Young people are being severely hit by the Covid-19 pandemic

Young people are among the worst affected by the pandemic.

International Youth Day on 12 August provides an opportunity to reflect on the present and future of young people in Australia. The plight of young people in the past provides a window onto present and future challenges that relate to Australians in general.

Earlier downturns such as the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007-08 can help predict key economic and social effects on young people as a result of the current pandemic. The GFC had both immediate and longer-term effects on young people throughout the world. Young people felt its impact quickly and disproportionately compared to the overall working population, resulting in high levels of unemployment. In Australia, the unemployment rate of those aged 15 to 24 rose from a low of 8.7 per cent in March 2008 to just under 12 per cent in May 2009, reaching nearly 14 per cent in September 2014.

Since then, the percentage of prime-age workers has increased, while the level of youth employment has not kept the same pace. Youth unemployment in Australia is around double the overall working population, despite decades of unbroken economic growth prior to the pandemic. One in three young people are unemployed or underemployed (that is working part-time and available to do more work). As the Brotherhood of Saint Laurence has noted, youth underemployment has reached the highest level in the four decades years since the count officially began.

Certain trends predate the GFC. Since 1992, the number of young people working full-time hours in casual employment has nearly doubled. Australia has one of the highest shares of people employed in short part-time work in the OECD. Concentrations of young people work in the gig economy, which has grown by 340 per cent since 2016. Young people in these types of work are typically the first to go during a downturn, which leads us to present conditions.

The Foundation for Young Australians and Tomorrow Movement highlight how Covid-19 has exacerbated existing labour market inequalities and “negatively impacted every element of young people’s working lives.” Job losses have been particularly severe in casual employment. For example, in the early months of the pandemic, the number of casual positions in small business fell by 25 per cent, in contrast to 2 per cent for full time and 5 per cent decreases in part time jobs.

Lessons from the past suggest long term scarring effects on those disengaged from work, manifest in lower wages and higher unemployment and underemployment. Youth unemployment costs up to up to $15.9 billion in lost GDP annually, but the real costs run deeper.

Looking to the future, the downstream effects of the pandemic on areas such as education and mental health are unclear.

Despite concern of learning loss due to school closures elsewhere in the world, the picture emerging in Australia is more positive. For example, research conducted last year with Year 3 and 4 students in NSW schools showed that “by term 4 most students were where they should be, despite the 8 to 10-week period of learning from home.”

In post-school education, we can expect some people will seek shelter in further study and training, but some have struggled with online learning and disruptions to study.

Understanding how young people are affected by the pandemic provides a kind of barometer of wider society, measuring pressures faced by young people, as well as potentially forecasting the weather ahead. We can expect young people to be worried about financial security – Mission Australia’s 2019 youth survey found about one in five young Australian were highly concerned about this.

We can also expect rising incidences of poor mental health. One survey conducted just prior to the pandemic found that 44 per cent of 18 to 24 year-olds rated their mental health as average or poor. Other data suggests that young women aged 18 to 24 had the biggest proportion of high or very high levels of psychological distress of any age group.

Longer trends suggest we need to be wary of reducing our view of young people to simplified categorisations such as “Generation X”, “Millennials” and “Generation Alpha”. Workforce conditions and trends predate the most recent generation of young people, whose experiences reflect wider changes; casualisation, for example, is a major feature of the workforce encompassing one in four workers. Anxiety about financial insecurity – indeed insecurity in general – is not confined to young people.

The theme of this year’s International Youth Day is “Transforming Food Systems: Youth Innovation for Human and Planetary Health”, highlighting the importance of engaging young people in the global effort to develop more sustainable ways of living. Key challenges, such as providing food security, are not something that happens only in faraway places. During Victoria’s Covid lockdown in June, demand for assistance among international students at Foodbank increased by 50 per cent in less than a week as casual workers lost shifts and jobs. They aren’t the only ones struggling.

But the pandemic has also shown that governments and communities can mobilise the enormous resources at their disposable given sufficient impetus.

The challenges facing young people do not exclusively rest on their shoulders. They concern us all.

Professor Lucas Walsh is director of the Monash Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice. Twitter: @ProfLucasWalsh