All of this, I have teenagers and it's horrendous. Even volunteer positions don't bother replying. University doesn't appeal at all, they don't want a massive debt with little chance of a job at the end of it.
This is a fantastic post but a deeply worrying one - and as a secondary school teacher of 20+ years, I've seen the aspirations of kids drop over that time. My own children are in their mid-20s now, and although they've both been employed since leaving education, I still worry for them and what their lives will be like. Successive governments have spent so much time sweetening the pot for older people - who tend to vote, and vote conservatively - that our young people have been shafted repeatedly. It's hardly surprising so many of them feel that politics has nothing to offer them. But as usual, I expect there will be several rounds of hand-wringing about this and years of consultations about reforming education etc. And nothing will be done at the end of it because there are too many vested interests pulling the other way.
I'm not sure if it's just me, but... This world where people use AI to submit job applications, to be reviewed by AI, only to be ghosted, by AI just seems to me be a wee bit like a nightmare dystopian vision were all being forced to live through by unelected, unaccountable overlords.
Its heartbreaking - and "Government" should be doing something about it. I think UBI would be a really good start, especially with the increase of AI filling physical jobs from under our noses.
When I worked, I spent two periods unemployed, once in the early 80's having been made redundant, and again in 2014. Both were totally soul destroying, with absolutely no help from the Joke Shop (Job Centre). I'm glad I've retired, but feel so sad for the current generation, and the shambles we've left for them.
Universal Basic Income it is, then. It can be introduced piecemeal and without the name (which will excite right wing monsters). Start with grants to people in 'key' study courses, including all those useful apprenticeships, science and the (highly nationally profitable) arts, then go on to replacing PIP and reducing the bureaucratic form filling nonsense which goes into benefit claims. Then maybe replace some means tested benefits with straight paymments. The key to making this universal is to set a single level of payment for all these diverse groups (and maybe state pensions as well). Do it that way and the thing can grow slowly, as we drift into the higher taxes which we need in order to pay for it. No slogans, just small practical changes which lead in the un-named direction.
Thought provoking piece Bear. I see young families and wonder if they thought of the consequences to their children of such a world. Perhaps all should aspire to be well remunerated politicians and change the world that way? 🤔 Goodness knows there's enough politicians currently who are a waste of taxpayers' money! Hoping your back is more comfortable now Bear x
i never thought of it in the you have explained, it must be horrendous for a person to come into the job sector and be constantly rejected, im have just retired, and have applied for jobs i am more than qualified to do, with absolutely no luck, and i now understand why.. 😏
Universities became businesses when funding changed to Student Loans. The whole process was then exacerbated by the 50% goal of Blair. Getting skills-based training to equivalence with an academic based ones is vital.
I am lucky to have 2 Millenial offspring in 'traditional' employment and doing well. My Gen Z niece and elder nephew are in degree related jobs. My younger nephew - seeing the way the wind is blowing - is trying to carve out a potential career in catering (unrelated to his degree). All (bar one) can see no end to their SL repayments but know they're lucky to have jobs/careers. The Gen Z ones have many friends who are still unable to get any work at all let alone degree-related ones.
1 - Unis are worthless archaic institutions obsessed with their own perpetuation and SFA else. Even after 10s of billions of hours of tuition, they still cannot advise kids on their best options and the lies they feed to students should have the bastards locked up
2 - Unless your kid is both academically bright AND possesses top notch emotional intelligence, stay away from Uni
3 - As a parent, it is OUR job to prepare them for life. They need to learn that:
No employer wants to know you have mental health issues. Get it sorted, cure or manage it and move on.
The business comes first NEVER the person - no matter what the bloody website says.
Hone enthusiasm, grit, determination and reliability
4 - Find companies who value people
Any company who employs AI to sift CVs is going to be a shite employer
Write to individuals in the company
Find out about what they do, who their customers are and how you'd be a good fit for them
Never forget that ALL employees give a company them MORE value in monetary terms than they pay you.
At your interview, go to the toilet, If it's lovely and clean they care about their employees. If it's grubby they don't - walk away.
My daughters degree course was a lie from start to finish. She was fed utter BS by NTU and its was continually intimated she'd walk into a job. She now sells books! Her industry has sold out and uses AI cos its cheaper so £45k was spent on a friggin expensive stay away from home...
Oh there is so much more to communicate but, unlike bear, I'm not that organised.
". Get it sorted, cure or manage it and move on." Whut? Curing mental illness in this economy? It's 2 years of waiting for a 12 week CBT booklet course!
The school of neo-liberal economics, under which we are all being slowly crushed, REQUIRES a non-zero unemployment rate. Their fantasy models treat the % of people unemployed as a parameter, and regard too low a number as a problem. So the whole economy is built around the principle that there will NEVER be enough jobs to go round. They then tell young people who can't find a job that it's their own fault and they need to try harder, even to the point of sanctioning them when they fail. No, it's not their fault, the system is working as designed.
Young people need support, even when they can't find a job, and the system that punishes them needs a total redesign.
I'm not sure what the point of this post was, except to make us feel even more depressed. Yes, we need to do all those things you suggest at the end, but how? Most of us feel (and are) powerless in this situation.
The point was really to explain how it is. Many people just aren't aware of life for NEETs. Being aware is the 1st step. We have to have hope that society can change and be part of making that change.
We need to start with demanding political regulation of both the public and private managerial and CEO class’s plundering of taxes and worker’s profits. Even if younger generations are some of the lucky ones who are in secure gainful employment, the Thatcher era introduced structural capital extraction from the lowest to the highest paid is inexcusably iniquitous. This cross party neoliberal policy creates a huge financial imbalance which also results in a socially destructive feedback loop of lack of investment in places outside the City of London.
The UK is now are right back in an increasingly bitter class war like that of the pre WW 2 era.
Something is missing from this discussion of the challenges job-seekers face. The dominance of several large and predominantly American job sites that are not actually designed to support job-seekers.
Several key players have effectively captured the market for hosting job vacancies, but they appear to have a far more cynical purpose. Anyone who has applied for jobs on the most prominent sites is likely to be familiar with the fundamental lack of success their efforts produce. Given the general lack of response from employers, it is hard to work out what is going wrong.
The answer, though, is likely to be 'nothing', or rather, 'nothing except for using the wrong source for vacancies.' At the end of the day, quite a few of these sites do little more than web-scrape and repost vacancies from other sites.
If you are lucky enough to receive a response, it is often from an employment agency asking if you would be interested in signing up with them. Essentially, these firms are little more than CV farmers.
Given the complete lack of regulation, or even monitoring, it is like the Wild West. As you say, Job Centres have evolved into Benefit Support Centres (and I use the term 'support' very carefully). DWPs jobs website has replaced the old relationship between job centres and local employers. Large enough companies invest in a jobs section on their website, but even that can be hit-and-miss.
Mind you, what is equally frustrating is this focus on young people's unemployment. True, there are significant implications for falling into the unemployment trap, but a growing number of people are facing increasing challenges in the twilight years of their careers.
Those within a decade or so of retirement face similar challenges, with the added burden of family responsibilities. Often the victim of aggressive company cost-saving activity, they struggle to find similarly paid employment.
Too young to draw pensions, potentially at risk of losing homes they've paid for over their lifetime, they can only look on despondently as they limp towards an increasingly distant retirement age that is likely to be marked by the poverty of an even weaker pension scheme, and the challenge of meeting accommodation costs or finishing paying their mortgage.
Politicians seem to be making assumptions about disengagement from the jobs market that place all the blame on employees. As for employers, they seem happy to allow them to wash their hands of what little responsibility they do have.
Thanks for your comments, Tim and agreed. Re web-scrapers, etc the NEET I quoted mentioned how the labyrinthine task of looking for work online is made even harder by the infiltration by numerous scam and other diversionary elements (e.g. directions to other job sites).
Re demographics - I selected young people for attention just because they are so vulnerable and I know some of them personally. But, absolutely, the problem is right across age groups. Another example I read about recently is 'women over 45' whose job experience doesn't appear to carry the same value online and who are now readily shelved by AI bots in favour of 'younger models'.
That wasn't a criticism, so much as an observation. I think you said it best elsewhere when you stated that there is so much to unpick with this that you have to draw a line somewhere.
On the whole 'disability and employment' debate, or rather the 'economically inactive' debate, politicians are steadfastly blaming individuals. "It's your fault you were born with / became disabled" seems to be the universal message.
Their solution? Employ a couple of thousand job coaches. "Ah, yes! It's because we've been applying wrong all this time that we can't get a job. How silly we are. Thank you for showing us the error of our ways."
Let's face it, the only beneficiaries of that policy will be the chums who run job coaching companies. If things run true to form, there'll be dozens of them springing up out of nowhere to bid for lucrative government contracts.
Just because governments have changed, doesn't mean procurement practices have changed.
I agree with a lot of this - my son has an Msc in Machine Learning and 3 years of work, but it still took 1 year for him to get a job after redundancy. It is dispiriting. However, I thoroughly disagree with your comments on PIP and Neurodivergence - do you know how long the waiting list is for a diagnosis (if you didn't get one as a child)? And you have obviously bought the MSM view of PIP - it is bloody hard to get even with documented, diagnosed conditions - you have to provide a mountain of evidence - you don't just waltz up and claim it - most claims are unsuccessful! DWP itself says the fraud is at 0.4%. Please do not just repeat the nonsense that MSM parrot re everybody can claim PIP with just a mild headache or whatever. BTW Most people have more than one diagnosis, how do they know which is their Primary condition - they don't so the reports just note all the diagnoses, guess what comes at the beginning of the alphabet - ADHD /ASD/Anxiety etc. etc.
Yes, eligibility for PIP is complex and difficult. I certainly haven't 'bought the view that PIP is easy to obtain'. However, according to the data, around 530,000 people between 18 and 30 yrs are currently claiming Pip (see e.g. https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/teenagers-pip-100-more-than-minimum-wage-5HjdfBc_2/). For 16 - 24 yr olds claims have doubled since 2019. The DWP estimates that 18–30 year olds receiving PIP has grown by around 600% in the last 10 years. To note the increase is not to imply that getting PIP is easy.
My experience of the predecessors to PIP is that we have had rubish systems. In my case that meant that I was eventually rejected for everything, despite letters from psychiatrists and all the rest, while I could see ways in which someone who was dishonest and canny could work the system and recieve benefits to which they were not reasonably entitled, so both stories are sometimes true -- honest claimants are rejected, while there are dishonest sucesses which fuel the scaberous press. I don't know enough to judge the numbers, but in my case I strongly suspect that I could have got through my final appeal by, for example, drinking two pints of coffee before I went in, so that I would twitch. Instead of that I wore my one remaining suit and had all my paperwork in neat folders, and got bounced.
Thanks for this, Chris and really sorry to hear about your experiences. I've no doubt you are right - predecessors + PIP were and are very imperfect systems. They are extremely challenging to navigate. And whilst they work fairly for some, they also sometimes help the undeserving and fail to help the deserving. There are stories from every one of these scenarios.
Thank you for that, the tone I picked up lent me to take what you said that way. The great elephant in the room is Covid - so many children are getting it repeatedly because nothing is being done to stop it spreading (many schools don't even have windows that can be opened for ventilation) and every time they catch it it increases the chance of Long Covid for which there is no cure. These are the forgotten children, most people don't even understand that the pandemic is still here, it is just not an emergency, and believe things like "it's just a mild cold". Every exposure impacts the bodies' immune system, the statistics for every single disease have gone way up - it's all measurable, it's all available in the NHS statistics - we are letting Covid wreck the health of the nation and many people don't even know it is a problem. So of course the number of young people unable to access school, claiming PIP, has risen hugely, and will continue to do so unless the government gets a grip and actually puts out correct and sensible messaging.
If someone doesn't wish to work, they can focus their time and attention on claiming benefits, including PIP. Coaching other people to claim benefits is a side hustle for some of them, and AI is now being used to generate PIP application paperwork too.
The root problem is that mental health conditions which make people unsuitable for employment are non-falsifiable, and are exacerbated by elective substance use. We have a system designed to support amputees returning from war or with lungs ruined by coal mining, being used in a post-industrial context of globalisation that the system wasn't designed for.
True and yes the system is sorely out of date. As I mentioned though, we should avoid generalising from the particular case. In reality, the system is abused by some, used rightfully by some, is rightfully denied to some, and wrongly denied to others. It's a complex picture. I also highlighted a further 'grey area' cohort of NEET PIP applications which have some justification.
Wowsers! An entire piece about youth unemployment that doesn’t even briefly reference employment-rights reforms that make it harder to fire workers or the tax rises that make it more expensive to employ people. Even though both issues disproportionately affect inexperienced and low productivity workers, e.g.., the young. This is quite an achievement! Bravo, señor Bear!
True. There was a great deal else that could have been mentioned. But the point of the piece was primarily to highlight how the situation is experienced by young people and future prospects.
All of this, I have teenagers and it's horrendous. Even volunteer positions don't bother replying. University doesn't appeal at all, they don't want a massive debt with little chance of a job at the end of it.
This is a fantastic post but a deeply worrying one - and as a secondary school teacher of 20+ years, I've seen the aspirations of kids drop over that time. My own children are in their mid-20s now, and although they've both been employed since leaving education, I still worry for them and what their lives will be like. Successive governments have spent so much time sweetening the pot for older people - who tend to vote, and vote conservatively - that our young people have been shafted repeatedly. It's hardly surprising so many of them feel that politics has nothing to offer them. But as usual, I expect there will be several rounds of hand-wringing about this and years of consultations about reforming education etc. And nothing will be done at the end of it because there are too many vested interests pulling the other way.
I'm not sure if it's just me, but... This world where people use AI to submit job applications, to be reviewed by AI, only to be ghosted, by AI just seems to me be a wee bit like a nightmare dystopian vision were all being forced to live through by unelected, unaccountable overlords.
JG Ballard had nothing on this.
Its heartbreaking - and "Government" should be doing something about it. I think UBI would be a really good start, especially with the increase of AI filling physical jobs from under our noses.
When I worked, I spent two periods unemployed, once in the early 80's having been made redundant, and again in 2014. Both were totally soul destroying, with absolutely no help from the Joke Shop (Job Centre). I'm glad I've retired, but feel so sad for the current generation, and the shambles we've left for them.
Never fear Reform is here they will throw all NEETs out on the streets and tell them to do a Norman Tebbitt
Universal Basic Income it is, then. It can be introduced piecemeal and without the name (which will excite right wing monsters). Start with grants to people in 'key' study courses, including all those useful apprenticeships, science and the (highly nationally profitable) arts, then go on to replacing PIP and reducing the bureaucratic form filling nonsense which goes into benefit claims. Then maybe replace some means tested benefits with straight paymments. The key to making this universal is to set a single level of payment for all these diverse groups (and maybe state pensions as well). Do it that way and the thing can grow slowly, as we drift into the higher taxes which we need in order to pay for it. No slogans, just small practical changes which lead in the un-named direction.
Thought provoking piece Bear. I see young families and wonder if they thought of the consequences to their children of such a world. Perhaps all should aspire to be well remunerated politicians and change the world that way? 🤔 Goodness knows there's enough politicians currently who are a waste of taxpayers' money! Hoping your back is more comfortable now Bear x
i never thought of it in the you have explained, it must be horrendous for a person to come into the job sector and be constantly rejected, im have just retired, and have applied for jobs i am more than qualified to do, with absolutely no luck, and i now understand why.. 😏
Hammer Nail Head
Universities became businesses when funding changed to Student Loans. The whole process was then exacerbated by the 50% goal of Blair. Getting skills-based training to equivalence with an academic based ones is vital.
I am lucky to have 2 Millenial offspring in 'traditional' employment and doing well. My Gen Z niece and elder nephew are in degree related jobs. My younger nephew - seeing the way the wind is blowing - is trying to carve out a potential career in catering (unrelated to his degree). All (bar one) can see no end to their SL repayments but know they're lucky to have jobs/careers. The Gen Z ones have many friends who are still unable to get any work at all let alone degree-related ones.
Bear your post made me cry with frustration.
1 - Unis are worthless archaic institutions obsessed with their own perpetuation and SFA else. Even after 10s of billions of hours of tuition, they still cannot advise kids on their best options and the lies they feed to students should have the bastards locked up
2 - Unless your kid is both academically bright AND possesses top notch emotional intelligence, stay away from Uni
3 - As a parent, it is OUR job to prepare them for life. They need to learn that:
No employer wants to know you have mental health issues. Get it sorted, cure or manage it and move on.
The business comes first NEVER the person - no matter what the bloody website says.
Hone enthusiasm, grit, determination and reliability
4 - Find companies who value people
Any company who employs AI to sift CVs is going to be a shite employer
Write to individuals in the company
Find out about what they do, who their customers are and how you'd be a good fit for them
Never forget that ALL employees give a company them MORE value in monetary terms than they pay you.
At your interview, go to the toilet, If it's lovely and clean they care about their employees. If it's grubby they don't - walk away.
My daughters degree course was a lie from start to finish. She was fed utter BS by NTU and its was continually intimated she'd walk into a job. She now sells books! Her industry has sold out and uses AI cos its cheaper so £45k was spent on a friggin expensive stay away from home...
Oh there is so much more to communicate but, unlike bear, I'm not that organised.
". Get it sorted, cure or manage it and move on." Whut? Curing mental illness in this economy? It's 2 years of waiting for a 12 week CBT booklet course!
Yep.
The school of neo-liberal economics, under which we are all being slowly crushed, REQUIRES a non-zero unemployment rate. Their fantasy models treat the % of people unemployed as a parameter, and regard too low a number as a problem. So the whole economy is built around the principle that there will NEVER be enough jobs to go round. They then tell young people who can't find a job that it's their own fault and they need to try harder, even to the point of sanctioning them when they fail. No, it's not their fault, the system is working as designed.
Young people need support, even when they can't find a job, and the system that punishes them needs a total redesign.
I'm not sure what the point of this post was, except to make us feel even more depressed. Yes, we need to do all those things you suggest at the end, but how? Most of us feel (and are) powerless in this situation.
The point was really to explain how it is. Many people just aren't aware of life for NEETs. Being aware is the 1st step. We have to have hope that society can change and be part of making that change.
How?
We need to start with demanding political regulation of both the public and private managerial and CEO class’s plundering of taxes and worker’s profits. Even if younger generations are some of the lucky ones who are in secure gainful employment, the Thatcher era introduced structural capital extraction from the lowest to the highest paid is inexcusably iniquitous. This cross party neoliberal policy creates a huge financial imbalance which also results in a socially destructive feedback loop of lack of investment in places outside the City of London.
The UK is now are right back in an increasingly bitter class war like that of the pre WW 2 era.
Something is missing from this discussion of the challenges job-seekers face. The dominance of several large and predominantly American job sites that are not actually designed to support job-seekers.
Several key players have effectively captured the market for hosting job vacancies, but they appear to have a far more cynical purpose. Anyone who has applied for jobs on the most prominent sites is likely to be familiar with the fundamental lack of success their efforts produce. Given the general lack of response from employers, it is hard to work out what is going wrong.
The answer, though, is likely to be 'nothing', or rather, 'nothing except for using the wrong source for vacancies.' At the end of the day, quite a few of these sites do little more than web-scrape and repost vacancies from other sites.
If you are lucky enough to receive a response, it is often from an employment agency asking if you would be interested in signing up with them. Essentially, these firms are little more than CV farmers.
Given the complete lack of regulation, or even monitoring, it is like the Wild West. As you say, Job Centres have evolved into Benefit Support Centres (and I use the term 'support' very carefully). DWPs jobs website has replaced the old relationship between job centres and local employers. Large enough companies invest in a jobs section on their website, but even that can be hit-and-miss.
Mind you, what is equally frustrating is this focus on young people's unemployment. True, there are significant implications for falling into the unemployment trap, but a growing number of people are facing increasing challenges in the twilight years of their careers.
Those within a decade or so of retirement face similar challenges, with the added burden of family responsibilities. Often the victim of aggressive company cost-saving activity, they struggle to find similarly paid employment.
Too young to draw pensions, potentially at risk of losing homes they've paid for over their lifetime, they can only look on despondently as they limp towards an increasingly distant retirement age that is likely to be marked by the poverty of an even weaker pension scheme, and the challenge of meeting accommodation costs or finishing paying their mortgage.
Politicians seem to be making assumptions about disengagement from the jobs market that place all the blame on employees. As for employers, they seem happy to allow them to wash their hands of what little responsibility they do have.
Thanks for your comments, Tim and agreed. Re web-scrapers, etc the NEET I quoted mentioned how the labyrinthine task of looking for work online is made even harder by the infiltration by numerous scam and other diversionary elements (e.g. directions to other job sites).
Re demographics - I selected young people for attention just because they are so vulnerable and I know some of them personally. But, absolutely, the problem is right across age groups. Another example I read about recently is 'women over 45' whose job experience doesn't appear to carry the same value online and who are now readily shelved by AI bots in favour of 'younger models'.
That wasn't a criticism, so much as an observation. I think you said it best elsewhere when you stated that there is so much to unpick with this that you have to draw a line somewhere.
On the whole 'disability and employment' debate, or rather the 'economically inactive' debate, politicians are steadfastly blaming individuals. "It's your fault you were born with / became disabled" seems to be the universal message.
Their solution? Employ a couple of thousand job coaches. "Ah, yes! It's because we've been applying wrong all this time that we can't get a job. How silly we are. Thank you for showing us the error of our ways."
Let's face it, the only beneficiaries of that policy will be the chums who run job coaching companies. If things run true to form, there'll be dozens of them springing up out of nowhere to bid for lucrative government contracts.
Just because governments have changed, doesn't mean procurement practices have changed.
I agree with a lot of this - my son has an Msc in Machine Learning and 3 years of work, but it still took 1 year for him to get a job after redundancy. It is dispiriting. However, I thoroughly disagree with your comments on PIP and Neurodivergence - do you know how long the waiting list is for a diagnosis (if you didn't get one as a child)? And you have obviously bought the MSM view of PIP - it is bloody hard to get even with documented, diagnosed conditions - you have to provide a mountain of evidence - you don't just waltz up and claim it - most claims are unsuccessful! DWP itself says the fraud is at 0.4%. Please do not just repeat the nonsense that MSM parrot re everybody can claim PIP with just a mild headache or whatever. BTW Most people have more than one diagnosis, how do they know which is their Primary condition - they don't so the reports just note all the diagnoses, guess what comes at the beginning of the alphabet - ADHD /ASD/Anxiety etc. etc.
Yes, eligibility for PIP is complex and difficult. I certainly haven't 'bought the view that PIP is easy to obtain'. However, according to the data, around 530,000 people between 18 and 30 yrs are currently claiming Pip (see e.g. https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/teenagers-pip-100-more-than-minimum-wage-5HjdfBc_2/). For 16 - 24 yr olds claims have doubled since 2019. The DWP estimates that 18–30 year olds receiving PIP has grown by around 600% in the last 10 years. To note the increase is not to imply that getting PIP is easy.
My experience of the predecessors to PIP is that we have had rubish systems. In my case that meant that I was eventually rejected for everything, despite letters from psychiatrists and all the rest, while I could see ways in which someone who was dishonest and canny could work the system and recieve benefits to which they were not reasonably entitled, so both stories are sometimes true -- honest claimants are rejected, while there are dishonest sucesses which fuel the scaberous press. I don't know enough to judge the numbers, but in my case I strongly suspect that I could have got through my final appeal by, for example, drinking two pints of coffee before I went in, so that I would twitch. Instead of that I wore my one remaining suit and had all my paperwork in neat folders, and got bounced.
Thanks for this, Chris and really sorry to hear about your experiences. I've no doubt you are right - predecessors + PIP were and are very imperfect systems. They are extremely challenging to navigate. And whilst they work fairly for some, they also sometimes help the undeserving and fail to help the deserving. There are stories from every one of these scenarios.
Thank you for that, the tone I picked up lent me to take what you said that way. The great elephant in the room is Covid - so many children are getting it repeatedly because nothing is being done to stop it spreading (many schools don't even have windows that can be opened for ventilation) and every time they catch it it increases the chance of Long Covid for which there is no cure. These are the forgotten children, most people don't even understand that the pandemic is still here, it is just not an emergency, and believe things like "it's just a mild cold". Every exposure impacts the bodies' immune system, the statistics for every single disease have gone way up - it's all measurable, it's all available in the NHS statistics - we are letting Covid wreck the health of the nation and many people don't even know it is a problem. So of course the number of young people unable to access school, claiming PIP, has risen hugely, and will continue to do so unless the government gets a grip and actually puts out correct and sensible messaging.
If someone doesn't wish to work, they can focus their time and attention on claiming benefits, including PIP. Coaching other people to claim benefits is a side hustle for some of them, and AI is now being used to generate PIP application paperwork too.
The root problem is that mental health conditions which make people unsuitable for employment are non-falsifiable, and are exacerbated by elective substance use. We have a system designed to support amputees returning from war or with lungs ruined by coal mining, being used in a post-industrial context of globalisation that the system wasn't designed for.
True and yes the system is sorely out of date. As I mentioned though, we should avoid generalising from the particular case. In reality, the system is abused by some, used rightfully by some, is rightfully denied to some, and wrongly denied to others. It's a complex picture. I also highlighted a further 'grey area' cohort of NEET PIP applications which have some justification.
If someone is depressed because they don't have a job, but don't want a job, should they be entitled to PIP?
Wowsers! An entire piece about youth unemployment that doesn’t even briefly reference employment-rights reforms that make it harder to fire workers or the tax rises that make it more expensive to employ people. Even though both issues disproportionately affect inexperienced and low productivity workers, e.g.., the young. This is quite an achievement! Bravo, señor Bear!
True. There was a great deal else that could have been mentioned. But the point of the piece was primarily to highlight how the situation is experienced by young people and future prospects.
I’d say these measures very directly impact their current experience and future prospects. Probably much more so than AI at this point.
UBI was what came to my mind reading through and then you mentioned it!
It would need the billionaires of the world to sanction it though, as,sadly, they're the ones in charge of the processes that AI can and will enhance.
Wouldn't it be brilliant though, if we could all do something that we were interested in and not have to worry about money.