ILPC 2027

Young people’s transitions into the labour market have been changing for some time. The financial crisis and subsequently turbulent economic period exacerbated existing concerns about structural changes in youth labour markets that have had the effects of making young people’s transitions from education to work longer, harder and more unstable (Bradley and Devadason 2008). Young people’s early experiences of labour markets have always involved precarious work, low paid work, and sometimes periods of free work (Goodwin and O’Connor 2015), but there is evidence that these are increasing in contemporary labour markets (Dolphin 2014). Surprisingly little attention is paid to the role of employers in these early labour market experiences. Employers are typically seen as relatively passive recipients of labour market policies aimed at incentivising (or dis-incentivising) particular activities and behaviours. This clearly is not an adequate conceptualisation of the role of key actors within these important formative experiences of employment, and this paper therefore addresses important questions about how employers understand, respond to and create these (new) structures of transition. This paper presents early findings from a sub-project of a 3-year study funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council looking at precarious labour in young people's transitions into work. The sub-project takes a sectoral and organisational research design to explore employers' experiences of recruiting and managing young people. By comparing employers with highly structured entry routes (National Health Service, high-skill manufacturing) with employers where labour market entry is chaotic and largely unstructured (creative industries, voluntary sector) the research design allows us to explore the extent to which employers are experiencing similar or different pressures from the broader societal and labour market changes. Findings indicate that all employers have been influenced by wider changes such as changing expectations of young people about their employment. They face strategic choices about the extent to which they embed, and sometimes formalise, precarious work within labour market transitions. The data clearly indicate, however, that not all employers choose this route. The paper will outline a range of factors that influence these strategic choices including: labour market policy, sectoral and geographic labour markets, skills development (including the under- and over-supply of skills in particular sectors and occupations), managerial agency, and changing ‘norms’ around youth employment. The paper argues that far greater attention should be paid to employers in sociological analyses of (early) labour market experiences in order to better understand the extent to which employers exert agency to create the context within which (young) people’s experiences of employment are formed. References Bradley, H. and R. Devadason. (2008). ‘Fractured Transitions: Young Adults' Pathways into Contemporary Labour Markets’. Sociology. 42: 1. pp 119-136. Dolphin, T. (2014) Remember the young ones: Improving career opportunities for Britain's young people. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. Goodwin, J. and O'Connor, H. (2015) Norbert Elias's Lost Research: Revisiting the Young Worker Project. Rethinking Classical Sociology. Farnham: Ashgate.