Neither in Education nor in Employment: NEET Youth File…
“NEET Youth’s Participation in Employment is Prevented for Multiple Reasons” 

"Neither in Education nor in Employment: Berkin Şafak Şener, one of the founding partners of the Youth Work Cooperative, which we interviewed within the scope of our NEET Youth file, stated that the participation of NEET youth in employment was prevented for more than one reason and says: “Consider a NEET youth with some disability, drop out of formal education, residing in a family with a low household income, and unemployed for more than a year. It is not possible to eliminate these four disadvantages with a single intervention.”

First of all, can we get to know you?

Mehmet Kuzu: I am one of the founding partners of the Youth Work Cooperative. I have been trying to contribute to the continuation of the cooperative since 2015. In addition, I work as an Entrepreneurship Consultant at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Berkin Şafak Şener: I am also one of the founding partners of the cooperative and I am also a consultant at the United Nations Development Program Eurasia Regional Office. 

Metin Özarslan: I am a cooperative partner and a Board Member. I am interested in social inclusion and equitable growth. I acted in the field of civil society for many years before I became a Youth Work partner. Some of the members of the Youth Work Cooperative also work in different professional jobs. They can have different professions in various foundations, organizations / programs affiliated to the United Nations, in the components of the Social Solidarity Economy. 

We have a horizontal governance mechanism made up of various circles within the cooperative. We work with the method of sociocracy. 

Could you tell us about the works you carry out? Who is in your target audience? Are there young people in this target audience?

  1. Ş. Ş.: Through our work, we aim to improve the capacity of components of the social counseling economy, raise awareness of cooperatives and increase our partners’ access to human-worthy employment and livelihoods.

We don’t see being young as a disadvantage component, just as disability is not a disadvantage in itself. Therefore, we prefer to develop a more horizontal approach rather than programs specific only to young people.

There is a mass in the labor market that is in formal education or employment. Apart from this, there are about 31 million new graduates, unemployed people looking for or not looking for a job, unpaid domestic workers consisting mainly of women, and employees who are underemployed due to the lack of labor demand, while they can work more. As the Youth Work Cooperative, this is the area we focus on. Labor force participation rate is far below the desired level in our country. Among our target groups in the Youth Work Cooperative are 1) unpaid domestic workers, 2) refugees, 3) neither in education nor in employment, 4) settled groups in the city periphery, and 5) disabled / impeded individuals.

  1. Ö.: We prepared a Sustainable Youth Employment Policy by conducting a 514 sample “field research” and “data analysis” within the scope of Erasmus + KA3 Structured Dialogue Project under the leadership of İzmir Governorship.

We are conducting a project called Strong Women Strong Cooperative with the support of Sabancı Foundation. We identified 5 women-specific cooperatives there and achieved an impact in 3 points. First of all, we applied the training contents we developed on “cooperative sustainability”. Secondly, we contributed to “financial sustainability” and “business model development” in partnership with Impact Hub Istanbul. In the third heading, we carried out non-formal educational studies on “human rights” and “women’s rights”.

We have another project carried out by Impact Hub with the support of the World Bank, where we are also a service provider in cooperative education and consultancy. It is a special project for Supporting Women-led Social Enterprises in Izmir. The name of our study, in which we aim to get together Syrian women under Temporary Protection and local women to ensure their social integration and establish and run a cooperative, is called HALKA Cooperative.

Again, with the support of FES (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Turkey Office), we developed the KoopSupport service in order to reach the beneficiaries who are considering establishing a cooperative or who have established a cooperative but need to be informed about this issue. We created a 400-question book that we compiled in a way that the final beneficiary could understand. At the same time, we designed a website to access these questions online. It has become a question-and-answer platform containing competent and simple answers given by lawyers, financial advisors and cooperative experts to the questions frequently asked by cooperatives: koopdestek.org.tr 

We conducted a study on the Turkish adaptation of KOOP.DÜŞÜN and KOOP.KUR modules and published these modules for free.

Based on your observations in your work with young people, do you think NEET youth have characteristics that differ from other young people? What are the breaking points on the road to NEET?

  1. Ş. Ş.:The concept of NEET was conceptualized in the 90s and entered into statistical accounts in the 2000s. We took this concept and leading data and asked the question “Which profiles are prone to be NEET?” And identified the breaking points. Generally, NEET youth are prevented from participating in employment for more than one reason. Therefore, the positive results of active labor market policies for NEETs remain limited and partial.

Consider a NEET youth with some disability, drop out of formal education, residing in a family with a low household income, and unemployed for more than a year. It is not possible to eliminate these four disadvantages with a single intervention. When this young person enters and receives training directed by İŞKUR, only his skill level increases. It is not possible to employ this young person from today to tomorrow unless there is a solution to the issues of transportation of the youth to the city center, the level of household income that cannot meet the basic needs, workplace rehabilitation for disability, and lack of workplace adaptation.

What do you think are the primary problems of these young people?

  1. K.: The biggest obstacle is the vicious cycle of the young people not having access to this information. Therefore, these communication tools need to be developed. According to the information we obtained in the field study of the “Youth at Work Project”, coordinated by the Governorship of İzmir and in which we, as the Youth Work Cooperative are a stakeholder; it was revealed that 44.2% of the youth do not know İŞKUR On-the-Job Training Program 49.6 % of them do not know İŞKUR Job Guaranteed Vocational Courses 46.5% of them do not know the KOSGEB Entrepreneurship Program, 65% do not know the Turkish national Agency and 75.1% do not know the Eurodesk Contact Point, 78% of them do not know the activities of İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Profession Factory.   According to this research conducted in 2016, I can say that the priority problem is the insufficiency of access to information. 
  2. Ş. Ş.: We have seen this in a study we conducted with young people studying associate degree programs in Seferihisar. There were 3 obstacles young people were exposed to. The first is the employability barriers, namely professional skill level and behavioral skill level. The second is the barriers to participation in the workforce, namely care obligations, self-awareness, self-esteem, and the third is insufficient knowledge and incentives. Graduated young people do not stand equidistant from all options. This is manifested in the approach to capital accumulation processes, wage employment and patronage. 

One of the risks is that young people in employment are either in informal and indifferent employment called the grey economy, or are candidates to be in the grey economy. These can manifest in the form of free work in the household. It can be in the form of seasonal labor, especially in agriculture. Third, it can occur in the form of non-insured informal employment.  

The responsibility of finding a job for the graduate belongs to the public. Because this is a basic social right and public finance fed by taxes has invested in these people until they reach that age. This investment should not remain idle. In short, the primary responsibility belongs to the public. Our advocacy activity based on this assumption consists of two elements. One is practical / current and the other is theoretical. We try to eliminate the lack of information and incentives among the NEET audience with the help of social media and other online tools that are outside of the usual channels. We put this theoretical answer into practice as koopdestek.org.tr. In this platform, we gathered the competent and simple answers given by lawyers, financial advisors and cooperative experts to frequently asked questions about cooperatives. This area, which no public legal entity has undertaken, is both an information source and an advocacy tool.

How do you think these problems are solved? Who should do what? With which stakeholders it is necessary to progress in order to produce a holistic solution?

  1. K.:Here, when we consider the public sector, private sector and the third sector, three main sectors need to develop a coordinated policy. Apart from that, unfortunately, there are no platforms to enable learning within the system.
  2. Ö.: I see 2 main axes. Institutional and organizational stakeholders. When we look at the corporate side, it is not easy for different institutions to come together in a competitive environment. There is a theoretical system in the cooperative that can break this down.