The bargain is familiar: study hard, work hard, and earn a fair chance of establishing a secure and independent life. But during a recent visit to a leading business school, I listened to a group of young people questioning whether that sequence still held. Frustration over housing, jobs, corruption, and public services is drawing young people onto the streets and reshaping politics from India and Kenya to Serbia and France.
Their anxiety concerns ordinary ambitions: a livelihood, an affordable home, enough confidence to make plans for the future.
That deal was never available to all, but the expectation that each generation would advance beyond the last gave it credibility. Last month, Harvard’s long-running Youth Poll recorded a first: young Americans expecting to be financially worse off than their parents outnumbered those expecting to be better off.
There are many reasons for that doubt. Research published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies this summer finds that real median earnings around age 25 have essentially stagnated across two decades of birth cohorts. For many young people, ordinary ambitions are becoming financially out of reach. Deloitte’s global Gen Z and Millennial survey found that 55% of Gen Z respondents were delaying major life decisions because of their finances.
Millions struggle to find a foothold at all. In the UK, an estimated 981,000 people aged 16–24 were ‘NEETS’ (not in education, employment or training) in April–June, roughly one in eight young people in that age group. Globally the figure is one in five, or over a quarter of a billion young people.
Young people are coming of age in a perfect storm: weak wage growth after the 2008 financial crash, Covid’s disruption to education and work, and surging living costs. In many developing countries too few secure jobs and debt repayments squeezing public services deepen the pressure. These forces compound: high rents prevent saving, insecure work delays independence, and overstretched services push more pressure and costs onto families.
Climate change and the destruction of natural ecosystems is tightening that constraint. The price of essentials like food depends on functioning soils, water cycles, pollinators, and a sufficiently stable climate. Degrade those systems and the consequences add pressure to the household budget. The European Central Bank estimates that Europe’s extreme heat and drought in 2026 could add between 0.3 and 0.8 percentage points to food inflation in the euro area over the following year. Food prices are already around 30% higher than at the end of 2021.
A society that cannot offer young people a fair chance to build a life is failing a basic moral test. It is also weakening the foundations of its economy. Business depends on people being able to move for work, establish households, and take risks. Making those choices unaffordable limits the talent employers can reach, the markets they can grow, and the new enterprises on which future prosperity depends. The deeper damage is to the system’s legitimacy. When hard work no longer offers a route to security, the promise of progress loses credibility among the generation expected to deliver it.
Business decisions help to shape these outcomes, giving leaders both the power and the responsibility to improve them. Net Positive companies thrive by giving more than they take and strengthening the people and systems they depend on. Investing in the next generation’s skills, security, and confidence is fundamental to future success.
At Unilever, we knew that being a responsible employer had to go beyond paying decent wages and our fair share of tax. We wanted to inspire everyone who worked for us, and especially young people, through a purpose they could believe in and values that showed we served society as well as shareholders. From 2009, we made improving health, livelihoods, and environmental performance central to our ambition for the business. By 2014, LinkedIn ranked us its third most in-demand employer, behind only Apple and Google.
That responsibility becomes especially important as AI changes how young people enter working life. AI could put capabilities once reserved for a privileged few into millions of hands. But if employers automate the work through which beginners gain experience, greater access to technology may come with fewer routes into a career.
Professional expertise develops through sustained involvement in complex work, collaboration, and seeing how decisions play out over time. Learning works both ways: experienced colleagues offer knowledge built over years, while newcomers bring new ideas and perspectives that challenge established assumptions.
At any career stage, faster answers do not automatically mean deeper understanding or better results. As companies automate tasks, they must redesign entry-level roles to provide substantive work, useful feedback, and an exchange of ideas that benefits the whole business. We cannot demand talented and experienced people while collectively removing the opportunities that create them.
Restoring the link between hard work and a fair chance of a secure, independent life requires commitments from business:
1. Make work a route to independence. Provide decent pay, predictable hours and paid parental leave, and extend those standards to contractors and suppliers.
2. Invest in people starting out. Make paid apprenticeships accessible to those without connections or prestigious degrees, and give managers the time and recognition to teach well.
3. Share the gains from AI. Involve employees in how their work changes, provide tools and paid learning time, and judge AI investments by the expertise, career opportunities and quality of jobs they create alongside the costs they save.
4. Give young people more influence. Bring young employees into decisions on products, workplaces and strategy, and show what changes as a result of their contributions.
5. Don’t forget the basics. Pay tax responsibly and ensure your lobbying and partnerships support education, affordable housing and childcare, clean infrastructure, and environmental protection.
The next generation will judge our claims of progress through the lives they can lead and the world they inherit. Business cannot sustain its own future if young people cannot build theirs.
Paul Polman
