NEGOTIATE investigates how young people’s agency interacts with structural conditions in a multilevel governance system, as well as how authorities at European, national and subnational levels ensure that these conditions support young people’s efforts to find employment. Conceptually, the project’s innovation lies in its use of four key concepts: resilience, capability, active agency and negotiation. These provide a lens through which to examine the individual and societal mechanisms that underpin specific circumstances of early job insecurity and its long-term effects.
To achieve its objectives, NEGOTIATE combines a variety of methodological approaches: comparative life course interviews with people from three birth cohorts, survey experiments where employers in four countries are asked to rank job applicants for actual vacancies based on fictitious CVs (vignettes), and comprehensive quantitative analysis of cross-national survey data. The project proceeds in three steps: assessment of early job insecurity as a theoretical challenge, collection and interpretation of primary and secondary data, and synthesis of findings across the project’s thematic work packages.
The following are some of NEGOTIATE’s main findings and recommendations:
• Entering the labour market during an economic downturn leads to scarring, with varying effects based on education and gender. When designing labour market policies, governments must focus more on trajectories than on single jobs. The accumulation of insecurity over time explains why some groups are more at risk of scarring than
others.
• Policymakers must distinguish between the effects of different forms of early job insecurity. Work in deskilling jobs, frequent job changes or even participation in active labour market policies (ALMPs) can be detrimental to a young worker’s professional career. Measures focusing on quick labour market reintegration without considering job
quality may reduce employability for unemployed youth. Both “skill-building first” and “work-first” strategies may have an ambiguous or even negative impact on the long-term job prospects of young people (depending on the national context).
• Strong and persistent differences in national levels of job insecurity for youth across Europe challenge the European Employment Strategy and European solidarity. Young people turn to immigration to cope with poor job prospects in their home country, which results in uncertain gains for long-term employment prospects.
The project results are integrated into two edited volumes (twenty-two chapters) and have formed the basis of sixteen scientific articles thus far.
