Nearly 1m young people out of work

[Starfeesh]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62gzl2yl24o

AIBU to be concerned that a life on benefits seems to be a viable option, and glad Labour are bringing in compulsory work placements?

She has 7 gcse passes, including Maths and both English.
She went to college to do a level 3 BTec - she lasted 2 terms due to college promising that her (relatively simple) ‘reasonable adjustments’ were followed but teachers seemed to delight in ignoring the requests. She was utterly exhausted from masking constantly And coping with the terrible situations she was put in.
This knocked her confidence terribly and she has no desire to put herself through that again.
She loves animals but cannot do any ‘stable girl’ work due to spinal issues from falling off horses.
She even offered to volunteer with the animals at the RSPCA but all they wanted was someone to clean out cages and kennels -all the care/dog walking etc was done by the paid employees.
She can’t do anything on the phone .
She could work in a pub as long as they were prepared to train her -but nobody is.
Shes sensible, she drives, she has her own car. She’s intelligent and very witty.
Shes mature for her age.
She couldn’t be a cleaner as she doesn’t see ‘dirt’ in the same way a NT person does.
She can’t get a job as a delivery driver as they are all taken by the local ‘migrant’ hotel men - (please don’t say this isn’t the case as it most certainly is. The car park of the hotel has mopeds in it) the local takeaways have no interest in employing a white girl I'm afraid.
She couldn’t do McDonalds as it’s just too much - the lights, the beeping, the shout8mg, the smells , the constant ‘go faster’. She just couldn’t manage all of those things at once.
I have been to the job center about 20 times with her. She doesn’t need me EVERY time but I go with her to try and push the staff into helping her.
Shes dying to work. Dying to meet new people and to feel useful. She feels utterly useless and that she will be destined to beimg on benefits unless something changes . She doesn’t want to be a drain on society.
She just needs some understanding and she could fly -but no one will give her a Fucking chance and it breaks my heart.

edit . Thanks you @SaulJunction for your lovely post/offer. It made me cry

Prepare for it to get worse for entry level. Come April 2026 there will be "protections" in place for new employees covering sick leave, probation etc so you get day one entitlements. Companies have reacted by getting rid of entry level as they can't take the risk of a bad employee. Why hire someone without history that you can't get rid off. Bad news for grads (so much debt, no grad scheme), good news for contractors and experienced workers.

Yeah well we're all pretty fed up tbf

Working our arses off and being taxed to the hilt

That’s crazy, hire someone who could be a total liability then you can’t sack them wtf?

I’m already assuming my child won’t attend university as I’m not convinced it’s worth it. The plan is to try and find a work placement so he can work and get the qualification at the same time. It’s whether Ai is going to make the job even be there by the time he finishes his A levels. Right now no one knows what’s going to happen. I’d be very concerned about running up the uni debts and if the career will be available in the end.

Benefits should never give an equivalent lifestyle to working, and until we address that ... nothing will change.

@LunaDeBallona is there anything at all that might suit on local councils websites. If she ticks she has a disability it’s usually guaranteed interview if meet essential criteria. Having been private sector now local government it’s definitely a different environment and much more diverse workforce.

That’s the Labour effect 😎

Welfare is meant to be a cover for when people hit difficult times not a way of life.

Some people are permanently having "difficult times" though @Rainbow1901 .

My brother is bipolar and it is only controlled by monthly depot injections that turn him into a zombie for the first couple of weeks. Then he has a few days of being more or less ok until he starts to get delusional and hyper for the last week.

He's 60 and hasn't been able to work for decades. He last had a job in his late twenties or early 30s.

The employment landscape has changed massively, physical retail and hospitality are dying industries so why look for jobs there, and formal employment is never going to be the same for young people. People of our generation turn their nose up at kids wanting to be you tubers but tbh, I think good on those that are trying their luck, gaining skills in digital content creation, and earning some money. The advantage that young people have over what we did is online information and training at their fingertips. A lot of skills can be self-taught, including staying ahead of AI. Yes it might not lead to the perfect permanent job but I do think those who can demonstrate continuous self- learning and creativity network will eventually see success via a mixture of permanent and temporary opportunities.

This. The jobless figures would improve if people who have never paid in, weren't paid just to sit in their bums. 🙄

They could swan off sick immediately and get sick pay. Sounded great when it was framed as worker rights but with a bit more thought this should have been easily forseeable. In fact it was, but they did it anyway.

Might I say that not signing on is not a good idea at all.

As a single person, presumably living at home, they will get £316.98 per month. But, more than that, they will also get free prescriptions, free NHS dental treatment (if you can actually find an NHS dentist that is), free NHS eye tests and help with the cost of glasses or contact lenses.

Importantly, you are also credited for NI payments. What this means is that these credits count towards your pension eligilibility. I know that your DC won't be thinking about a state pension at the moment but it does help to have these extra NI credits.

The Job Centre can also help with things like paying towards interview clothing if they have nothing suitable or helping with the costs of travelling to an interview.

I was pro lockdown though😬

They just needed support to reintegrate. But nothing happened.

Well said!

Maybe they are all just overeducated😱

Good thing they’re not the equivalent then. A single person gets £100 a week, that’s £5.2k. Minimum wage is over £26k.

A family member of mine is almost 24 and has never worked. His girlfriend who has a child has also never worked. They both live on benefits and it’s hard to understand why they can collect benefits every year and no inventive to have a job. They are both healthy and well.

I think this is so area dependent. My 16 year old is doing his GCSEs this year and did a fitness type qualification in the first half term after his birthday which cost a couple of hundred pounds. He then walked into a part time job a week later and has been offered several more since. Admittedly this won’t be his main career but he is at least able to make money through it and can work for himself if needs be. We need to help set our kids up where we can, especially if we know it’s grim out there.

But replace people going out drinking with gyms, instead of shopping many more people get beauty treatments.

Theatres are full, some restaurants still thrive, there is a huge rise in delivery food, people still need to make it.

Things change but there are still service jobs.

I don’t agree. One of the main reasons I don’t agree is I was educating my kids at home during covid while my partner went to work every day. Neither of us were Covid Walking Cunts aimlessly wandering through the countryside or riding a bloody Peloton or buying a dog or endlessly baking or whatever other ridiculous shit people were doing over that period.

As a result I have two kids who are completely unscathed by Covid. In fact it ended up doing me a huge favour as I realised how behind educationally my older child was and I was able to catch him up to the point that he’s now top sets and hopefully on his way to a decent set of exam results.

It’s strange because I swear only a few years ago everyone was saying we need more and more immigration because we have no young people to do the jobs.

My point isn’t a pro or anti lockdown post - it is what it is, and what happened, happened. My issue is that we have utterly failed young people, by just expecting them to pick back up where they left off. In many hundreds of thousands of cases, they watched their parents on furlough sit in the garden and get paid to do absolutely nothing for months on end, yet now we criticise them when they think they’re too good for an entry level role. That’s if they aren’t being criticised because their parents are on benefits so they are now too.
Kids learn what they live, and half the time they’ve turned out they way they have because their parents were not perhaps the role models they so often pat themselves on the back for. We owe it to them to demand much more from our leaders so they at least have half a chance of a life like we’ve had.

The systems have changed. You've literally got people on here saying their young person is doing everything they can but just not getting anywhere. No sentence that starts 'young people today are all, or mostly are crap and lazy and entitled' is fair.

If this is all true, what about the many "covid" young people who ARE working/contributing towards our society. They lived through this as well!!