Tripartite Responses to Young Workers and Precarious Employment in the European Union

Abstract

Youth unemployment has long been a challenge for industrialised countries and has become a policy focus since the 1980s (Bell and Blanchflower 2011). While the rate of youth unemployment in many countries eased in the early part of this century, this progress was erased by the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007 (Arpaia and Curci 2010). Young people are now twice as likely to be unemployed compared to the general population (Choudhry et al. 2012). Young workers in Asia, Africa and the USA may experience similar employment issues, but this chapter focuses on Europe because of the particularly dramatic effect of the crisis on youth unemployment. Further, the variety of contemporary political economies allows for the examination of differing institutional responses to the young worker crisis and offers important social and political insights for other regions on how to address such issues.