Editorial: We've got to make this work

OPINION: Take a look at the front page of yesterday's Taranaki Daily News. Check out the main picture and the young guy at the right.

He's 16, fresh out of school and four weeks into his first job. And now he's been made redundant.

Is this the face of New Zealand employment – devastated, lost youth staring blankly into a bleak future?

Unless he finds another job he will have to join the dole queue. But he will also be joining another growing line, a group that commentators have begun to call the 'lost generation'. It's made up of young, vulnerable workers like our friend on the front page. They are more likely to either have no job, low-paying jobs with not enough work hours or meaningless jobs that do not match their skills.

And many will have been through education and/or training, only to emerge into a market that does not want them; and one that might not want or be able to afford them for some time.

The statistics make sad, sorry, scary reading: Our level of youth unemployment – that's workers between the ages of 15 and 19 – is getting up towards levels not seen since the fallout of the last big crash in 1987. Back then it jumped above 20 per cent in the aftermath and took another seven years before dropping below that figure.

More worrying is anecdotal evidence that suggests employers have taken a more consultative approach than in the past in regards to retaining staff. That is to be applauded but shorter working weeks and creative use of holidays can only go so far when the orders have dried up and the pressure is building.

In the past spooked employers were quick to jettison workers to cut costs; this time around firms have held on and held on, but the dam is starting to creak dangerously.

If that levee breaks and the trickle of redundancies becomes a flood, then among the victims, the flotsam and jetsam will be young lives left to drift helplessly into a rudderless future.

That could mean many of our young people struggling to find work or settling for demeaning jobs for the best part of the next decade – a generation genuinely lost to hope and possibly lost to society.

The implications are obvious: young people with idle hands and the devil's work in mind; people desperate to engage with society but robbed of one of its basic tools – a job.

Government agencies need to find ways to get these young people into work or training, to keep their focus on the horizon and not on hopelessness, despair and base instincts. Unfortunately, those agencies will also need to find ways to deal with the inevitable symptoms of a lost generation without work and hope: alcohol, abuse, crime, unwanted pregnancies, self-harm and suicide.

Let's all work together so that our young friend on the front page and the many like him around the country can have some purpose, dignity and, more importantly, a future.

- © Fairfax NZ News