Quotes of the Day

Kai Lippolt left school as a teenager and then broke off his apprenticeship as a heating mechanic after six months. The 22-year-old German, who was born in Jena and moved to Bavaria as a child, has drifted around from job to job ever since, working at a recycling company, in warehouses and some industrial jobs, but never for very long. "These jobs are too boring and after a while I can't get up in the morning," he says bluntly. Lippolt belongs to a group that is fast emerging as one of the toughest problems for European governments: he's a NEET, a person not in education, employment or training. And like NEETs across the Continent, he drifts from precarious job to precarious job, earning just enough to get by, part of a new underclass of unmotivated youngsters for whom work is a four-letter word.

In Germany, NEETness is quite a recent phenomenon, says Bodo Neubacher, project manager at an agency in East Berlin called Jobbörse, where Kippolt comes from time to time. "Back in the early '90s, the young people acted on their own initiative. They wanted a different life-style," Neubacher says. "Today we work mostly with young people who cannot be integrated into society for completely different reasons. They do not actively participate any longer. The pressure on them has increased immensely and they are desperate to earn just a little money to make ends meet."

He reckons about half of the 15,000 youngsters he has worked with since 1988 didn't even register as unemployed, and that since Germany's new Hartz IV reforms, that number has dropped sharply. The reason: the youngsters don't want to be coerced into work, living instead on child allowance, at their parents or on their own — even when the power has been cut off. In France, a study published in June tracking 10,000 youngsters who entered the job market in 2001 found that 40% of those without qualifications were still unemployed three years later. And in Britain, there are an estimated 1.1 million NEETs between the ages of 16 and 24 — a number the government is desperately trying to reduce. Andy Furlong, a sociology professor at the University of Glasgow, says that many of them simply move from poorly paid insecure job to poorly paid insecure job. "Unemployment is just the tip of the iceberg," he says. "The problem is getting trapped in precarious jobs that lead nowhere."

How do you motivate people who may have lost all motivation? One British vocational school thinks it has an answer. In early June, Bournemouth & Poole College in southern England drew national attention by launching a summer program designed to encourage 16- to 18-year-olds who have left school to re-engage with education and training. Among the incentives it offered: a free mini-iPod and $177 in cash. Julie-Anne Houldey, the college's head of marketing, says the response is positive. "All the kids are encouraged and really motivated," she says. Others are appalled. "Bribing to improve education means there's something wrong with our culture," says Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, an independent pressure group. "No employer buys iPods for employees turning up to work on time or doing what they're supposed to be doing." Perhaps not, but it seems better than the alternatives.

• PETER GUMBEL
• Trying to reach the hardcore young jobless