The crisis of capitalism continues to erode the living conditions of the youth. University graduates must compete increasingly intensely with others for a shrinking number of graduate roles, with an average of 140 applicants for each role. Jobs website Adzuna showed a stark 50% decrease in graduate roles in the past year. The website offered 55,800 graduate roles at its peak in 2017. That figure is now 8,383. The number of young people aged 16 to 24 who are not in employment, education or training (NEET) between April to June 2026 is a shocking 16.2%, an increase from 14.3% the previous year.
The capitalist state today uses higher and further education as holding pens for surplus workers. 2,066,630 undergraduates, mostly aged under 25, presently anxiously stew in universities. Young people spend years at university being taught and trained for jobs that won’t exist when they graduate. Millions of them are compelled to borrow to pay for the cost of training with expensive lifelong student loan debts. Capitalism needs a mobile, readily accessible workforce to use as it needs and available at a moment’s notice to meet its boom and bust cycles. This ‘trained’ reserve army of labour means that employed workers are forced to compete with an army of competing workers, themselves forced to accept poverty wages for the job.
Businesses are now compelled by competition to buy new AI systems to replace entry-level jobs. The Labour government has classified AI data centres as critical national infrastructure to speed up the planning process, bypassing local democratic planning requirements, in order to ensure that the British ruling class don’t miss the boat when it comes to potential profits. Estimated job creation by these data centres was projected to be over 40,000 (industry lobby group TechUK). According to environment researcher Verdant fewer than 4,400 have so far appeared.
The Growth and Skills Levy was introduced this year, replacing the Apprenticeship Levy. This includes foundation apprenticeships. Employers with an annual pay bill over £3m continue to pay 0.5% of their total payroll into a digital account and reclaim it by providing new apprenticeships which now have a lower minimum commitment of eight months down from the previous system’s 12 months, based on shorter ‘apprenticeship units’. Once levy-paying employers exhaust their digital funds, the employer co-investment rate for extra training increases to 25% , with a government subsidy covering the remaining 75%. Typical entry-level jobs that never previously required a period of training are now being branded as apprenticeships, in order for companies to reclaim more easily their apprenticeship levies. This move also indisputably fits such jobs into a lower minimum wage category. The aim is for businesses to secure productive, full time labour more cheaply than before.
On top of poorly paid work, the Labour government under Burnham is also forcing young people into unpaid work. A new scheme called Opening Shift, a joint initiative by the Department for Work and Pensions and the British Retail Consortium, aims to roll out 11,000 ‘work experience’ placements with providers like John Lewis, Waitrose, Tesco, Currys and Costa Coffee. Andy Burnham has also promoted an unpaid work experience scheme by Sainsbury’s, announcing 10,000 placements to young people. This comes despite Sainsbury’s laying off over 3,000 workers in 2025, and boasting of more than £1bn in operating profits. A, surely unrelated, generous £160,000 donation was given to Burnham from Lord Sainsbury, great-grandson of the founder of the chain, who is still a shareholder.
These work experience placements are not benevolent public welfare initiatives, but a way for the capitalist state to intervene to protect corporate profits and patch the holes in the labour supply problems of capitalism. In a paid job, the surplus value is extracted from the worker by the business owner, but in the case of work experience schemes the entire fresh value created by the worker is greedily squirreled away by the companies. Yet again, young people foot the bills of businesses. The vocabulary surrounding government youth unem-ployment schemes focuses on blaming the individual for their failure, highlighting the need for ‘confidence’, ‘skills’, and ‘character’, while ignoring the profit-seeking system of increasing productivity that cause this unemployment. Capitalism constantly creates unemployment. It’s up to us to fight for a system that can offer young people a better future. It’s up to us to fight for socialism.
