Expediting youth's entry into employment whilst overlooking precariousness: Flexi‐employability and disciplinary activation in Hong Kong

Abstract

With an emphasis placed on supply‐side interventions such as skills training and incentives enhancement, active labor market polices (ALMPs) are strongly promoted by international organizations and widely adopted across different welfare regimes to boost employment rates. This article first presents the under‐examined relationship between ALMPs and employment precariousness, which has posed a challenge to the neoliberal notion of employability and activation. Youth‐focused employment policies tend to speed up employment entry whilst downplaying the risk of precariousness and the importance of job quality, and thus further reinforcing the belief that engaging in precarious employment is tolerable if not inevitable. The article then examines the case of Hong Kong, which illustrates that its relatively low rate of youth unemployment may conceal the unfavorable employment conditions confronted by youth. It is argued that the service‐led employment policies and short‐term vocational training define the employability of young workers in terms of labor flexibilities. The coined phase of “flexi‐employability” is characterized by promoting youth's readiness for, and adaptability to, the volatilities and changing demands of the labor market. Arguably, the disciplinary approach to youth activation would only strengthen the work‐first principle by enforcing young people to take up jobs available and leave welfare as soon as possible, but without thoroughly addressing the risks and insecurities generated by the labor market in undermining their well‐being.

A One-Year Prospective Follow-Up Study on the Health Profile of Hikikomori Living in Hong Kong

“…And this action could be at least related to two experiences: 1) The participants were informed of the outcomes immediately after the physical assessments by the nursing researcher, which triggered their awareness and they were looking forward to having the next round of follow-up assessments [38]; and 2) As described by certain social workers, they would care about the health of their clients but they were not healthcare workers, therefore, they played a role of caregiver to remind their clients to live healthier by doing more exercises. The case social workers opined that doing health assessments at the participants' home or in social work service centres had become an attraction in terms of encouraging them to step outside their comfort zone if not safe cocoon which has de-skilled their ability and lowered their confidence to interact with others face-to-face in the non-virtual community [39][40][41]. Another unintended yet positive outcome was the action taken by the social workers to make the most of the archived health records given to each of the assessed participant as an explicit gentle reminder for doing more exercises at home and loitering around the neighborhood community so as to make improvement in their next wave of health assessment.…”

A One-Year Prospective Follow-Up Study on the Health Profile of Hikikomori Living in Hong Kong

“…And this action could be at least related to two experiences: (1) The participants were informed of the outcomes immediately after the physical assessments by the nursing researcher, which triggered their awareness and they were looking forward to having the next round of follow-up assessments [45]; and (2) As described by certain social workers, they would care about the health of their clients but they were not healthcare workers, therefore, they played a role of caregiver to remind their clients to live healthier by doing more exercises. The case social workers opined that doing health assessments at the participants’ home or in social work service centers had become an attraction in terms of encouraging them to step outside their comfort zone if not safe cocoon which has de-skilled their ability and lowered their confidence to interact with others face-to-face in the non-virtual community [46,47,48]. Another unintended yet positive outcome was the action taken by the social workers to make the most of the archived health records given to each of the assessed participant as an explicit gentle reminder for doing more exercises at home and loitering around the neighborhood community so as to make improvement in their next time point of health assessment.…”

Autonomous precarity or precarious autonomy? Dilemmas of young workers in Hong Kong

“…Despite long-standing precariousness in Hong Kong, Chan (2016) contends that the nature of insecurity has shifted from transitional to permanent as the economy has been increasingly embedded in the global financial market, accompanied by frequently unpredictable crises. The implementation of the work-first approach to short-term employment services and training has neglected addressing employment precariousness experienced by young people in the labour market (Wong and Au-Yeung, 2018).…”