In common journalistic practice retrospective commentaries are written in decennial anniversaries. But politics and policies have their own time conceptualisation. Ten years is enough for a policy to be considered obsolete. This is even more so for the years after the 2008 economic crisis and the subsequent recession. The political time became so dense, especially in the European South, that assessing a policy and indeed an employment policy, is always relevant. During the ten years long crisis and the ensuing pandemic the impact on employment has been significantly harsh. The impact on youth has been moreover of particular interest because of the eventual risk of a very delayed introduction of a whole generation in the labour market. In that respect active labour market policies, which have always been a vantage point for social and economic intervention, came to the epicentre of youth policy. Under that light, the 2013 introduction of the Youth Guarantee marks a turning point. For the first time an employment policy tried to solve the problem of youth unemployment.
Any assessment requires the abandonment of prejudices; and the previous phrase includes several of them!
In the everyday practice the juxtaposition of problems, policies and solutions is almost self-understandable. “We design and implement policies in order to solve problems”. Nevertheless, a simple review of the aforementioned phrase reveals the limits of this approach. It is people that solve problems! Policies rather offer the conceptual framework that help people make sense of the problems. A further analysis would reveal the complexity of the concept of the problem itself. Not all public issues are “problems” irrespective of their urgency, potential risk or impact. They rather become problems when they are registered by the public as such. And the formation of public sentiment may range from apathy to moral panic. Political communication offers a plethora of expletive approaches.
By transferring the above line of argumentation in the case of Youth Guarantee more issues arise. The relativization of the public problem is not a negation. In other words, youth unemployment is indeed a social problem and a serious one! The point lies with the time, the space and the way that a public policy, Youth Guarantee in that case, conceptually frames it as a problem.
The YOUTHShare project and many other researches before have highlighted the complexity of the phenomenon; structural, temporary, seasonal, friction unemployment and many other aspects. At the same time, the bibliography has pointed to, at least, two directions of reasons; the demand and the supply side.
If employment is a process involving at least two sides – the employer and the employee – its stimulation may focus on the support of employers to hire more employees. In that case solutions including wage subsidies or tax relief for the re-investment of profit are the expected solutions. On the other hand, a supply side perspective would focus on the employee. Skills gap is understood as the primary cause of the “problem” and the solution is to be found in reskilling or upskilling which would improve the employability of unemployed youth.
It is apparent that both perspectives and their accompanied solutions are sound. The point is how a policy conceptually frames the process by making one of the perspectives “self-understandable”. In that respect Youth Guarantee has been calibrated around the unemployed person. Seminars, trainings, skills, entrepreneurial empowerment, coaching, counselling, enrolment offices are just few of the measures in the toolbox. Most importantly, however, the very concept of the Not in Employment Education or Training centralises the individual looking (or not) for job. It seems peculiar to imagine the respective concept from the demand side. Wouldn’t the Unable To Hire Employees (UTHE) phenomenon sound like a joke?
Nine years after the introduction of the Youth Guarantee, marks a good point for the assessment of this emblematic active labour market policy. An assessment, however, that needs to be deep enough to include the fundamental concepts involved. And such an assessment reveals that a policy is much more than a bureaucratic response to a problem. It is rather the incorporation of the political ideologies involved in their making.
