708
Jobless Growth, Youth Anger and the Informal Sector
Abstract Submissions Closed
WG05 Famine and Society (host committee)
Language: English and Spanish
Session Type: Oral
Neo-Liberalism was to be the solution to the 1960s global recession whereby company profits - economic growth - would spur on employment, spending, consumption and government revenues. This was achieved through deregulating financial and goods markets. For business, this meant increasing productivity and efficiency whilst reducing costs, through lean production. For the State, it meant privatising enterprises, outsourcing services and reducing public expenditure.
Neo-Liberalism, however, was marked by low economic growth in post-Soviet states in the 1990s and most Middle Eastern, African and poor Latin American countries in the 1980s and early 1990s (Saad-Filho, 2010). Moreover, between 1996 & 2017, cumulatively, the South African economy grew 58% alongside a 36% increase in unemployment. Clearly, free capital mobility has little impact on economic development (Jeanne, Subramanian & Williamson, 2012) and Neo-Liberalism led to jobless growth.
For workers, lean production strategies increased unemployment and labour-related insecurities (Standing, 2016). As the traditional male breadwinner wage declined more women entered flexibilised jobs incurring a ‘double shift’ (Hochschild & Machung, 2012) in addition to their unpaid social productive work. Compounded by surging population rates, the proportion of employed working-age citizens has been on a global decline. This trend, however, disproportionately affected the youth lengthening their period of dependency and transition to adulthood. This has attributed to an identity crisis - especially amongst unemployed men - and global urban youth uprisings. In addition, as a coping strategy, it has led to the growth of the informal economy, especially in developing and emerging countries.