Britain’s largest online retailer has waded into one of the most uncomfortable debates in Westminster and the boardroom: who, exactly, is to blame for almost a million young people sitting outside the labour market?
The answer, according to Amazon’s UK country manager John Boumphrey, is not the young people themselves.
In a candid interview with the BBC’s Big Boss series, Boumphrey said the prevailing narrative that Generation Z lacks motivation, resilience or grit simply does not square with what his managers see on the warehouse floor. “We have to stop blaming young people,” he said, arguing that the education system is no longer “producing young people who are ready for work”.
Coming from the man who runs an operation employing 75,000 people across roughly 100 UK sites — half of them recruited straight out of school, college or unemployment — the intervention will sting employers who have spent the past 18 months grumbling about a “soft” younger workforce.
A million reasons to pay attention
The numbers behind Boumphrey’s comments are sobering. Almost a million 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK are now classified as NEET — not in education, employment or training — a figure that has hovered uncomfortably close to seven-figure territory for more than a year, according to the Office for National Statistics. At the same time, the headline unemployment rate ticked up to 5 per cent in the three months to March, from 4.9 per cent a month earlier.
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