Lauren Bauer and others write,
The teen labor force participation rate reached an all-time peak in 1979 (57.9 percent) and gradually declined until about 2000, when it then dropped precipitously to a 2010–18 plateau of about 35 percent (figure 1). While the participation rate of prime-age workers (25- to 54-year-olds) has edged down since its peak in the late 1990s and older workers’ (55- to 64-year-olds) participation has increased, the scale of the shift in teen participation dwarfs these other changes.
One of the factors reducing teen labor force participation is that high schoolers have less time for work. Included in the list of time impositions is my pet peeve: the requirement for “community service hours.” My line is that community service is for convicted criminals, but high school students are innocent.
I would like to see more young people gaining experience in working for a profit. “Community service” does the opposite.
Ha Ha Ha…
At the heart of this of this change is more High School students are building college resumes not necessarily any love of community service. (Kids are taking Geometry and SAT classes while using community service for college applications not serving hamburgers here.) And judging by the modern economy competitive, do you blame them here? Again, the conservative asking for more vocational and blue collar work without offering any real change in benefits to this choice is not going to change young people here.
Actually, I did have 17 year do a part time job and I believe it does teach one very important message to young people going to college.
The job teaches how terrible people are treated in low wage jobs and teaches ambitions.
A job gives a sense of independence as you are making your own money. It also reinforces conscientiousness, punctuality and responsibility to keep the positive reinforcement of receiving pay going. Kids also learn the reality of life and how to identify bad people to work for and how to make a change.
Community service teaches kids that they should work for the approval of the local commissar who runs their cooperative. As well as, appearing to work, in front of important people or photographers, is more important than actual accomplishment.
Really? I had a handful of those kinds of jobs in my younger days (bagging groceries, stocking shelves flipping burgers, making pizza, etc). I wouldn’t say I was treated poorly at any of them. The main problem I found with these low wage jobs was (surprise!) that they didn’t pay very well.
Honestly, I am trolling here a bit and I did tell my 17 year old a usual it teaches responsibility, dealing with customers, working honest day work, and value of owning your money to spend things want and need.
And I was treated fine at 17 but it better way of thinking about it is:
1) It does teach ambition because these jobs don’t pay well and it makes sense to focus on school and career.
2) I did see the real struggles of people, who working as shift supervisors, that did have these jobs as a career.
The HS actually make them a graduation requirement for the advanced diploma, that is the complaint here.
Our HS has not done that and I don’t agree here.
However, I think the reality is 80% of moving from flipping burgers to community service at the animal shelter is High School students are building college applications.
1. Cars. In the same period, the percentage of American 16-year-olds with driver’s licenses fell from 46% to 25%.
Hmm, looks suspiciously like 58% to 35%.
Perhaps many teens used to work to buy cars, gas, etc.
2. Contributor: disappearance of newspaper delivery boys.
Nothing lights the fire of ambition like exposure to the bottom rungs of the labor ladder. Middle class kids see what kind of adult characters wind up in these jobs, and it instills a lifelong fear of poverty. Certainly did in my case.
Immigrants, often adult immigrants over the age of 25 or 30, do the jobs that teenagers used to do in many parts of the country.
You could actually test this using county level data. The causal mechanism would still not be clear, but you could look for correlations of “immigrant pop goes up” and “teenage labor force participation rate goes down” over time, where immigrants do the jobs that high schoolers used to do.
This particular insight (above) has probably been made hundreds of times. In my case, it was shared to an economic geography seminar at the University of Iowa by Professor Andrew Isserman (RIP). It was a while ago–probably 1993.
He had flown into Eastern Iowa from someplace more coastal (probably the East Coast) and was discussing a newly released research product he was involved with that largely worked with county level data.
One of the first sentences out of his mouth was along the lines of “I can tell I’m in the part of the country where high school and college kids still do the sorts of jobs that immigrants do other places!” (He was probably thinking about California, Maryland, etc).
http://www.aag.org/cs/membership/tributes_memorials/gl/isserman_andrew
I believe it was in the linked “EconTalk” episode below where Russ spoke to a small organic farmer and the guest described a challenge she had with employing teenagers.
She said that was the first time in their life doing something for the benefit of someone else and that was a big change in mindset for them. Up to that point, all their activities were for their own benefit.
She had to explain to them the reason she paid them (to get value for her money) and it wasn’t just so they could get money. Or something like that. I can’t believe the episode is from 2012 and I remembered it.
https://www.econtalk.org/lisa-turner-on-organic-farming/
Perhaps, kids work less nowadays because society as a whole is wealthier than in the past? The alternatives to work: spending more time in school (as the article’s author suggests), community service, leisure. Those are all things that wealthier kids can afford to do compared to poorer kids that need to work to earn money. Isn’t it true that in the cross-section of countries, it’s the poorer countries in which teens and children start working sooner?
I utterly loathe the community service rquirement, but it has nothing to do with teen employment which is, as Charles mentions, linked almost entirely to the presence of immigrant adults.
Child labor laws are also a factor. I worked at a bowling alley starting at age 14. That is now illegal in the same state. Now you can’t hire a regular employee until age 16. My daughter is an outlier. My business used to be directly above a bookstore. She used to go there at age 15 waiting for me and sit in the window seat and read. Her presence brought people into the store. The owner hired her as a sort of trainee at 15 and as a part time employee at 16. She’s now 24 and has eight years of continuous work experience, a bachelor’s degree in business management from a community college, no educational debt, and a job in a financial management firm. I wonder how much of this would have happened if she had not landed that early job.