Accountancy student Shuab Gamote should be in Scotland working on the opportunity of a lifetime – a one-year work placement in the finance department of the jet engine maker GE Aviation. Instead, the 20-year-old is stuck at home in Manchester searching for new opportunities after the hard-won placement was cancelled due to the pandemic.
“I am working really hard to sort something out,” says Gamote, who is in his second year at Manchester Metropolitan University – the first in his family to go to university.
“The fear of not doing something for a while is something that I have seen so much and I don’t want it to happen to me.”
He is among millions of young people who are bearing the economic brunt of a lockdown which has saved lives mostly in their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. With businesses freezing training and recruitment, and shedding jobs, there are concerns that irreparable damage will be done to the prospects of millions – and calls for action are growing.
“We can’t abandon their generation to mass unemployment and lost life chances,” warns Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress.
She was speaking on Thursday as new figures showed that, between January and March, some 8,000 of the country’s 16-24 year-olds joined the ranks of those not in employment, education or training.
The period covers only one week of the coronavirus lockdown, with the Resolution Foundation warning those numbers will swell, and youth unemployment could hit one million this year as a cohort graduates over the summer into a major recession.