Colin Delfosse for The New York Times
France’s Floating Generation:
As youth unemployment hits 22 percent, many young people cannot find jobs that get them on the path to being tax-paying, property-owning adults.
LILLE, France — Justine Forriez wakes up early to go onto the computer to look for a job. She calls university friends and contacts; she goes to the unemployment office every week, though mostly for the companionship, and has taken a course in job hunting. She has met with 10 different recruiters since May and sent out 200 résumés.
Ms. Forriez is not poor or disadvantaged, and she holds a master’s degree in health administration. But after a two-year apprenticeship, she is living on state aid and working at off-the-books jobs like baby-sitting and tending bar. She cares for a dog for $6.50 a day. She paints watercolors in her spare time to keep herself from going crazy.
“I don’t feel at ease when I’m home,” she said. “You find yourself with no work, no project.” With the extra $45 for dog sitting, she said, “I can go to the grocery store.”
Ms. Forriez, 23, is part of a growing problem in France and other low-growth countries of Europe — the young and educated unemployed, who go from one internship to another, one short-term contract to another, but who cannot find a permanent job that gets them on the path to the taxpaying, property-owning French ideal that seemed the norm for decades.
This is a “floating generation,” made worse by the euro crisis, and its plight is widely seen as a failure of the system: an elitist educational tradition that does not integrate graduates into the work force, a rigid labor market that is hard to enter, and a tax system that makes it expensive for companies to hire full-time employees and both difficult and expensive to lay them off.
The result, analysts and officials agree, is a new and growing sector of educated unemployed, whose lives are delayed and whose inability to find good jobs damages tax receipts, pension programs and the property market. There are no separate figures kept for them, but when added to the large number of unemployed young people who have little education or training, there is a growing sense that France and other countries in Western Europe risk losing a generation, further damaging prospects for sustainable economic growth.
Louise Charlet, 25, has a master’s degree in management. She worked as an apprentice at the Kiabi clothing company for more than two years, but was not given a permanent job; she’s also worked for three months at a hotel here. She prowls the Internet for job offers, goes to the unemployment office and lives with her unemployed boyfriend in a neat, tiny apartment. “You see,” she said, pointing to the computer, “there’s only one job offer today, and it’s a temporary contract.”
The crisis makes companies doubly reluctant to hire, she said. “In our parents’ generation, you had a job for life; now we constantly have to change jobs, change companies, change regions.”
Yasmine Askri, 26, majored in human resources, and after a year of unemployment, she got a business school degree. She was promised a fixed contract after an internship, but it never came. She left the Lille area for Paris to find a job, and spent another year on unemployment, finally finding an interim job for 18 months at GDF Suez. But that contract ended in June. Again unemployed, she has sent out nearly 400 résumés, she said, but has had only three interviews.
“It’s a disaster for everyone,” said Jean Pisani-Ferry, who runs the economic research center Bruegel in Brussels. “They can’t get credit, and they’re treated awfully by employers. And then there are all those young people in jobs that don’t match their skills.” The labor market, he said, is “deeply dysfunctional.”
Throughout the European Union, unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 is soaring — 22 percent in France, 51 percent in Spain, 36 percent in Italy. But those are only percentages among those looking for work. There is another category: those who are “not in employment, education or training,” or NEETs, as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calls them. And according to a study by the European Union’s research agency, Eurofound, there are as many as 14 million out-of-work and disengaged young Europeans, costing member states an estimated 153 billion euros, or about $200 billion, a year in welfare benefits and lost production — 1.2 percent of the bloc’s gross domestic product.
