Introduction: youth discrimination, still invisible after all these years

This chapter reviews young people's experience of the labour market, drawing on research for the SEQUAL project into a small group of Connexions clients. It explores their understandings and priorities, and then links this to wider evidence of labour market processes that impact on young people. A key feature of this is the way in which young people are socially constructed as being problematic and not just as having problems, which needs some prior discussion.

The SEQUAL research was conducted before significant measures to combat age discrimination in employment came into force as a result of the 2006 Employment Equality (Age) Regulations in the wake of the European Union's (EU’s) 2000 Employment Framework Directive. The government also defends some ‘age and experience’ requirements as ‘objectively justified’, as well as lower National Minimum Wage (NMW) rates than the adult rate (Elliot, 2006). Protection on the grounds of age exists under the 1998 Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on ‘any grounds such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status’ (emphasis added). However, outside employment, there is no explicit legal protection against age discrimination. In this sphere too much of the media and public discussion has focused on discrimination of older workers. Our analysis of the government's Age Positive website (www.agepositive.gov.uk) in October 2006 showed that most of the 36 case studies of Age Positive Employer Champions, many leading public and private employers, focus chiefly on what employers are doing to recruit and retain older employers. If youth is mentioned, it is usually in terms of taking an ‘age neutral’ approach, although in the case of the Nationwide Building Society, younger employees are negatively associated with higher turnover by comparison with older ones. Most of the biographical examples given are of older workers.

In this chapter therefore we focus explicitly on ‘youth’ discrimination and equality as an issue in danger of being sidelined within age equality debates, and ‘youth’ discourses as often inherently discriminatory. Claims often previously made that young people are largely invisible, until identified as a problem or threat (for example, Davies, 1986), are still sustainable.