Rattus Norvegicus
The Great Recession may have only lasted from 2008 to 2009, but its effects are still felt today, particularly by the youth.
Vital Signs is a Canada-based community statistics group. In June 2012 they released a comprehensive report examining, among other things, youth unemployment in Canada and the rest of the world. The results, while concerning, should come as no shock to the Millennial Generation.
“I’ve been (job) hunting for the better part of a year and a half, maybe?” said Curtis Kupkee, a 20 year-old Radio Broadcasting student at Algonquin. “As soon as I got out of the second half of theatre at the college, I was like ‘okay, I need money to pay for tuition and everything,’ and I’ve been hunting since then. Twenty, 30 resumes have been sent out, and I think 27 of them have been no response and three of them have been a no – if I’ve been lucky.”
Unfortunately, Kupkee’s story is nothing new. According to the report, the percentage of unemployed Canadian youth in 2012 was resting at 14.8 per cent, more than double the national average of 7.2 per cent.
And just like Kupkee, the youth have not been sitting idly and waiting for the jobs to come to them, no matter how often the media calls them “entitled.” Vital Signs reports that in 2011, 55 000 youth had been job-hunting for a period exceeding six months. That is 14 per cent of all unemployed youth in Canada.
But what about the jobs that are available?
“My first job was at a grocery store in Manotick – it was an Independent grocery store,” said Kupkee. “I was maybe… 18 when I started working there? It was a good job – it was boring, tedious, I was stocking shelves all day – there was nothing too special about it. I haven’t really worked another job since.”
One third of all 25 – 29 year-olds with a diploma will end up moving to a low-skilled occupation when they finish schooling. Despite not fitting into that age bracket, Kupkee is struggling to find even a low-skilled, part-time job.
But is it all doom and gloom?
“I entered the workforce when I was 15,” said Casandra LaNeve, a 20 year-old Child and Youth Worker student at the college.
And where was this job?
“Wendy’s – it was awful.”
To be fair, though, LaNeve’s job-hunting experience was painless compared to Kupkee’s.
“I literally was looking for my job for the first time, I handed in my resume, and they hired me on the spot. It was really easy.” This was the first and only resume she had given out in her search.
However, the report covers this as well. It explains that many jobs available to the youth are “part-time or a series of piecemeal jobs that do not provide benefits or career prospects.”
The workplaces themselves often reflect this dead-end nature. LaNeve’s experience at Wendy’s was typical.
“The first day I got there – I had just turned 15, this was literally my first job, I had never been to any kind of job before,” she explained. “I come in and I’m waiting at the front of the counter, waiting for someone to come see me or something, tell me to come in. I didn’t want to be rude.”
“Someone asks, ‘Why are you standing there?’ I replied, ‘Oh, it’s my first day here, I don’t know what I am supposed to do.’ They yelled, ‘You work here now. You’re allowed to walk back here.’ So the first day I got there, I got in trouble.”
LaNeve feels that this set the tone for the rest of her time working there. She went on to explain that they did not treat their employees well, and that she feels that the work she had to do for Wendy’s was worth much more than her minimum wage paycheque.
While these so-called “student jobs” have traditionally been a sort of necessary step to adulthood, we are beginning to see them disappear as well.
According to the report, “those aged 55+ hold 37%” of all jobs traditionally held by youth. Jobs in establishments such as fast food restaurants, movie theatres, and grocery stores are beginning to be worked by the elderly. And as the report showed, it isn’t because these establishments are unable to find young people to employ.
But what about those who are past this point in their lives? What are the opinions of those who have worked student jobs earlier in life and have since moved on to stable careers and families?
“I’m 50/50, actually,” said Leigh Ann Hayward, 48. Hayward, a Corporate Foods Business Manager and mother of Kupkee, has held numerous steady jobs throughout her life, staying at each one for a decent amount of time.
“I see a lot of – and I’m going to try not to gender-stereotype – I find that the girls seem to be more aggressive and looking for employment,” she continued. “But I think that might be because there are more opportunities for them – retail, when you’re 16, 17, or 18. When you get to hit 19, it’s easier for the females to get a job in a bar.”
“The males tend to sometimes – and I’m not saying this about all of them – want to get the job that they want to do. Let’s say they want to work at EB Games. ‘Well, if I can’t get a job at EB Games, I’m not going to get a job.’
She isn’t wrong. The report shows that the majority – 66 per cent – of long-term unemployed 20-somethings are men.
However, she also shares the view that many of the older generations share – that young people just don’t want to work unpleasant jobs.
“If you really want to get far in life, you need to work hard at it,” she said. “Someone’s not just going to walk up and hand you an $80 000 a year job, it’s not going to happen. Sometimes you’ve got to do crappy jobs. You just don’t get the plum jobs right of school.”
Again, this isn’t wrong – it is very uncommon to get a good-paying job immediately after graduating. But as Vital Signs showed, the 25 – 29 year-old graduates have learned this and are adapting. Of the two-thirds that are not finding low-skill occupations after completing their education, many return to school to increase their job opportunities, though this will often plunge them further into debt.
It may be a little unfair, then, to claim that young people are unwilling to work their way to the top, particularly when even these low-skill jobs are being snatched up by the same generations that criticize the youth for being unemployed, lazy, and entitled.
“Everybody wants experience,” said Marie Agapitos, a 23 year-old Masters of Science in Interdisciplinary Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa. “If you don’t have experience, you can’t get it because everybody wants you to have it.”
Agapitos held her first job when she was 18 – she worked retail at a Rogers store. She left after two years, prompted by management changes “way up the chain.”
“It was just a bunch of things that I didn’t feel like dealing with,” she said of the restrictions placed upon the workplace.
After spending a significant amount of time unemployed, she was later able to find a job working as an administrative assistant at the university.
“It’s nice to be in an office environment and not have to work shift work,” she said.
However, the reason she got the job was because she knew the hiring manager.
“The woman that hired me – I’ve known her since I was 12.”
This is by no means wrong or somehow immoral – after all, when there are so few jobs available, you do what is necessary to find employment. Agapitos, having graduated the psychology program in 2012 and continuing into her current program last September, will have plenty of bills to pay when she is finished her education.
It does raise questions, however. Why is a university graduate with a medical specialty only able to find a job through connections she made when she was 12?
In 2008 – just before the recession hit – youth unemployment was sitting at 7.4 per cent, a mere 0.2 per cent higher than the current national average. Over the course of one year, that percentage doubled, with roughly 229 500 youth aged 15 – 24 lost their jobs. Those jobs accounted for more than half of all jobs lost during the recession.
Of interest is the fact that while the youth were facing massive job losses, employment among those aged 55 and older increased by 83 100 – right in the middle of the very same recession.
So while the youth were losing their jobs, the elderly were gaining them. This phenomenon could certainly justify resentment.
But does it?
“I guess I don’t hold it against them personally,” said LaNeve. “I do get mad at the older generation because it’s like, ‘Get out of our jobs.’ But at the same time… I also kinda get it. I don’t think everyone really planned for (the economy) to turn out the way it is.”
While she is upset at the prospect of elderly people taking jobs traditionally held by the youth, she also understands what they are going through – life has gotten more expensive in recent years.
“Everything is getting more expensive – people’s pensions and their retirement plans aren’t really ready for all this,” she said. “Gas has gone up, food as gone up, rent has gone up, everything. People who planned to retire at a certain age can’t now because they don’t have the money to.”
Understandable, of course, but this is not the case for all elderly.
“My mother-in-law is going to be 67 this year,” said Hayward. “She works for the government, so she’s got a wicked pension. She’s planned for her retirement, she’s invested wisely. She can afford to retire. For her, it will most likely be a boredom thing that will put her back to work within a year.”
Granted, Hayward’s mother-in-law works in consulting and would likely return to that, resulting in no jobs lost for the youth. But this boredom – this need to keep one’s self busy – can often lead to the already strained job market for youth becoming even more strained.
So how far will the youth extend their understanding?
“If it’s just someone getting a job out of boredom, like if they have financial stability or if they don’t have to worry about money… I’m not as fond of that, obviously,” said Kupkee. “If they’re doing it because they’re bored, then… why are you doing that? Please stop.”
So what can we do to fix all of this? Other generations faced struggles – the Great Depression, wars, and social change. Vital Signs feels that this struggle is unique, however, in that we have never faced such a combination of obstacles – “the requirement for post-secondary, the high cost of education and housing, the debt load, demographic shift, prevalence of technology and all its implications for physical and mental health, and the delays in life transitions are unprecendented.”
However, the report also states that Canada’s youth are becoming more involved in direct action, believing that to be a more effective way of initiating change than joining a political party. The Occupy movement, KONY 2012, and the student protests in Montreal are all such examples.
Perhaps the winds of change are blowing in Canada.
Perhaps it is time we take things into our hands.
All information used for my article came from Vital Signs, a community-based statistics group. They published their findings on their website in a report titled #Generation Flux. The statistics they provided and the charts I produced help provide context to my story. They allow a visual representation of the information given in the story, communicating the ideas in a much clearer fashion. They allow the reader to literally see the trends explained in my feature.