unemployed young person getting a job at any point in the future, even when the economy recovers? Is there a strong bias towards new grads, that would lead to a "lost generation" that permanently suffers in the job market? How does society look on the unemployed? Do they look at them with sympathy or scorn? Lastly, how do the young unemployed feel? Are they angry? Are they carefree? Or are they filled with despair and hopelessness?
  • jcrites 13y ago
    How are they making a living and otherwise providing for themselves? (Serious question.) Is homelessness also skyrocketing, or do the unemployed receive benefits of some kind?
    • ferongr 13y ago
      They live with their parents.
    • flexie 13y ago
      It's different from country to country, but in general lot's of them live with their parents and most of them receive some welfare. In Southern Europe it's not unnormal to live with your parents way into your twenties or even early thirties. And it's not considered embarrassing either. In the cafés of Barcelona, Rome, Athens, you will meet the well dressed 31 year old guy with a smart phone in his pocket a laptop on his knees and a girlfriend by his side. He drives a nice little car, goes on vacations once or twice a year, has a master in something soft, which he got for free, and he is covered by free health care. He lives with his parents or - if he is lucky - in one of their spare apartments (lots of Southern European families have more than one home). He may have a low paid job or he may be unemployed living with a bit of government welfare and occational help from daddy.
      • autodafe 13y ago
        Welfare, free health care, free education... Free to him but it has to be paid for by someone. As more people rely on those benefits, the cost goes up for those who contribute to the system. The frightening question is what happens when the well runs dry?
• jcrites 13y ago
  It would be great if the US government provided an expedited Visa program for college-educated foreign nationals who have received a job offer from a company in the US. There is H1B, but that applies to specialty occupations. (I'm not an immigration expert - perhaps this already exists and I don't know about it?) How many people from those countries immigrate to the US or wish to? If they're willing to work, and a company here has offered them a job, I say bring them over! Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free; The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, Tempest-tossed to me I lift my lamp beside the golden door! (I do get the impression that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. can hire the candidates they want, but is that true for smaller companies as well?) The article mentioned that about 30% are college educated. It would be interesting to look at a breakdown of degrees. For example, many Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics graduates are highly sought after in industry. Additionally, are the degrees reputable from an international perspective and in fields suitable by commerce and industry?
  • icelancer 13y ago
    Why do they have to be college-educated?
    • sliverstorm 13y ago
      It's a reaction to the observation that the most valuable immigrants, the ones that we want most, have options elsewhere and are going elsewhere. So, shouldn't we lower the barriers to entice said valuable immigrants? College-educated is just an easy metric to approximate this distinction.
  • mullingitover 13y ago
    As someone who'd like to drive down the value of my labor down to poverty levels, this is a fantastic idea.
    • jcrites 13y ago
      This isn't a particularly constructive comment, especially the sarcasm. I can see that you've been on HN for a while, but in the future it would be great if you could consider stating your concerns directly. (Unless you're just trying to make a joke, in which case it doesn't make complete sense to me. We're talking about positions that require college education.) Or do you genuinely believe that allowing a greater level of immigration will have more drawbacks than benefits?
• sebkomianos 13y ago
  Another quite scary graph: http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2013/06/Europe%20unemployment%20country.jpg http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im... I hope it's getting clear to everyone that this is not a "union" anymore..
  • flexie 13y ago
    And then this is not a union either: http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/labor/state-unemployment-update.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/labor/state-unemployment... The difference between unemployment in North Dakota and Puerto Rico is 4 fold, not that different from Austria vs. Greece. Also, the figures for Greece are the February figures. The largest industry in Greece, tourism, takes off right about now, and last year on the beach in Greece there were plenty of young Greeks working the beaches, bars and hotels. But of course, many of these jobs are unofficial so they may continue to count as unemployed.
    • sebkomianos 13y ago
      I don't know as much about how the USA works as a union but, no, it sure doesn't look like a union either. :) But they are not threatening to kick California out of the US if it doesn't pay its debts, right? As for tourism, yes, it's going to be slightly reduced in July, but do you think it's nice to wait for 3-4 months to work? Also, they are going to vote for an austerity measure to give seasonal workers an unemployment aid not every year but every two years. At the same time a former minister of defence, who is jailed for corruption scandals, is receiving two pensions every month.
• niles 13y ago
  What's a good website to directly target skilled workers in Spain / Greece / Italy / etc? I'm always on the look for good design, code, marketing, writing, really just about anything (even with a little language barrier). oDesk and similar don't seem to attract what I would consider to be 70% of a country's workforce. Any sense of if they have training / skills? Where are these people looking for work (online)?
  • iaskwhy 13y ago
    As far as I know (I'm Portuguese), everything in Europe is very local so people are looking for work on their countries local job sites. There's also another problem that probably affect more the Portuguese people than the others: if you had a job you were paid a really low salary (the average is probaly around 800 EUR/month net), you were not able to save enough money to go abroad so, for most people, that is not an option.
• kposehn 13y ago
  Youths with nothing to lose are how bloody revolutions start, rarely turning out well for any involved. I find one thing about the unemployment rate in Europe truly scary: There are a /lot/ of youths there with nothing to lose.
  • kposehn 13y ago
    And another thing: austerity is all that stands between Europe and total collapse. They can't keep writing checks they cannot cash.
    • sopooneo 13y ago
      Do you mean that you believe austerity will help avoid collapse, or that austerity will bring it on? I think you mean the former. I'm too ignorant on the issue to have an opinion myself.
      • javs42 13y ago
        Unfortunately there is still debate about the benefit/drawbacks of austerity, but if Europe is any indication, it is just degrading the whole situation. What's keeping Europe away from the edge or from a turn to prosperity is the hard-nosed devotion to austerity.
        • adventured 13y ago
          Ah yes, if the troubled European nations would just spend a lot more money they don't actually have while not paying off any of their debts, while pretending they could ever afford the vast welfare states they built, they would find themselves prosperous again. Keynesian faith based economics at its finest. Spend what you don't have, run up debts you can never pay back, and print your way deeper into destruction when all else fails, because inflation is easier to lie about than an equivalent austerity cut. Keynesian economics, turning first world countries into second world countries since 1936.
          • 13y ago
• sidcool 13y ago
  News of this kind makes me confused, scared and angry. Confused because of questions like 'Is Government directly responsible for jobs?', 'What is the skill set of the youth?' etc. Scared because the youth have families to feed, they have ambitions and this leads to a rise in suicides among the youth. Angry because the government, due to their poor economic choices, have ruined the dreams of the youth. The government is responsible for providing opportunities and freedom, if not employment. But they fail, for various reasons, including corruption, dirty politics, poor economic choices etc.
• brownbat 13y ago
  The conventional (conservative/economic liberal/libertarian) wisdom is that employers are reluctant to hire new youths because these states mandate so many employer provided protections for any new hires. Employers become risk averse, unwilling to give anyone untested a first shot at the labor market. Evidence is somewhat mixed based on this chart. The UK has traditionally had lower severance ("redundancy") pay requirements, and is lower on the chart, but close to the EU average. Germany is fairly low on the chart as well, so... maybe youth unemployment is driven more by GDP / worker productivity / promotion of internships / demographics, any number of confounding factors. The risk of even discussing this idea, even agnostically, is it can beg attacks on the social safety net, so everyone drowns in the quicksand of passionate partisan shouting. Maybe there's a way to sidestep the traditional arguments and get something out of the discussion. Say we assume the European safety net is non-negotiable, but say we also believe that employee protections may make employers reluctant to hire. Is there a way to implement the same social protections that would blunt the unintended consequences?
  • anonymous 13y ago
    That's pretty much entirely false, at least as I can see it. Employers can and do hire young, inexperienced people on contracts that say "we can fire you when we want and we don't owe you". Those aren't proper long-term labour contracts, true, but it's precisely what you want for someone who's getting a job for the very first time in their life. Edit: for the record, I'm from Bulgaria and our unemployment rate for under 25 years-olds is 28%, according to latest Eurostat data. Back in 2008 we were at nearly German levels (11% vs 10%). Interestingly, Germany is the only country whose rate has gone down rather than up in the last few years. Their graph is almost perfectly asymmetrical with the ones for countries of Eastern Europe.
    • claudius 13y ago
      That’s because Germany implemented the necessary social reforms before the crash (around 2005), rather than after. It also still has a superior education programme with apprenticeships for standard jobs, as well as cheap university access with extra funding for poorer people. Edit: You can even see this in the graph. German youth unemployment peaked in 2005, well before the financial crisis but after a decade of slow growth, also cf. [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_man_of_Europe#Modern_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_man_of_Europe#Modern_use
• Irishsteve 13y ago
  Just anecdotal stuff, Friends in Greece who work for the government have not been paid for 6 - 9 months. But they stay in the job for whenever the pay day does come. Friends in Spain work for cash in hand because their potential employers save money on the various social insurance costs they have to put up, but cannot afford because times are tight. Local mid size companies are using the down turn as a great excuse to let people go, while pushing their own salary up. (Noted from friends who work in payroll who have access to that kinda info)
  • iaskwhy 13y ago
    I don't think the cash in hand thing is happening in Portugal which is kind of surprising giving the small salary you get per month and the amount of taxes you pay now. Maybe they have some catch up to do.
    • disgruntledphd2 13y ago
      There's a lot of it in Ireland, but then, there was a lot of it in Ireland even when times were good. We have this sense, as a nation, that if you can beat the system and get money for nothing, then you should. Probably a holdover from colonial times, which is sad.
• mtgx 13y ago
  Usually job growth comes from startups, especially in tough times. If Europe had a stronger startup culture, it could've helped, especially for young people.
• 1morepassword 13y ago
  Take one look at that graphic and tell me that there is such a thing as "Europe", other than as a continent on a map.
  • EliRivers 13y ago
    I could say the same thing about the US by looking at Detroit and New York, for example.
• pinaceae 13y ago
  it's bad, but not as bad as these stats make it seem. a lot of those youths do have jobs, but simply are paid cash in hand. when asked, they are unemployed for tax and insurance reasons. as long as illegal immigrant workers are working on the fields of spain, uneomployment simply cannot be that bad. nobody is starving. roads, bars, stadiums are full. money is circulating in the system. it just is black, untaxed.
  • gaius 13y ago
    You've hit the nail on the head there. Go to any cafe or bar in London and the chances are you will be served by a Pole. Think about that for a second: the labour situation in the UK is such that we have to import workers from 600 miles away to make coffee. Now these people aren't being paid under the table, they are legal employees or legitimate companies. So where are the Brits who could be doing these jobs? For whatever reason, unavailable.
  • michaelochurch 13y ago
    nobody is starving. roads, bars, stadiums are full. money is circulating in the system. it just is black, untaxed. That is how countries end up like Greece.
• rafski 13y ago
  Nobody's hiring in Southern EU countries, because firing is too difficult/expensive there. All the protectionist laws that were meant to keep the employee secure naturally backfired and resulted in a steadily shrinking job market. Employing someone in EU is like accepting them into a kindergarten, you assume full responsibility for them as if they weren't adults. Matt Henderson gives an eye-opening first-hand report from Spain here: http://www.dafacto.com/2011/02/12/the-unfortunate-consequence-of-protective-social-laws-in-spain/ http://www.dafacto.com/2011/02/12/the-unfortunate-consequenc... Allow the employers to fire easily, they will have no problem hiring again.