Means of survival: youth unemployment and entrepreneurial training in Newfoundland

Abstract

Federal and provincial governments first began tracking youth unemployment rates in the 1970s. Since then, the youth unemployment rate has remained in the double- digits both nationally and in Newfoundland. The Federal Government has responded to the problem of youth unemployment in various ways since the late 1960s, most recently in partnership with business interests to promote entrepreneurship as an alternative to traditional paid employment. Because youth generally lack the experience and financing required to open a business, they seem unlikely targets for these messages. This thesis set out to discover what else the promotion of entrepreneurship as a solution to unemployment might be trying to achieve. -- This thesis approaches the promotion of entrepreneurship as part of a government and business sponsored social movement that is in place to promote New Right values. It uses primary documents and newspaper articles to lay out the development of an entrepreneurial movement in Newfoundland. It also explores how and why individuals and organisations become involved in entrepreneurial training, their attitudes towards unemployment and entrepreneurship, and their experiences with these, through the use of semi-structured interviews with participants, instructors and administrators of two youth entrepreneurial training programmes that ran consecutively in two Newfoundland cities. -- The promotion of entrepreneurship is different from past government responses to youth unemployment in that it is in partnership with business interests, and appears everywhere - in newspapers, job sites, television, magazines, radio, and school classrooms. In addition, sponsorship money is available for organisations that want to run entrepreneurial training programmes, and for unemployed individuals who want to learn the skills. The participants in this thesis believe that individual employment circumstances are an individual responsibility, but they also believe that social policies very much shape available choices. All participants in this research used entrepreneurial training as a means of staying in Newfoundland when employment opportunities proved insufficient. For most participants in this research, entrepreneurial training was a source of income and occupation at a time when there were no other employment options available to them. It was simply a means of survival.