Abstract
Since the 2008 financial crisis, much has been said, in both popular and academic literature, on the shifting character of work and employment in advanced capitalist nations. While not confined to the global north, the everyday experience of work for many people has become characterized by contingency. Work is no longer permanent, salaried, or reliable. Work has become part-time, precarious, shift or contract, and, increasingly, global in character (Brown, Lauder, & Ashton, 2010). This phenomenon, which is by no means new in the history of capitalist organization of labor (Ross, 2009), has become so pervasive that many now refer to the working class as “the precariat” (Standing, 2011). This job precariousness, however, is best understood as “an intensification and generalization of a pre-existing situation rather than the emergence of a new phenomenon” (Cairns et al., Youth Unemployment and Job Precariousness, p. 5). These shifts in labor are also tied to a global anxiety around the extent, form, and implications of youth unemployment, which now often encompasses young adults up to the age of 30 years. While young people’s participation in labor markets has long been on a seasonal, part-time, or contract basis, the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on youth labor market outcomes is still unveiling itself, even almost a decade later. The International Labor Organization (2016) recently reported an expected increase in global youth unemployment, while continuing to highlight significant concerns in terms of gender disparities, racialized labor markets, and continued restriction of young people to work that is unsafe and low wage.
Adult educators may be hesitant to tread into an issue characterized by the concept of “youth.” However, the problem of the economic and political participation of young people is a key concern for both the present and future dimensions of our field. This concern arises from several directions. On the one hand, young adults are our adult learners today and will be our adult learners for decades to come. Understanding the conditions that they face as young people will be vital to our ability to engage with them in learning environments. On the other hand, the highly problematic discourse of “youth” obscures the dynamics of what is taking place in the traditional domains of adult education practice: workplaces, communities, and social movements. As two of the authors reviewed here argue, “something happens when we start thinking of a minimum wage worker in his or her 20s as a ‘youth’ or ‘emerging adult,’ rather than, for example, a member of the working class” (Sukarieh & Tannock, Youth Rising, p. 25).
This review essay profiles three recent texts that shed light on the dynamics, debates, and problems associated with the study of young people’s economic and political participation in today’s global political economy. Taken together they offer adult educators important insight into the changing landscape of both labor and adult education. In this context, young adults have emerged as an important area of intervention from both traditional educational institutions, but also the state and, increasingly, capital. As two authors reviewed here argue,
The shifting scope, meaning and salience of youth are shaped not just by young people themselves, but by a whole host of other social institutions and actors as well, each pursuing different political agendas and ideologies, in the context of the ever-changing social relations and political economy of a global capitalist society. (Sukarieh & Tannock, Youth Rising, p. 4)
Youth Rising? The Politics of Youth in the Global Economy begins from the position that a critical engagement with the concept of youth is crucial in today’s political landscape. This engagement, however, is not only driven by the material and cultural circumstances in which youth live but also by the salience and malleability of the concept to policy makers, transnational organizations, and capital. Specifically, the authors argue that “youth” is central to neoliberal discourses concerning the capitalist development, volatility in labor markets, and the ideal sort of political subject within an era of increasing contestation, on a global scale, of the distribution of wealth and political power. Their analysis reviews the intersections between growing discourses of youth, the history of capitalist development, and the politics of neoliberalism, echoing other authors such as Giroux (2009) and Kwon (2013), when they argue that neoliberalism constructs youth as both intrinsically deficient and full of potential assets and abilities. This “always becoming” aspect of youth translates into the proliferation of youth-oriented programming, including leadership development, civic engagement, and entrepreneurship. This “neoliberal embrace,” as termed by the authors, constructs youth as both the object and subject of neoliberal reform. After extending their analysis into terrains of youth unemployment and the extension of postsecondary education, the authors pose the important question of whether or not youth in today’s context can be considered a revolutionary subject. Ultimately, the fetishization of youth is rejected for the argument that social transformation cannot emerge from any single group, abstracted from the broader racialized, gendered, and classed relations of society.
Youth Unemployment and Job Precariousness: Political Participation in the Austerity Era reports on the findings of a multi-year study in Portugal on the relationship between labor market precariousness for young adults and the forms and expressions of their political engagement. The national context of the study provides insight into the particularities of the “youth crisis” in a country that has undergone structural adjustment and austerity measures in Europe. The authors describe several debates concerning a generational approach to the study of young people, before arguing that there is some utility in exploring the various conceptualizations of austerity and the impact these social forces may have on both the economic and political participation of young people. Thus, they conclude that scholars and policy makers must take seriously the possibility and possible implications of an “austerity generation.” This generational effect echoes concerns already articulated by the International Labor Organization (2013), which is that young people may remain, past the age of 30 years, excluded from key areas of the labor market including those most tied to economic growth. The results of this labor market exclusion and job precariousness are seen to not only have individual consequences, but threaten larger instability in broader society. After concluding that there is little evidence to support the idea that Portuguese young people are abandoning formal politics, or increasing their participation, the authors highlight two case studies of youth movements within Portugal that echo the larger European-wide anti-austerity climate.
The Future of Work: Super-Exploitation and Social Precariousness in the 21st Century departs from the other texts reviewed here in that it does not specifically address the economic conditions of young adults nor their political engagement. Rather, the author aims to contribute to the debates surrounding the emergence of so-called immaterial labor in the context of late capitalism. Valencia argues for an interpretation of the current crisis in capitalism as driven by a crisis in the production of value and surplus-value. Attempts by capital to “resolve” the crisis increasingly rely on a deepening of exploited forms of labor, a form Valencia calls “super-exploitation,” which ultimately contributes to, and deepens, the tendency toward a falling rate of profit. Thus, Valencia considers the implications of super-exploitation for labor that is subjected to extra-economic forms of discipline as well as increasing forms of dangerous, unsafe, and illegal work.
These texts compel adult educators to revisit our assumptions concerning the material lives of adult learners and their engagement with institutions. Not only must we reconsider practice, but we must also pay careful attention to the ways in which young adults relate to institutions, both of work and learning. Valencia reminds us that
super-exploitation does not operate in a vacuum . . . without being mediated and indeed overdetermined by class, political and cultural structures. . . . To the contrary, it is a complete, fully functioning and multifaceted system, structural in nature but also requiring State participation and political power . . . to ensure its effective operation as both an economic and social formation. (Valencia, The Future of Work, p. 73)
Given this reality, it is no wonder that increasingly the forms of political movements taken up by young people are crossing traditional sites of social struggles (work and trade unions) and generating social movements aimed at state violence, ongoing colonialism, and capitalist restructuring.