ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns itself with some of the processes, problems and policies encountered by working-class young people as they carve out transitions from school towards adulthood in the context of high unemployment and a rapidly changing labour market. It focuses upon the experiences of young men and women who engage first-hand with the insecurities of youth transitions no longer underpinned by regular employment. It explores their involvement with more marginal, precarious and non-standard forms of working. The chapter begins by describing how youth transitions in the UK have been restructured over the past thirty years, and illustrates this by examining the worsening of opportunities for young people in one area of particularly dramatic economic change (Teesside in the Northeast of England). This is followed by discussion of qualitative research undertaken with young Teessiders who, in the first instance, have attempted to join ‘the enterprise culture’ of self-employment and new firms and, in the second case, have engaged in ‘fiddly jobs’ (undeclared, cash-in-hand work while officially unemployed). The chapter concludes by contrasting these accounts of insecure livelihoods with those provided by underclass theorists, and by questioning the usefulness of government policies towards the ‘welfare dependent’ young unemployed.
