Unemployment or Precarious Employment: Tough Choices for Young Workers in the Twenty-First Century

This chapter updates the work of Andy Furlong published in the first edition of the Handbook and focuses on the period between the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) and the COVID-19 pandemic. Although economies generally recovered from the GFC and the Great Recession that followed, labor markets retained many of the characteristics developed during the GFC. Rates of underemployment increased, gig work replaced regular jobs, and young people struggled to transition into secure full-time employment. Impacting across the socioeconomic spectrum, precarious employment consigned a generation of young people to precarious lives. Although young people with family support were better placed to ‘wait’ for the labor market to recover, many were still ‘waiting’ when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, sparking another wave of economic recessions.