Bagging a job gets fiendish for teens

By Tammy Joyner and Gertha Coffee

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Statistically speaking, Matthew Cannon has made a liar out of the oddsmakers.

In what has been deemed the worst job market for teenagers ever, the 16-year-old Lovejoy High School student recently landed a job at a grocery store. It took several months, but he got it after showing up regularly to ask the customer service manager about opportunities.

“I guess I wore her down,” Cannon joked recently while helping a customer with her groceries.

By all accounts, Cannon’s $7.25-an-hour job at the Publix in Lovejoy is nothing short of miraculous, considering just one in four American teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19 is working right now. That’s the lowest level of young adult workers since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking them in 1948.

And the nearly 6 million young people who are in the U.S. work force these days are facing many challenges more daunting than those experienced by previous generations of teenagers:

● They are competing with — and losing jobs to — older, more seasoned workers.

● The extreme joblessness is not just a short-term issue. Experts say teenagers’ inability to get hired now could have long-term consequences for their working lives.

● Paychecks of many working teens are going to help with family finances rather than incidental expenses.

Teens in Georgia face the additional burden of trying to find a job in the worst state for job-hunting teenagers. Last summer, only 22 in 100 teenagers in Georgia were working, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. This summer could be worse.

“Kids in Georgia have really been beaten up beyond belief,” said center director Andrew Sum. Sum, who is also an economics professor at Northeastern, said the crippled economy plus a large influx of illegal immigrants have essentially shut Georgia teens out of the state’s job market.

Disappearing act

As of April, the unemployment rate among American teenagers — those 16 to 19 years old seeking work — was 23.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For black teens, it was 37.3 percent. Overall unemployment in the United States was 9.9 percent.

In addition, more than 1 million young people between 16 and 24 have bailed out of the U.S. work force since the start of the recession in December 2007. They’re not working, not looking for work, and not collecting unemployment.

College enrollment soared last year to its highest level since the federal government began tracking it in 1959. Some 70 percent of the 2.9 million high school graduates between the ages of 16 and 24 went to colleges and universities, according to U.S. Labor Department data from January through October 2009. But even that increase isn’t enough to account for many teen workers’ whereabouts.

The likelihood is that many young people are riding out the recession on their parents’ couches.

Regardless of where the young people have gone, since they aren’t in the job market, they are not earning unemployment insurance, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit research group that studies employment issues. “That’s just an additional burden on their families. ... The rug has been pulled out from under them, so they end up on their parents’ rugs.”

Squeezed out

A growing number of older workers are competing for available jobs. In fact, the only workers whose numbers have increased during this recession are those 60 and older.

Amusement park Six Flags Over Georgia filled 1,300 positions for its spring season and is looking for summer workers. Spokeswoman Kendell Kelton said job applicants have come out in droves this year, among them second-wage earners and retirees returning to work.

The same can be said for Publix. The supermarket chain says it has seen an increase in job applicants of all ages. And more current employees, the store says, are holding on to their jobs.

The Lovejoy Publix has hired only 10 people in the last year, half of whom were teenagers.

“We have been looking at more teenagers here recently” because they can work evenings and weekends, store manager Dennis Williamson said.

Likewise, Kansas City, Mo.-based AMC Theatres expects an onslaught of work applications this summer. Already, AMC has noticed “all age groups” applying for jobs, spokesman Justin Scott said. “It’s probably due to the recession.”

Teen bailout?

Michael Saltsman of the Washington-based Employment Policies Institute, which studies entry-level employment issues, believes the minimum wage hike during the past few years is a factor in the tough job market for teens.

“The unintended consequences of our legislators’ good intentions is an increase in the cost to hire and train entry-level or less-skilled employees like minority teens,” said Saltsman. As a result, Saltsman said, employers can either slash the number of low-wage jobs they offer or hire more experienced applicants.

“Minimum wage increases end up hurting the very people they were meant to help,” Saltsman said.

Georgia Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond takes issue with that view. “People who benefit from minimum wage increases outweigh any negative,” he said.

Joblessness led teens from around the country to descend on Washington recently to bring attention to the problem. Participants in the Youth Unemployment Rally carried rafts and life preservers to illustrate how their employment levels are sinking. They called for their own TARP-style bailout: a “Teen Age Relief Program.”

(Congress is considering legislation that would send $600 million to states to create summer jobs for teens. The House has already passed a version of the bill.)

It’s a problem likely to last long past this summer. The joblessness created by the recession could have a “significant scarring effect” on young people’s future earnings, the Economic Policy Institute said in a recent report on teen workers. The downturn is robbing this generation of teenagers of a major rite of passage: summer jobs that serve as springboards to fruitful careers.

First jobs serve as a critical juncture in young people’s lives, teaching skills, discipline and other traits. Research shows the work experience teenagers get in their last two years of high school are strong influences on what their employment and earnings will be later on.

Shierholz notes that the job market for young people essentially collapsed during the past decade and no significant improvement is expected until the middle of this decade. By then, many of today’s teenagers and young adults who should be well ensconced in the work world won’t be.

“It’s a huge expanse” of potential working time that will be lost, she said.

Mortgage vs. mall

In some ways, the teens’ dilemma mirrors that of adults. Construction, transportation and other industries known for hiring teenage boys have been hard-hit in this recession. Teen girls, meanwhile, are finding jobs in health care and education, fields that have continued hiring and are seen as the saving grace of this recession.

At the same time, more teenage workers are being saddled with grown-up responsibilities. Median family income in the United States has fallen to its lowest level since 1997 — to $50,303 (in 2008, the latest available data). As a result, many teenagers are working to help pay family bills.

Linda Johnson, assistant commissioner for career development services for the Georgia Department of Labor, has worked with teens for more than three decades. She oversaw the Labor Department’s Summer Training Employment Program Unlimited Potential, or Step-Up, which put 10,000 Georgia youths to work last summer.

This summer, the agency will team with the Georgia Department of Human Services for a program that starts June 1 and runs through Aug. 13, aimed at putting some 10,000 teens, 14 years old to 18 years old, to work.

Johnson said she has begun seeing a trend among working teenagers that sets them apart from earlier generations.

Instead of movies and mall outings, “Many young people told us they paid the light bill. They paid the rent. They helped siblings buy school clothes,” Johnson said. “I heard more young people last year speak of their ability to help their mothers buy the groceries.”

While sobering, she said, the development is also “encouraging and refreshing.”

“The fact that young people were recognizing the value of their money to the household was amazing.”

Staff writer Gracie Bonds Staples contributed to this report.