At their October meeting, assembled European trade leaders got a stern warning from Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. She told them, “Youth unemployment is a time bomb.”
The same day, Pope Francis called youth unemployment one of “…the most serious of the evils that afflict the world these days…”
In Europe, the rising tide of idle young people has governments in near panic. In Spain, an estimated 56% of those younger than 26 years old are without jobs. In Greece, that number is more than 62%. Bernadette Segol, the chief of the European Trade Union Confederation, told her colleagues, “Twenty-seven million [young] unemployed in Europe see no light at the end of the tunnel, only the light of a high speed train ready to run them over.”
Elsewhere, high unemployment rates among young people are seen as the powder keg which helped spark Arab Spring uprisings and ongoing unrest in the Middle East. Leaders and investors there are rightly worried too.
In the U.S., the situation is better but by no means good.
A report issued this month pegs the U.S. out-of-school yet out-of-work population at more than six million – or about 15% of our workforce. According to the latest U.S. employment statistics, more than 22% of Americans between 16 and 19 are not working.
And those numbers are growing.
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at
via The Entrepreneurship Answer to Youth Unemployment – Forbes.
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