THE massive growth in unemployment sparked by the worldwide financial collapse in the capitalist system in 2008 is hitting youth so hard that the United Nations has warned the numbers of jobless youth will reach an all-time high this year.
The ILO Global Employment Trends for Youth says that by the end of 2009, 81 million out of an estimated 620 million young workers aged between 15 and 24, were without jobs. The report was published to coincide with the launch of UN International Youth Year.
Ninety per cent of young people live in developing countries and the United Nations report estimates that a further 152 million young people, or about 28 per cent of all the young workers in the world, were working in conditions of extreme poverty in households trying to survive on less than $1.25 a day.
This situation has been dramatically heightened by the financial crisis, which the United Nations report estimates has created an extra 1.1 million unemployed youth in 2007-08 and an extra 6.7 million unemployed youth in 2008-09.
This rapid rise in youth unemployment, especially in the richest capitalist nations of Europe, the United States and Japan – where it is now officially running at a record 17.7 per cent – has prompted the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) to warn of a ‘social time-bomb’.
The United Nations is playing down the chances of this ‘time-bomb’ going off by predicting that youth unemployment will peak this year at 81.2 million, but will start to fall in 2011 to 78.5 million. This is still a gigantic number.
The idea that the ‘worst’ of youth unemployment will soon be over when the capitalist system is facing its greatest financial crisis is a nonsense and young people certainly won’t believe it!
Yesterday, British Telecoms revealed that 24,000 young people had applied for just 211 apprenticeships that it was offering. That’s more than the total applications to Oxford University, which attracted 17,000 applications for 3,000 undergraduate places.
Sharan Burrow, general secretary of ITUC, has pleaded with the capitalist governments of the world to act fast to do something about this situation ‘or the consequences of this for society will be severe’.
‘More than 80 million young people are now out of work and many millions more are trapped in short-term, low-paid jobs or in the informal economy. An entire generation of young people is being left behind,’ she said.
The leaders of the international trade unions are shocked at the scale of the crisis and fear the consequences.
But the youth are not afraid, they are angry and they are rising up, in country after country, from Pakistan, to Greece, to Ireland, to South Africa and to Spain.
On every continent capitalism is facing a growing revolt by youth, and this is posing a danger to the future of capitalism which we welcome.
Capitalism needs to be swept off the face of the earth if the youth are going to have any kind of future with real jobs for wages on which they can eat!
Leon Trotsky wrote in 1938, during the last great crisis of capitalism: ‘The Fourth International pays particular attention to the young generation of the proletariat. All of its policies strive to inspire the youth with the belief in its own strength and in the future.’
Youth will rebel with all their might against being used as an army of slave labourers by capitalist governments and employers.
In the advanced captalist states like Britain and the United States, they will rise up against the ‘alternatives’ to unemployment being offered to them.
These ‘alternatives’ are: record debts for those ‘privileged’ to win a place at university, being driven into an army of unpaid ‘volunteers’, or into the army itself, to fight more imperialist wars like the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Youth are struggling to find their way in the world in these conditions of growing crisis. We urge all our young readers to take up the banner of socialist revolution alongside the youth of the world to put an end to a system that only promises even more unemployment and even more savage education cuts.
Join the Young Socialists and the Workers Revolutionary Party and build a mass youth movement that will see the working class fulfil its role as the ‘gravediggers’ of capitalism.
Replace capitalism with a system of social ownership of the means of production – socialism – where not one young person is denied free education, skilled training and work, where they will be working without being exploited by the capitalists, by reorganising production on the basis of human need, not for profit.
The labour of all will be for the benefit of all – not to make billions of dollars for a few idle rich – and will leave none to go hungry, without any income at all.
