Precarious Employment, Social Norms and Youth Policies: Priorities and Rights in Canada, France and Argentine

Despite developing skills and making efforts to adapt themselves to new work standards, young people are one of the age groups who have struggled the most in the labour market for the last decades, constituting a deliberated and credible target for State policies in many countries. However shared and “explicit goals” of social inclusion, skills expansion, development of experience, access to employment, and increase of job standards, rights and security are dominated by “implicit social norms” of each context, defining different policies effects. The paper analyses the ways in which public policies address solutions to young people employment difficulties such as precariousness, instability, vulnerability, low wages, and lack of access or training. It focuses on recipient’s programs priorities and “forgotten” groups to identify different: a) state functions among youth, b) criteria to generate rights, and c) individual efforts required to benefit a public action. These points will be illustrated by results from a qualitative research on youth employment policies in three countries: Canada, Argentine, France. Under this project we realized a documentary analysis of more than a hundred of policies and programs and we interviewed responsible and designers of these policies and programs in each context.