‘Two decades ago, the median graduate in a ‘graduate job’ had a salary 2.5 times that of a minimum wage worker. But by 2023, the typical graduate earned only 1.6 times the salary of someone on the wage floor. And the lowest-earning graduates now earn only marginally more than full-time minimum wage workers: those at the 10th percentile of earnings now have salaries just 11 per cent higher than someone on the wage floor, compared to 82 per cent higher back in 2001.’
from the Resolution Foundation labour market outlook report, December 2024
Today there are nearly 5 million graduates working in non-graduate jobs. I am sure most of these listened to pre-exam booster talks from their teachers that said passing with good grades was the gateway to decent jobs. Their parents probably echoed such sentiments too. It is not just the low wages which has betrayed their expectations after they had worked hard and done the ‘right thing’.
The majority of them are burdened with student debt that can reach more than £50,000 which they pay off at rip off interest rates. You can easily end up paying £90,000 over your lifetime as the additional marginal tax rate can be as high as 9%.
Graduates a few decades ago were able to get a job with a permanent contract, often in a trade union organised workplace. Today the graduate precariat is huge. People bounce from one short term post to another or have some sort of freelance or zero hours contract.
Homes out of reach
Even if you are fortunate to find a more secure job you are then obliged to continue to live in a room in a shared house and pay over half your salary in rent and bills. The quality of the accommodation is sometimes very poor and there is not a lot you can do to change it. It’s one thing to be in a shared house with other students when you are at college – but harder when you are working – especially for those with irregular hours. And increasingly people have no choice over who they share with – and therefore are less likely to have anything in common with them.
If you cannot manage renting then you are forced (back) into the parental home. In the boomer generation, it was a point of honour that once you left home for University you never went back to live permanently with your parents.
The big chunk of your income you pay out for rent just keeps on increasing too. Between 2009 and 2023, the average weekly rent for private renters in England increased from £153 to £231. In London and the big cities it is much greater than the average. Graduates even in the 1980s and 90s were able to use their salaries to put down a deposit to buy a flat. Today you need £50,000 for a deposit on a small apartment. Unless you have access to the bank of mum, dad or gran than you have little chance of getting on the housing ladder.
Unsurprisingly, declining work and home conditions has led to a big increase in mental health illness experienced by young working people. The Mental Health of Children and Young People in England 2023 report, published in November 2023 recorded a 21.7% rate of mental illness among 20 to 25 year olds. NHS Support for young people with mental health issues is extremely rudimentary.
One response, retreat or escape
Another reaction to this situation is to seek a retreat, an escape – sometimes with a group of friends. Pundits have dubbed this the ‘quiet resignation’ first identified as a consequence of the Covid pandemic. It is still continuing. Fed up, not just of low paid, insecure jobs, but also with how alienating so many of these ‘bullshit’ jobs are, they create a new work life balance where the job is not the main obsession. It is reported that people are resigning their jobs if their bosses demand they return to the office for the full 5 days a week. Some make do with a lower paid but more creative job in a cheaper town. Others get into smallholding or organic farming. A number try setting up small craft or food businesses. If they are tech savvy they can become digital nomads living in places like Lisbon or Vietnam and earning enough to live better than in London. It is also reported that some graduates seek to suck it up and try to stay as long as possible with one employer, deliberately dropping out of hustling for rapid promotion and big money.
Such responses are understandable given how few workplaces are organised by trade unions and how useless the Labour Party is in providing any sort of support or vision for them.
The fourth globalisation will cut graduate jobs
The latest changes in the world capitalist economy are not going to make things any easier for graduates. First the latest phase of globalisation – the fourth – according to the World Economic Forum is all about how the service sector is becoming increasingly a global labour market. Whereas in the decades at the end of the 20th Century we saw industrial production shifting from the global north to other countries with lower wages we are now seeing the same thing happening with the service sector. Here we are not just talking about call centres becoming based in India. Insurance, accountancy, advertising, design could all become outsourced.
The advances of Artificial Intelligence and machine translations will have a big impact inside each national economy cutting graduate jobs. It also facilitates global outsourcing. The end of the TV drama about banking, Industry, saw the replacement of the London trading floor and all its personnel with automatic AI trading.
Radicalisation – to the left or the right?
Recent articles by Dan Evans and Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian have raised the political implications of the graduate job experience today. It is the relative, comparative decline that needs to be understood. Most graduates are not in the desperate poverty experienced by people on benefits who have to use foodbanks to get enough to eat each week. Although their rented accommodation can be bad, it is not as awful as the temporary housing many homeless families have to put up with. However people’s sense of their situation is based very much on how it compares to their expectations of where they thought they would be and on their perceived standard of living compared to other layers of society.
Another factor, not really noted by the journalists, is the young graduate’s sense of their place in the world and where they will be in the future. Here strong feelings about the state of the world, the genocide in Gaza, the gross inequality and the danger that the world might be uninhabitable by the time they retire – also has an influence on their outlook.
One reaction is to move left, to look for an alternative to Labour. So we have seen higher votes for candidates to the left of Labour and for the Greens at the general election in July. Studies have shown that young graduates make up a significant number of such voters. They also make up much of the membership of the revolutionary Marxist groups who are recruiting from this demographic at the moment.
On the other hand another possible reaction is to move to the right, even to the far right. Looking at the audience of Farage’s Reform party young graduates were not much in evidence. However he is making clear that he will be reaching out more to recruit them. The influx of money from a rising membership and the arrival of big donors will allow Reform to staff a whole number of initiatives towards younger graduates. Tommy Robinson’s brand of neo-fascist street politics may also recruit from this layer.
The Left must reach out
The left has a responsibility and an opportunity to win people from this sector of the working class to a socialist alternative. We need to explain that the bosses, the capitalist system and their imperialist states are responsible for their predicament. At the same time we need to listen to them and construct the demands and policies that we can organise around to change their situation. Such policies should include dealing with: student fees and debt, rent controls, social housing, free or subsidized public transport, facilitating trade union rights and organisation, sexual freedom, international solidarity as well as ecological measures to save humanity and the planet.
Of course there should be no contradiction between winning over graduates and convincing non-graduate workers in the so-called ‘Red Wall ‘areas that a socialist alternative is a better than Farage’s anti-migrant Reform party. The Labour party mimics Farage’s politics on migration and his anti-woke demagogy to try and hang on to the non-graduate workers and just takes the graduate vote for granted. Labour assumes that the latter have no political alternative to vote for. Increasingly that is not true.
A new broad left party, which could be set up this year, would have a chance of channelling the anger of the graduate worker as well as competing seriously in the Red Wall areas to stem the flow to Farage.