Another great piece, this time on employment, in the @FT’s New Deal For the Young Series. https://on.ft.com/3dWxqwx  Makes the point that between the financial crisis & the pandemic, much of today’s young have experienced job loss, slow wage growth and a rise in insecure working.

This resonates with the work from @resfoundation & especially our Intergenerational Centre. For example, our 2020 Intergenerational Audit, supported by @NuffieldFound, found that even before the pandemic, insecure working was more prevalent & growing fastest among today's young.

We also found that successive cohorts have been more likely to work in key low-paying sectors at young ages. https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/intergenerational-audit-uk-2020/

And that wage growth has been especially weak for those now in their 30s.

During an economic crisis, being young - and especially a recent education leaver - can have long term scarring impacts. And as the FT rightly notes, these effects are distributed unequally, with non-grads being particularly worse off on average. https://bit.ly/2S1eggy 

And inequality within generations, such as today’s young, has come to bear in the current crisis too.

All this matters for living standards in the long term: lower employment and weaker wage growth will reduce the odds of home ownership (as we’ve so famously seen).

And it also exacerbates problems like falling retirement savings, where a combination of lower contributions and Defined Contribution schemes mean young people are accruing pensions wealth at a slower rate than their predecessors. https://bit.ly/3nqt0kX 

As the FT series indicates, declining employment, wage growth & job quality for today’s young has thankfully generated a strong response across both media and policy makers – see for example, the House of Lords Youth Unemployment Committee @LordsYouthUnemp

The question is: what to do. Today’s piece offers some excellent starting points: encouraging job creation, allowing for job flexibility but preventing a two-tiered labour force & engendering a better working culture that bears in mind mental health.

@resfoundation will be following up on much of these issues over the coming weeks and months, so please stay tuned.