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“I am the one in ten,” sang UK reggae band UB40 – whose name itself refers to an unemployment benefit claims form – back in 1981 as the jobless rate in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain hit double-digits.
In subsequent decades, unemployment rates eased in a number of industrialized countries and other economic concerns – notably the cost of living - came to the fore. But that masked the fact that in many parts of the world, young people were increasingly struggling to find a foothold in the labour market.
A report this week by the International Labour Organization found that global unemployment among 15 to 24-year-olds last year increased to 12.4% - roughly one in eight. Chronically high youth unemployment has long plagued many low-income countries but the report found that a mix of factors ranging from rapid technological change to weak economic growth meant it was being felt in advanced economies too: "The picture is worsening almost universally," it concluded.
Indeed, it turns out that some of the sharpest deterioration is happening in richer countries: youth unemployment in North America climbed to 9.8% in 2025 while Europe is seeing rates around 15% - albeit still well below the 20%-plus levels seen across Arab states and Northern Africa.
Such numbers become a cause for wider grievance. Despite being the world’s fastest growing economy, India has struggled to generate entry-level jobs – the youth unemployment rate stood at 9.9% last year, over three times the overall jobless rate of 3.1%. The frustration associated with that helped fuel the mass street protests against Narendra Modi initially sparked by the discovery of leaked medical exam questions.
In China, a weak local job market is unable to absorb a record number of graduates – meaning that many of those are having to find work in a gig economy that offers little or no job security and where social insurance is not mandatory.
Elsewhere, even the brightest graduates are having to leave their home country to find work in the few labour markets with openings – an increasing number of young South Korean tech talent is heading to Japan because of a lack of opportunity at home.
And in Britain, new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has promised to revamp technical education and training with youth unemployment at a 10-year high and more than a million 16-to-24-year-olds not in education, employment or training – and therefore unable to help improve the UK’s weak productivity levels.
This is all happening even before we know to what extent artificial intelligence will strip out the entry-level roles that have in the past been the passageway into the labour market. The ILO report already cited the decline of what it called “middle-skilled” jobs that set young workers on their career paths - clerical and administrative roles, service and sales occupations and some technical occupations.
Recognising that AI could generate new jobs as well as cannibalise existing ones, it called on policy-makers to set ground rules so that take-up of AI creates fresh opportunities for job-seekers rather than deepens existing inequalities. That’s a big ask and, if previous technological revolutions are anything to go by, could emerge as one of the defining economic questions of our age.
