Young, qualified and jobless: plight of Europe's best-educated generation | World news. "All your life," says Argyro Paraskeva, "you've been told you're a golden prince. The future awaits: it's bright, it's yours. You have a degree! You'll have a good job, a fine life. And then suddenly you find it's not true.
" Or not so suddenly. Paraskeva left Thessaloniki University five years ago with an MSc in molecular biology. Over cold tea in a sunlit cafe in Greece's second city, Paraskeva says she has written "literally hundreds of letters". So would countless other young Europeans. European leaders are rarely without a new initiative. Some commentators say the figures overstate the problem: young people in full-time education or training (a large proportion, obviously) are not considered "economically active" and so in some countries are counted as unemployed. The crisis is even more acute because of its knock-on impact: these are often young people with no pensions, no social security contributions, diminishing networks, limited opportunities for independence.
Job security is a thing of the past - so millions need a better welfare system | Guy Standing | Comment is free. So, millions of British workers are anxious and frustrated. Is anybody surprised at the precariousness revealed by the latest Skills and Employment Survey, published on Monday? The national survey, carried out every six years, shows that more employees feel insecure than at any time in 20 years; that work is being intensified, with people being asked to do more and work longer; and that for the first time people working in the public sector feel more insecure than those in the private sector. The reasons for this are clear. All governments since Margaret Thatcher's have promoted flexible labour markets as the right response to globalisation, without radically altering the social protection system in order to cushion workers against the inevitable insecurities that arise.
As long as this consensus prevails, more and more people will join the ranks of the "precariat", and the insecurities confronting people will continue to multiply and intensify. Britain is not alone, of course. Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class. Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. “Lanier is often described as ‘visionary,’ ” Jennifer Kahn wrote in a 2011 New Yorker profile, “a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills.” Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who’d escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he’s been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine.
He’s also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian. His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. This week sees the publication of “Who Owns the Future? You talk early in “Who Owns the Future?” Right.
Right. ‘Bout to explode: a day in the life of a precarious worker. As part of Shift Magazine's series on precarity, Juan Conatz describes a day in the work life of a sleep deprived day laborer. “Damn it, where’s this pinche thing?” Sometimes when I get real frustrated, a few Spanish curse words enter my vocabulary. My mom would probably be both amused and disappointed. “Jesus Christ, there ain’t nowhere in here for anything to get lost!” It’s 4:30 AM, and I’m frantically looking for both my house keys and bus pass. It was another all-nighter. I’ve been up for almost 2 days now. Insomnia pushes your tolerance for minor annoyances a lot lower. “Ah hah!” I finally find both my keys and bus pass hidden behind my suitcases, which I’ve been living out of for about a year now.
This early in the morning is no time for a human being to be searching for a bus pass, but when you’re virtually unemployed, you’ve got to get on your grind. I think about this fact real briefly, then try to shove it out of my mind. Pretty awake now. Try to concentrate on my work. Le précariat : « Une classe sociale en devenir » - Néo-libéralisme. Alors que le chômage explose en Europe, en particulier chez les jeunes, la notion de précariat, contraction de précarité et de prolétariat, devient de plus en plus d’actualité. Pour le britannique Guy Standing, professeur d’économie et promoteur d’un revenu citoyen pour tous, ce précariat rassemble aussi bien les jeunes diplômés précarisés, les enfants d’ouvriers rongés par l’incertitude que les travailleurs migrants.
Il nous livre son analyse sur « cette classe sociale en devenir » et appelle à combattre les discours stigmatisant les « assistés », nouveau terreau de la montée de l’extrême droite. Guy Standing est professeur d’économie à l’université de Bath (Royaume-Uni) et membre fondateur du Basic Income Earth Network (Réseau pour un revenu de base universel), une organisation qui promeut un revenu citoyen pour tous. Basta ! : La notion de précariat englobe celle de précarité et de prolétariat. Que signifie faire partie du précariat ? Vous êtes donc optimiste ? Lire aussi : Europe's lost generation costs €153bn a year, study finds | Society.
A lost generation of 14 million out-of-work and disengaged young Europeans is costing member states a total of €153bn (£124bn) a year – 1.2% of the EU's gross domestic product – the largest study of the young unemployed has concluded. The report, by the EU's own research agency, Eurofound, has discovered that Europeans aged 15 to 29 who are not in employment, education or training (known as Neets) have reached record levels and are costing the EU €3bn a week in state welfare and lost production. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said Europe was "failing in its social contract" with the young and rising political disenchantment could reach levels similar to those that sparked North African uprisings during the Arab spring. "The consequences of a lost generation are not merely economic," the report warns, "but are societal, with the risk of young people opting out of democratic participation in society.
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