Financial precarity, basic income and securing young people’s futures

Date: Wednesday 3rd July 2024

Venue: Room X101 NuSpace (in Newcastle city, near public transport) and online audience via zoom

Financial precarity, basic income and securing young people’s futures: challenging the intensifying financial violence of everyday life

Cost of living pressures. Priced out of the housing market. Casualised, insecure but upwardly credentialised labour markets. Increased higher education debts. The rapid rise of unregulated fintech. These are but some of the issues many young people face as they individually strategize a trajectory towards the future by stitching together the means to make a living and a good life. All the while, public debates often blame young people for these economic predicaments and assume that they can be addressed through individualized solutions.

This event, co-hosted by the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre and the Australian Basic Income Lab, will involve academic and public-facing presentations. First, researchers will share their work addressing how young people are dealing with financial precarity in work, education, the creative industries and arts, and everyday life. We will then hear from Basic Income Australia, who will discuss practical solutions and alternatives to the current unsustainable and ever-more financially violent norms.

Our seminar will be followed bu a public dicsussion on : Basic income and the financial challenges of everyday life with Emma Hansma from Baisc Income Australia with repondents from the above semainer. Details can befound here.

10am to 2pm: Research Seminar: Financial precarity, basic income and securing young people’s futures: challenging the intensifying financial violence of everyday life

Chair: Julia Coffey

Ben Matthews and Adriana Haro: Creative industry students, wageless work and the projectariat

Rachael Jacobs: Can it work here?: Lessons from the BIA (Basic Income for the Arts) Pilot in Ireland

Anne Gotfredsen: No time to waste in a teenage wasteland – girls’ precarious leisure in rural Sweden

Julia Cook: The (re)turn to the family in the post-welfare state: what do we overlook when we talk about the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’?

Josh Healy and Andi Pekarek: Inviting vista or hostile landscape? Young Australians’ views of gig work

Ben Spies-Butcher: Basic Income in Precarious Times: Promises and limits

Steve Threadgold: From entrepreneurial speculators to hopeful gamblers? Young people’s subjectivities and orientations towards the future

Ben Matthews and Adriana Haro: Creative industry students, wageless work and the projectariat

The Creative Industries are precarious, emblematic of what has become known as ‘wageless life’ in the ‘projectariat’. In this paper, we use qualitative data to explore how young people who are studying to enter the Creative Industries or already in the early stages of working there, are strategising about their future and negotiating their pending insecurity. For these young people, financialisation of everyday life inspires strategies that include uses of debt, thrift and commoning practices. We consider how these young creative labourers are ‘getting by’, through the lens of ‘hustling’ in the projectariat, revealing the ambivalences of this trajectory. We argue that while our participants may be naïve about aspects of their future, that naivety is likely to maintain a reflexively hopeful disposition. They are frequently critical about their Creative Industries future, and can be understood as proponents of the so-called ‘guerrilla self’.

Ben Matthews is a Senior Lecturer in Design and Communication at the University of Newcastle where his focus is on emerging technology and creative industry studies. He is an AI with the Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology and has over 15 years of experience in transdisciplinary roles in creative marketing as a brand strategist and producer of digital media.

Adriana Haro is an early career researcher with interests in creative and arts-based methods, youth and masculinities. She is based at the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE), at the University of Newcastle, Australia. During her PhD she was awarded a Global Voices Scholarship and undertook a policy fellowship, producing a policy paper focused on meaningfully embedding the voices of student/staff victims-survivors in policy and decision-making processes at the University of Newcastle. In 2023, she was invited to be part of a research team at the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education, that explores the effects of gender-based violence in participation and access to higher education. She is currently a research assistant with the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre and project officer at CEEHE.

Rachael Jacobs: Can it work here?: Lessons from the BIA (Basic Income for the Arts) Pilot in Ireland

The world over, the arts sector was decimated as a result of Covid-19.

Furthermore, it is widely acknowledged as a sector where precarity is the norm. A basic income for artists has been engaged in several models around the world, and has been celebrated as one of the antidotes to this precarity. One of the newest models being trialled is Ireland’s new Basic Income for the Arts (BIA). It is a 3 year pilot scheme trialling a weekly income for artists and creative workers. In interviews with the architects of the policy and artists who are being supported by the scheme, the BIA has been found to be making a big impact on artists health and wellbeing, as well as their creative capabilities and output. This session will share personal stories of the scheme’s transformative attributes, as well as some of the challenges which were not anticipated in the design. The session will also discuss the possibilities for a basic income for artists in Australia, in particular, the difference it could make for young artists and creatives hoping to forge a life devoted to artistic pursuits.

Rachael Jacobs is a Senior Lecturer at Western Sydney University whose research focuses on arts education for racial justice, climate action and creative justice . She facilitates arts projects in community settings, mostly working with migrant and refugee communities. Rachael is a community activist, aerial artist, South Asian choreographer and runs an intercultural dance company.

Anne Gotfredsen: No time to waste in a teenage wasteland – girls’ precarious leisure in rural Sweden

The starting point for this presentation is a small rural town in Northern Sweden. The town is described as a ‘dead shoe box’ by some of its young residents. This taken-for-granted-knowledge that young people have nothing to do in rural places stands in sharp contrast to how demanding and stressful the same residents describe their own leisure to be. Young people being busy is not a denial of the representation of rural places as ‘wastelands’, but a reaction to it – young people do a lot of things to make a place for leisure precisely because the space offers so little fun. Here, this responsibility for creating places of leisure was constructed in relation to the ‘common-sense’ idea that (a certain kind of) leisure is positive for young people. The girls in this study perceived leisure as positive if it was characterized as social, away from home and screens, and where individual skills, such as leadership, planning, and responsibility-taking could be acquired, with current and future educational and career achievements in mind. For leisure to be constructed as responsible and productive, and as something from which (certain) young people can benefit in terms of social capital, certain organizational structures need to be in place. Within a rural context, these structures and services might be few and far between or even or under threat of withdrawal. Therefore, young people carry additional responsibility for these places to survive. These investments, reproducing gendered and classed subject positions, illustrate the relevance of precarity when analyzing not only youth education and employment, but also spaces of leisure.

Anne Gotfredsen holds a PhD in public health from Umeå University, Sweden and is currently a visiting postdoc fellow at the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre, University of Newcastle. Her research focuses on intersecting inequalities in relation to leisure and youth mental health.

Julia Cook: The (re)turn to the family in the post-welfare state: what do we overlook when we talk about the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’?

Government support for housing in Australia comes in several forms: a residualised social housing sector, targeted payments to support eligible individuals in the private rental sector, and significant tax offsets and discounts available to home and investment property owners. Due to the high cost of property, particularly in the cities of Melbourne and Sydney, a growing number of young adults have turned to the so-called ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ to assist in financing their entry into home ownership. This trend represents a notable (re)turn to the family as a source of support with financing housing. It also carries with it serious equity concerns, as those whose parents or other family members cannot afford to provide financial support struggle to compete with those who are able to access this support. In this presentation I draw on the findings of a longitudinal interview-based study conducted with 80 donors and recipients of family financial assistance with first home ownership. By showing that many of the donors of family financial assistance with home ownership were using wealth accumulated through investment properties that were subject to favourable tax settings to finance this assistance I seek to highlight the relationship between these tax settings and the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’.

Dr Julia Cook is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include the sociology of youth, housing and money. She is a current ARC DECRA Fellow (2022-2025), and a chief investigator on the current phase of the ARC-funded Life Patterns longitudinal research program (2021-2026). She is Director of Engagement at the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre and co-editor in chief of Journal of Applied Youth Studies. She is an ABC Top 5 (Humanities) scholar and is a regular media commentator.

Josh Healy and Andi Pekarek: Inviting vista or hostile landscape? Young Australians’ views of gig work

Young people are avid participants in the gig economy, both as users and as workers. This dual involvement means that labour platform companies play a significant and two-sided role in many young people’s lives, enabling different patterns of consumption but also providing new opportunities for workforce participation by themselves and many of their peers. In this paper, we present contemporary evidence of how young Australians engage with local labour platforms and how this shapes their views of gig work. While young people have enthusiastically taken to using platforms, they are pessimistic about several key aspects of gig work. We discuss what this combination of support and suspicion portends for young people’s acceptance of labour platforms as central players in imagined futures of work, careers, and livelihoods.

Josh Healy is Senior Lecturer in Employment Relations in the Newcastle Business School at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is a leading researcher and commentator on the future of work and workplaces, with recent studies on technological disruption, work in the gig economy, experiences of younger and older workers, and the living wage movement. Josh is a member of the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre, an Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Future of Employment and Skills Centre at the University of Adelaide, an Associate Editor of Labour and Industry: A journal of the social and economic relations of work, and an Editorial Board member for Journal of Industrial Relations and Research in the Sociology of Work (Emerald).

Andreas (Andi) Pekarek is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Andi is fascinated by how people work, and his research has focused on how collective action by workers and their allies can steer the world of work in a more sustainable direction, towards fairness and social justice. His recent projects have centred on gig work in the platform economy, unions and industrial relations institutions, the HRM occupation, and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of work. He has published in leading international journals, such as Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Human Resource Management Journal, Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, Organization, British Journal of Industrial Relations, and New Technology, Work and Employment. He is an Associate Editor of Research in the Sociology of Work (Emerald) and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Industrial Relations (Sage).

Ben Spies-Butcher: Basic Income in Precarious Times: Promises and limits

Can a Basic Income help address growing economic inequality and insecurity and provide young people with a more reliable economic foundation? This paper critically reflects on Basic Income’s utopian appeal, and its potential in a context like Australia. By unpacking the features of a Basic Income, it thinks through how individualising payments, removing conditionality, relaxing means-tests and improving payment adequacy might provide greater economic security. Drawing on recent international evidence and experiences through the pandemic it identifies how greater universalism is most likely to change young people’s lives, but also its limits in dealing comprehensively with unequal labour and housing markets.

Ben Spies-Butcher is Associate Professor of Economy and Society at the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, at Macquarie University. His research focuses on public finance, social policy and the political economy of inequality. Ben is co-director of the Australian Basic Income Lab and his most recent book is Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation (2023, Anthem Press).

Steven Threadgold: From entrepreneurial speculators to hopeful gamblers? Young people’s subjectivities and orientations towards the future

The literature on young people’s subjectivities has created a well-established and still very relevant understanding of how young people need to make choices in late capitalism, that is, as entrepreneurial subjects that need to make the right choices now as they speculate into their future. As the current generation of young people are experiencing their transition in an era of rising inequality, unprecedented new risks (expensive higher education, precarious labour markets and stagnant wages, rising housing and general cost of living, climate change, pandemics, terrorism, the normalisation of the far right, western supported genocide) and the ubiquitous saturation but ever-evolving role of digital technologies in their lives, we have noticed what may be a new, or at least a new layer, of subjectivity creeping in to how young people talk about their future, that of the gambling speculator.

As young people find out many of the promises made to them in their journey from child to adult are just not true - that meritocracy exists, that gender and racial inequalities are getting better, that adults will do something about climate change, etc. – there is evidence in some of our research projects that they are feeling let down, ripped off, and sold out. This sees a different orientation towards the future, a more ironic and cynical dispositions, a feeling of ‘whatever’ that leads to choices feeling more as gambling than investing. Both gambling and investing are forms of speculation, but it may be that he privileged can invest, while the rest must gamble.

Steven Threadgold is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Newcastle, Australia. His research focuses on youth and class, with particular interests in unequal and alternative work and career trajectories; underground and independent creative scenes; cultural formations of taste, and financial practices. Steve is the Director of the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre. His latest book is Bourdieu and Affect: Towards a Theory of Affective Affinities (2020, Bristol University Press). Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles won the 2020 Raewyn Connell Prize for best first book in Australian sociology.