I live in Finland, with over 10% unemployment according to official statistics (second highest in EU, just after Spain). From what I can tell, things really suck especially for fresh grads. There's fierce competition for jobs like cashier at supermarket, hundreds of applications for one position is normal. Lots of fresh grads with bachelor's or master's degree compete for those jobs too, since they can't find anything better. Also, of the few open positions, many are the kind of "rental work" that offer only limited hours a week, at unpredictable times.

So, this is what an objectively bad job market looks like in Europe.

▲

torginus 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Is having temporarily high unemployment that bad? Sure, demand is not as sky high as it used to be but doesn't mean people won't get a proper job eventually.

Imo it shows that you consider your people valuable and have a strong social safety net, so people are not forced to accept the first job that comes their way and compromise on pay or what you want to do.

I'm sure those grads could get underpaid crappy jobs the next day if they had to, but the point is they're not forced to.

If you can't sort this out in a couple years, then you have a real problem.

	▲	mschuster91 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> If you can't sort this out in a couple years, then you have a real problem. The problem is, we've been in an era of the polycrisis for decades - first 2007 the financial crisis thanks to the US subprime loan market, then the Euro crisis, then came the refugee crisis 2015, then the second refugee crisis 2018, then Covid, then the Russian invasion, then the Israel-Palestine war, and now Trump. And the last three and a half crises are still going on simultaneously. There has been no recovery period in which things could settle and those who got left behind could catch up, it was straight from one crisis to the next.