Summer used to be time for teens to get a part-time job, earn a few bucks and pile up some work experience. Now cultural and economic shifts are making that tradition a thing of the past.
America’s teenagers “face a bleak job outlook heading into summer,” said Yahoo Finance. Rising oil prices, automation and artificial intelligence are all part of the problem. Work is simply more difficult to find for teens. But today’s young people are also increasingly turning to “club sports, extracurriculars, college prep and even content creation” as an alternative to lifeguarding at the local pool or flipping burgers at fast-food restaurants.
If a young person “can only work one day a month” because of their extracurricular commitments “there’s no point in really hiring them,” Jesse Lauritsen of Washington D.C.’s Zeke’s Coffee said to NPR. That could be a problem as those teens get older and move into the full-time workforce. Employers tend to look for signals that new workers are “ready to go and they have what it takes,” ZipRecruiter’s Nicole Bachaud said to Yahoo. But without a summer job, they are not getting that experience.
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“Youths aren’t bothering to get summer jobs,” Stephen Moore said at The Washington Times. Working a low-paying seasonal gig can teach vital lessons in how to “show up for work on time, be nice to the foreman and do a little extra to get noticed.” Yet federal data suggests about a third of teens are seeking summer work, down from 50% in earlier decades. That is “deeply troubling” because studies indicate that the “earlier one begins working, the more successful they are likely to be later in life.” One solution would be to create a lower teen minimum wage of $5 or $6 an hour to “incentivize employers to hire them for starter jobs.”
Teens have “found better opportunities” than taking summer work, Roland Fryer said at The Wall Street Journal. It is true that summer hiring projections are the “weakest since the government began counting in 1948.” But the “classic” teen summer gig has been “disappearing for nearly half a century” for good reason. Time “spent folding shirts at the Gap” is less valuable than building a college resume, with a “lifetime payoff” that is “significantly larger.” U.S. teenagers are not being turned away from summer jobs. “They stopped wanting them.”
What next?
The issue has taken on political dimensions. Oklahoma voters will soon decide a referendum to gradually raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. Doing so could “make things even worse by pricing many teenagers out of the market,” Ray Carter said at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. But a higher minimum wage could provide stability that is the “difference between staying in school and dropping out” for lower-income young workers, Jill Mencke said at the Oklahoma Policy Institute. The referendum is Tuesday.
