How have adults and young people weathered the worldwide economic downturn? This two-minute 12-second video shows that young people have been harder hit by joblessness in almost all OECD countries:
From the OECD Factblog.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 6
Heina — April 30, 2010
Thank you for this. I'm so tired of hearing about age discrimination against middle-aged folks as well as listening to older folks complain about how hard it is to compete with young whippersnappers like myself when the facts and data say that we young college grads are the worst-off due to the recession.
Jadehawk — May 1, 2010
this is interesting... In Europe, where there's strong worker-protections, it's more difficult to impossible to just fire someone, so the older people who already have a job are protected at the cost of those entering the job market.
And for that reason, I was surprised that the same trend holds true in America, where these job protections don't exist. I wonder what causes this?
And also, I'd love to know just how they compiled the unemployment statistics; different methods of deciding who counts as "unemployed" might reveal different things...
Glossolalia Black — January 25, 2011
I feel really scared for my kid. I got out of high school in 1990 and spent about half a decade going from crap job to crap job because there were so many, and the thought of working anywhere for 10-20 years seemed ridiculous, as my own mother had... those kind of jobs were already starting to die back then.
Now, a couple of decades later, my own eighteen year old can't even get a job at places like Toys R Us because the HR departments don't even operate like they used to. Non-human algorithms will ditch most resumes that don't match exactly what they're looking for, and it's an employer's market for sure.
Something's gotta give.