Young people face growing poverty
By Sean Malloy
Youth unemployment has reached a rate of 34.1%. Paul Keating argues that it is really only 10% while he organises a hasty unemployment summit to be held next month.
Keating argued that the youth unemployment rate is exaggerated by the fact that most people in the 15-19 bracket are in educational institutions. The real unemployment rate, he said, was around 10% for 15-19 year-olds.
But if the official unemployment figures are misleading, it is primarily because they understate real unemployment. The youth unemployment figure does not take into account youth who have given up searching for jobs because they are not there or the many young people who are staying in school only because they cannot get a job or receive unemployment benefits. Federal opposition leader John Hewson estimates that there at least 40,000 youth in these categories.
Teenage full-time employment has fallen from 25-35% of the working population in 1986 to 15-25% of the working population in 1991. Teenage part-time employment has grown from 14-18% of the working population in 1984 to 18-26% in 1991.
School retention rates for 15-19 year-olds has increased from 35% in 1982 to 48% in 1991. Overcrowding of TAFEs and universities in recent years is also a product of the lack of jobs.
Growing unemployment has pushed more and more youth into poverty. The poverty line is currently $194.08 per week for an independent individual. Unemployed 16 and 17-year-olds receiving benefits are $132.03 under the poverty line, unemployed 18-20 year-olds are living $80.83 under the poverty line, and over 21s are living $55.23 under the poverty line.
Making a virtue of disaster, Paul Keating said in a radio interview on June 6 that "something good" was happening in the labour market because "uninteresting, low-paid, dead-end jobs" were being replaced by more interesting ones.
Keating said that "people can start off quite young in the job and find themselves in London for six months or find themselves in Tokyo and back into Australia". This is fantasy bordering on lunacy.
What the government really has in mind is pushing unemployed young people into even lower paid uninteresting, dead-end jobs. Keating has already foreshadowed implementing proposals in the Carmichael report around September after it is discussed at the unemployment summit.
The report, by former ACTU assistant secretary Laurie Carmichael, was commissioned in August 1991 as part of plans to restructure vocational education and training. One of its proposals is ng" wage.
A meeting of the ACTU executive in May endorsed a figure of $117 per week as a youth training wage. This is $77 short of the poverty line.
The Carmichael report also proposes dismantling current awards for young people and tying their wages to their productivity and competence as a proportion of "a fully competent worker".
[Pilot scheme in Victoria: page 4.]