Tougher than the 90s? Why work reality for young people is much worse than it looks - Liam Dann

THE FACTS

• Unemployment in Auckland rose to 6.3%, with youth unemployment at 18.7%.
• Nationally, 23.5% of young Māori aged 15-24 are unemployed.
• The underutilisation rate for young people is 23%, highlighting struggles in finding sufficient work.

The topline unemployment rate last week didn’t make much of a headline.

Officially, it was down from 5.4% to 5.3% in the first quarter – but with caveats around changes in the size of the labour force and expectations that the worst of the Iran war fallout is still to come.

Naturally, the Government claimed this as good news.

But you didn’t have to dig too deeply into the latest unemployment data to find some shocking numbers.

And if, as most economists think, we’re going to see further deterioration as businesses deal with the pain of the oil shock, then we have a big problem.

Unemployment in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest job market, was at 6.3% – up from 5.4% for the same period a year ago.

Youth unemployment was much worse.

In the Auckland region, 18.7% of people aged 15-24 are unemployed.

Tragically but somewhat predictably, the figures for Māori unemployment make sobering reading.

At a national level, almost a quarter (23.5%) of young Māori (aged 15-24) are unemployed.

In recent years, the raw numbers of jobless in the youth category have been relatively low because more young people have opted to stay in school or go back to further training.

The unemployment rate is based on the cutely named Neet rate (those “not in youth, not in employment, education, or training”).

That rate had been climbing as the unemployment rate had risen over the past few years.

That’s a good thing, right? It means a better-educated workforce and more opportunities in the long term.

I remember writing that this would pay off when these kids finished their studies and came out into an improved job market.

But the disturbing thing in the latest labour market release was that the Neet number has started to rise again.

People can’t stay in school forever.

In the March 2026 quarter, the proportion of people aged 15-24 who were not in employment, education, or training was 14.4%, compared with 13.3% in the December 2025 quarter.

That suggests more young people are finishing their training courses, coming out of school or uni and struggling to get work.

Are things really worse for this generation?

In the style of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch (“You think you had it tough ... ”), I’ve always been prone to pointing out that the unemployment rate peaked at about 11% in 1992*.

A famous sketch from Monty Python, who were John Cleese (from left), Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin and Eric Idle, focused on how tough life was growing up.

That’s just as my generation came out into the workforce.

But I’m increasingly of the view that changes in the way we work have complicated comparisons with that era.

I think the casualisation of the workforce in the past 30 years, the so-called gig economy, minimises the size of the current problem.

These days, far more people are self-employed, or on short-term contracts, freelancing, or even working more than one part-time job.

They don’t count as unemployed if they receive payment for as little as one hour’s work a week.

When times get tough (as they have) and their paid hours drop to levels that make life miserable, they only count as “underemployed”.

We get a much better sense of how many people in the economy are struggling with a lack of work by looking at the underutilisation rate.

That combines the unemployed and underemployed numbers.

The underutilisation rate in the year to March was 13%.

For young people, it was much worse.

It was 23% for those aged 20-24 and a shocking 50% for those 15-19 (although that’s probably a statistically smaller set given the Neet rate).

Overall, it looks to me that reality for young people now is that it is as hard or harder to find enough work than it was in the early 1990s.

So what was Generation X’s response to the lousy job market?

Well, a lot of us gave up looking. We joined what was colloquially known around my way as “Jim Bolger’s surf team”.

There were also some great rock and roll bands largely funded by the unemployment benefit, which effectively doubled as a kind of arts grant in those days.

I’m pretty sure being on the dole isn’t as fun as it used to be.

The days of cheap inner-city flats are long gone.

Drinking in pubs and bars costs a fortune.

Benefit rates for single people under 25 are much less generous – presumably in order to incentivise people to look harder for work.

Perhaps there is some logic to that.

But regardless, what we can say is that young people face the highest unemployment rates, receive the lowest benefit rates, and now face tighter eligibility rules – all simultaneously.

From November this year, those aged under 20 won’t be eligible for a benefit at all if their parents earn a miserable combined annual income above $65,500.

In the past few months, the big brain drain of Kiwis heading offshore long-term has started to ease.

There were hopes this would see our net migration rate lift in a positive way – more population means more economic growth, more tax revenue, a lift for the housing market etc.

Another surge in unemployment, and youth unemployment in particular, will jeopardise that part of the recovery.

To put it bluntly: if you don’t have strong parental support, good luck in Australia.

As a footnote to all this gloom and nostalgia, I should say that a bunch of mates and I, who were knocking around together in the early 90s, are catching up for one of our semi-regular gatherings this weekend.

Most of us spent some time on the dole, despite (or perhaps because of) our non-vocational arts degrees. We did some rubbish jobs, we headed to London and eventually we went back and did more training.

In the mid-90s the economy recovered, we got our act together and life wasn’t nearly as apocalyptic as we used to predict in our late-night rants at the time.

We all did okay in the end.

Yes, we all came from middle-class backgrounds and you could argue we were privileged and all that.

But that puts us right in the zone for the young Kiwis currently leaving the country en masse.

Hopefully, New Zealand’s job market has another comeback in it.

And then one day, this current generation of school leavers will catch up in their virtual reality pubs or neural network chatrooms (or whatever they’ll be doing then) and laugh and complain about how tough they had it when they were young.

*The Four Yorkshiremen sketch does predate Monty Python. John Cleese wrote it with Tim Brook-Taylor, Marty Feldman and Graham Chapman in 1967 for an earlier BBC show. But the Pythons performed it live.

Liam Dann is business editor-at-large for the New Zealand Herald. He is a senior writer and columnist, and also presents and produces videos and podcasts. He joined the Herald in 2003.

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