Young people bearing the brunt of a weak economy
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Illustration: Simon Letch
Without wanting to be branded a class traitor, I have to admit that we Baby Boomers have enjoyed a rails-run in the race of life.
Most of us had little trouble getting ourselves set up in the jobs market and then the housing market. I look at today’s bright and bushy-tailed youngsters, just starting out in both markets, and don’t envy them one bit (except, of course, their instinctive understanding of the right place to click on a webpage).
(Just to protect my back: those Baby Boomers who were conscripted, or ended up in Vietnam, didn’t have it easy. Nor should those who’ve come after us imagine all Baby Boomers are rolling in it, have never been unemployed, never paid uni fees nor suffered bad luck.)
In the decade since the global financial crisis and the recession we supposedly didn’t have, the supply of people wanting to work has been stronger than employers’ demand for work to be done.
That’s true even though the rate of unemployment never got very high and isn’t all that high today. But a study by Zoya Dhillon and Natasha Cassidy, of the Reserve Bank, confirms what I’ve long suspected: the reason the position overall hasn’t looked so bad is the brunt of the weakness in employers’ demand for labour has been borne by young people leaving school and university.
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