We saw this article on the WLOX TV website for Biloxi, Mississippi. The article orginated from the Christian Science Monitor and deals with that old perennial teenage summer employment.
Special from CSMonitor.com
Summer Job Forecast: Cloudy
By Matt Bradley | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
Jasmine Blocker has reached an impasse in her job hunt. After weeks of pounding the pavement, the 19-year-old Chicago native still hasn’t found employment for the summer, and her applications have gone unanswered. Without a job, and with a child of her own to take care of, Ms. Blocker is growing frustrated.
“Now that I’m at my wit’s end, I’m looking for any job. Restaurant, retail, anything. I think that’s what it is – a lack of experience,” she says. “Maybe people have had one or two jobs, but I’ve only had one.”
Blocker is mired in one of the more common pitfalls faced by the millions of teenagers searching for jobs each summer: the Catch-22 of employment experience. Companies are reluctant to hire teens with little or no work history. But without a job to prove themselves, young people lack the experience necessary to jump-start a career.
Seasonal job applicants have always faced this chicken-and-egg challenge, and this year may offer little relief from that cycle. According to labor analysts, the job market for young people this summer will be nearly as austere as over the past several years, despite an upswing in employment numbers in the overall labor market.
“The last few summers saw some of the lowest teen employment rates in history,” says Joseph McLaughlin, a research associate at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University and one of the authors of an annual summer teen job-market report. They predict an employment rate of 37.4 percent for the summer of 2006 – marking only a slight improvement over last year’s 36.8 percent.
The continuing job stagnation for teens comes at a time when their priorities seem to be shifting. Nearly 36 percent of teens cited a need to save money for college as the top reason for working this summer, according to the annual Junior Achievement Interprise Poll of nearly 1,500 teens published in May. Until this year, most teens had listed a need for spending money as their primary reason for seeking work.
“They’re kind of seeing a more purposeful need to work,” says Darrell Luzzo, senior vice president of education for JA Worldwide in Colorado Springs, Colo. “They know that because of the high cost of tuition and fees … their parents will be reluctant to offer spending money,” he says.
The prolonged lull in the summer labor market this decade is a surprise. During the decades after World War II, teenage employment followed a fairly consistent pattern. Teen hiring prospects rode on the outside of America’s cyclical employment curve. During recessions, older workers would settle for the lower-skilled jobs normally awarded to teens and less- experienced applicants. “It wasn’t surprising that [teens] were hit so hard by [the recession of] 2001,” Mr. McLaughlin says. “What was surprising is that their recovery has been very slow.”
The article goes on to give teens helpful tips in finding and securiing jobs. There is mention of a website www.teens4 hire.org that posts jobs and tips for teens looking for work.
The article claims it is the increase in the teenage population that is responsible for teens having difficulty in find a summer job. What we found most curious is that there is no mention of outsourcing where at least some of the jobs have been shipped off to foreign countries. Even the purveyors of the oft quoted quip , “You want fries with that?” have been downscaled at least now that most orders are processed through a phone bank from anywhere but here.
More than the actual and sad reality of a teenager being less able to make his spending money, yet alone save for college, perhaps we are denying our youth and even greater lesson. We are denying them an ability to experience the work ethic at a formative age. Clearly, not working too often leads to too much idle time for kids, which can translate into drugs, foolishness, apathy and trouble. it is a bad precendent to create an environment where a teenager is denied the ability to measure his worth in even the limited market place. He is not only denied the measurement of his own value, but the ability to learn how to work well with others. Even in the most menial jobs, there are myriad skills a young person will polish. If nothing else, he or she will learn better communications skills and the best approach to dealing with the public.
It is a shame, really, that we are curtailing the growth of our own teens. It is also one more place where we are actually short changing ourselves in quest of a more attractive bottom line. But then what is the true bottom line? A few dollars or a more accountable and competent work force?
Since Corra specializes in pre-employment background checks, it is always nice to know that we will enjoy a large and vital emerging work force in the years to come. We would hope that our nation’s youth wouldn’t have to crawl its way into our more basic jobs. There is, after all, a certain rite of passage for a young person to be serving sandwhiches or working in a retail shop. Or starting his own software company. (just kidding.) But we don’t kid about the rite of passage and the sense of responsibility that come with it.
It would be a shame that in the name of greed that is far too often disguised as expediency we nullify our youths’ introcution into the workforce. This, too, will have evident fall out. Kids will remain dependent on their parents for spending money. They will not be able to save for school. And their parents, already strapped for cash, will be forced to dig even deeper or go further into debt in order to shell out allowance and to put their kids through college.
So, as with many other things, there are more than the simple ramifications associated with outsourcing. There are certain complexities enveloping the issue. There are always other things to consider. To create a system that essentially deprives our kids from finding work can lead to consequences we in our short sightedness cannot imagine.
