Liminality, Marginalisation and Low-Skilled Work: Mapping long-term labour market difficulty following participation in the 1980s government-sponsored youth training schemes (YTS)

Key takeaways

content: "@droyLiminalityMarginalisationLowSkilled2019" -file:@droyLiminalityMarginalisationLowSkilled2019

Reading notes

Imported on 2024-05-07 21:34

⭐ Important

• & Both the implementation and structural context of the schemes have been subject to sustained sociological critique. Yet, the evaluation of the scheme, especially as a lesson for future youth policy, remains contested in popular discourse. Productive reflection on the YTS scheme necessitates a rich understanding of its outcomes for participants. (p. 3)
• & The Youth Training Scheme (YTS) was a major UK government youth labour-market intervention implemented in 1983. It lasted until 1990 when it was replaced by a similar scheme, called Youth Training (YT). (p. 3)
• & Participants in the scheme were typically placed within a local business, either through direct recruitment to that business (employer-led schemes where the business acted as its own managing agent) or indirectly through an umbrella scheme (run by a private entity, typically a for-profit managing agent and/or training provider) who found a work placement for them. Participants placed in businesses gained ‘work experience’ and typically received some form of work-related training, either through their managing agents or at an FE institution (Lee, 1990). The work experience and training of participants were government subsided. Businesses were not obligated to offer continuing employment to trainees after their YTS placements ended, many did not (Furlong, 1993). (p. 3)
• & The scheme was estimated to cost the British state at least 1 billion pounds (Walker, 1987) and had more than 4 million participants over the 1983-1995 (including the successor: YT) (The Independent, 1995) period. It also led to the creation of a private sector dedicated to training school leavers and placing them in businesses for work experience. It was implemented at a time of high youth unemployment, associated with the 1980s recession and the collapse of the UK manufacturing industry. The youth labour-market transformation of the period has been argued to mark the beginning of the contemporary precariousness of much of youth employment (Furlong et al., 2017) (p. 3)
• & the scheme has been considered part of the foundation of the punitive and labor-deficiency focused approach to unemployment & welfare that has proceeded it - the so-called punitive turn after which access to welfar (p. 3)
• & has become conditional on work (workfare) and levels of unemployment often blamed on the deficiencies of the unemployed (Furlong et al., 2017). (p. 4)
• & Those sympathetic to the scheme may ascribe to it the narrow goal of providing a comprehensive system for vocational education in the style of the German apprenticeship system (Levy, 2012; Roberts, 2005) that would allow under-qualified school leavers to compete on the job market. Others have noted the parallel goal of alleviating (or perhaps obscuring, see below) youth unemployment among school-leavers (Bradley, 1995; Raffe, 1987). This was evident in political rhetoric associating high youth unemployment with the deficient employ-ability of youth themselves (deficiencies the scheme was meant to redress, at least in part) (Finn, 1984), along with the aspiration that the YTS would reduce unemployment in the youth labour market by improving the skills and productivity of the youth labour supply (Raffe, 1987). The link between the YTS and unemployment was made concrete policy when young people who refused a placement were threatened with reduced benefits in 1983 (Furlong et al., 2017). Starting in 1988, unemployment benefits were withdrawn almost entirely for school leavers not in the YTS scheme (Roberts, 2005), reinforcing the mandatory ‘workfare’ nature of the scheme. (p. 4)
• & Other political agendas ascribed to the scheme included those of (a) social control (Gleeson, 1984) and (b) the obscuring of unemployment figures. In this vein, some have argued that the scheme had a parking (Gleeson, 1984) function. It functioned as a means of keeping young people off of the streets and artificially removing them from the unemployment register. (p. 4)
• & These critiques typically focused on concerns about the ‘quality’ of the placements and training. In short, many commentators point to internal stratification of the YTS, such that some young people went onto ‘good’ schemes (high-quality training with a good prospect of subsequent employment), whilst others went onto ‘bad’ schemes (lower quality training with uncertain job prospects). A certain degree of stratification was built into the scheme, which had Mode A and Mode B (at-least initially) variants with latter schemes often operated by FE colleges and Local Education Authorities for the (alleged) benefit of disadvantaged youths. (p. 5)
• & ccording to Roberts (2005), it was widely recognised by participants that Mode B schemes were of considerably less value (p. 5)
• & Critical accounts of this lower-stratum of unacceptable quality are compounded by evidence of systematic inequity of access to the upper strata. Despite rhetoric and aspiration that YTS would address the skills shortages of under-qualified school leavers, educationally disadvantaged youth entering the scheme were likely to be directed towards its lower tiers (Furlong, 1993). Ironically, for a scheme intended to skills deficits, Lee (1990) suggest that young people leaving school without qualifications were the least likely to be placed on schemes that provided meaningful experience or training. (p. 5)
• & primarily a critique which presupposes the internal logic of the program itself. In other words, it is a critique of the way in which training and workfare were implemented, but it says little about the logic of deficiency-focused market-led mandatory training that underwrote the scheme. (p. 5)
• & An important premise of the YTS was that unemployment difficulty was the result of supply-side inadequacy. The supply of youth labour from school leavers was considered under-skilled, poorly adjusted for work, inflexible and having excessive wage expectations. It was believed that training youth, ‘disciplining’ expectations, and so on, would facilitate demand from employers. (p. 5)
• & there were not enough jobs to meet the supply of school-leavers in many strata (Ashton et al., 1990). It was suggested at the time that the YTS scheme itself might have contributed to overall demand-deficits (Gleeson, 1984). By providing employers with a source of subsidized cheap labour, some argued that employers were disincentivised to offer paid employment to young people. (p. 6)
• This provides a good argument for the use of random effects with a regional level 2.:
  • & Furlong (1993) found that different local labour markets surveyed at the time of the scheme offered fundamentally different employment prospects. In depressed local economies (as opposed to those experiencing growth), securing qualifications and training may have provided limited benefit for young workers - because of the scale of demand deficits (p.59). They argued that a substantive minority of youth during the period were unable to participate effectively in the labour market, despite the YTS. They refer to the segment of the youth labour market experiencing such difficulties the marginalised zone. (p. 6)
• & the YTS has also faced criticism for its consignment of its participants to particular occupational sectors associated with poor employment prospects. According to labour segmentation theory (Ashton et al., 1990), the youth labour market during the 1980s was subject to stratification, such that once a young person had entered a particular sector of work, they might face considerable difficulty in moving to other sectors (especially from lower to higher sectors). This constricted mobility was associated with features of the labour market such as age-stratification and front-loaded sectorspecific training requirements. Many YTS participants were placed in roles in the expanding service industry. Yet, Furlong et al. (2017) and Ashton et al. (1990) point out that this sector was increasingly associated with insecure employment. Furlong et al. (2017) called this growing insecure sector the liminal zone of the youth labour market, in which young people’s career experiences were characterized by insecure, temporary and part-time employment. (p. 6)
• & Concerns about the failure of the YTS to alleviate immediate labour market difficulties are reinforced by theories about the long-term negative impact of early protracted periods of unemployment for young people’s careers. Often referred to as the scarring effect, studies of early labour market difficulties have associated this with penalties to wages and employment over the long-term (Bell and Blanchflower, 2011). Ashton et al. (1990) pointed out, for example, that protracted unemployment can amount to a distressing exclusion from participation in social and material life. Roberts (2005) argued that studies of the long-term youth unemployed point to disillusionment as a result of prior experience of failure. (p. 6)
• & An important set of analyses of the outcomes of the YTS have been econometric estimations of the causal impact of the scheme (Dolton et al., 2004, 2001, 1994a, 1994b; Green et al., 1998; Main, 1991; Main and Shelly, 1990; O’Higgins, 1994; Upward, 2002; Whitfield and Bourlakis, 1991), some of which have used nationally representative longitudinal data (e.g. Dolton et al. (2004)). These studies have focused on levels of employment and earnings, and have attempted to estimate the (average) causal impact of the YTS. The conclusions of these analyses, with respect to employment, appear mixed, Whitfield and Bourlakis (1991) and Main and Shelly (1990) found that YTS increased the chance of employment (on average), whilst Dolton et al. (1994b) and Dolton et al. (2004) found a negative impact on men’s employment chances. The finding that YTS participation negatively impacted earnings is more consistently supported (Bradley, 1995). In line with the theoretical critiques outlined above, estimates of impact may be non-uniform with respect to scheme types (Upward, 2002), gender (Bradley, 1995; Dolton et al., 2004) and pre-existing labour market disadvantage (O’Higgins, 1994). (p. 7)
• This provides a good argument and justification for using the econ201 variable for BCS and other cohorts. Good to cite.:
  • & Our available sample for analysis were those individuals for whom relevant career data (activity type and occupational class) was available for all months between September 1986 (after compulsory school had ended) (p. 9)
• & To estimate finite population totals (for the full target BCS70 cohort) and to correct for non-response bias, individual cases were weighted by the inverse of their probability of responding (i.e. being complete cases), estimated using logistic regression with gender, region of residence and parental occupational class as predictors (Mostafa and Wiggins, 2014) (based on the most recent measures available for each case up to age 16). (p. 9)
• & The results of the analysis lend support to critiques of the youth training schemes which highlight the subsequent exclusion of its participants from the labour market, or their consignment to undesirable labour market trajectories. In particular, the results lend support to the theoretical contentions of Ashton et al. (1990) and Furlong et al. (2017), although the picture offered by the results is not without complications. (p. 17)
• & A substantial minority of cohort members, mostly female, who participated in the YTS, later withdrew from the labour market to look after their home or family. (p. 18)