First, I explore the impacts of industrial structure and associated national growth models on employers’ preferences for youth-oriented policy reforms. Strong manufacturing sectors are associated with expansive vocational training systems that offer seamless transitions from school to work to non-academic youth. Yet the programs’ high standards constitute barriers to low-skilled youth, and robust labor unions (with supportive employers’ associations) seek to retain strong academic content in these programs to sustain wage equality with white-collar workers. Countries dominated by services have an edge in job creation for low-skilled workers and have developed a plethora of largely job-based programs to develop some basic skills. Yet the employment trajectories for these low-skilled youth in services remain grim.
Second, I consider how employer organization in particular and institutional capacities for deliberative negotiations more broadly contribute to national solutions to the growing low-skilled, unemployed youth problem. Although strong industrial relations organizations have fostered broadly solidaristic social reforms in the past, social partners with to protect older insiders against the young outsiders. At the same time, strong industrial relations and PR party systems include rules for political negotiation, which make pie-enhancing reforms more likely.
