A summer bummer: the teen job market
With unemployment up, adults are encroaching on typical teen job territory
Clackamas senior Lauren Dey outside of Clackamas Town Center, one of the spots she scoured for a summer job.
anthony roberts / clackamas review
Lauren Dey was planning on having a busy summer at a new job before entering her senior year at Clackamas High School.
The Happy Valley 17-year-old has indeed been busy, but in a different way than she’d hoped. Dey spent the better part of the late spring and early summer canvassing the North Clackamas area searching and applying for jobs, only to be turned away by dozens of potential employers.
“I’ve applied at tons of places,” Dey said. “It’s frustrating … I had a group interview where there were 26 people. It took two and a half hours and everyone got to speak a few times.”
Dey’s story is all too common this summer, as a tightening job market has pushed some adults into jobs normally reserved for high school and college students. And it comes at a terrible time for teens trying to save for college. Dey said the college fund her parents set up for her shrunk as the stock market plunged.
“Also my parents are starting to make me pay for my own stuff, like gas and phone bills,” she said.
Fortunately for Dey, she was able to find a job as a nanny for a friend of the family. Not everyone has been so lucky.
“The labor market for kids has collapsed in the last nine months,” said Andrew Sum, the director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, Mass. “Oregon’s kids have really gotten whacked beyond belief.”
The recession means most businesses have fewer summer jobs available, Sum said. And data is showing that those seasonal jobs that remain are increasingly being taken by out-of-work adults.
Every summer, the Oregon Zoo hires about 150 summer employees, most part-time, to work in the zoo cafeteria, in security or in grounds maintenance. And every summer the zoo gets more applicants than the year before. In 2006, 1,678 people, most of them teens, applied for the jobs. Last year, 4,462 applied. This year, more than 7,000 have applied for the no-benefits, minimum-wage jobs.
But the growing number of people applying for summer zoo jobs isn’t what most startled zoo officials, who figured the Portland area’s high unemployment rate would have some effect. What zoo officials weren’t prepared for was having adult applicants outnumber kids this year by a ratio of 9-to-1.
As a result, most of the zoo’s summer jobs this year, some offering only about 10 hours of work a week, went to adults.
Laurie Baggio, owner of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, a local franchise hauler, said that in previous summers, he has hired as many as eight college students to haul junk for 15 to 20 hours a week. College students, he’s found, are ambitious, flexible about when they work and willing to do just about anything – including drumming up business by waving street corner signs.
In previous summers, Baggio said, he received about 10 job applications a month. This year, he has received two to three times as many applications, and most came from adults who had lost work and were trying to cobble together multiple part-time jobs. Baggio has about half as many summer jobs to hand out this year, and he likely will hire only one college student.
Companies that hire youths must obtain a certificate from the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. The number of companies obtaining the certificates has held fairly steady in recent years, according to Christine Hammond, administrator of the bureau’s Wage and Hour Division. But this year, Hammond said, the bureau has issued 13 percent fewer certificates than in the past. That tells her that fewer businesses are even considering hiring teens.
Immigrants, seniors filling traditional youth jobs
If there’s a traditional summer job for teens in Oregon, it’s berry picking. But Brooke Jackson-Winegardner, an economist with the Oregon Employment Department, said farmers are telling her that adult migrant workers have mostly taken those jobs. Jackson-Winegardner said that overall, Oregon and Portland teen employment has dropped about 25 percent since its peak in 1989.
Sum’s research backs up what the farmers are saying. Beyond the recession and Oregon’s second-highest-in-the -nation unemployment rate, Oregon teens suffer because of the state’s high number of recently arrived foreign immigrants.
Adult immigrants have begun to replace teens in many traditional summer jobs, Sum said, including landscaping, unskilled construction and at fast food restaurants. And those are jobs that traditionally were held in the summer by teenage boys. Many of the jobs that teen girls have gravitated to over the years – child care, nurse’s aid, camp counselor, clerical work– have not been eliminated at the same rate as the traditional jobs for boys.
Sum’s research shows that in states with low rates of immigrant populations, mostly in the Midwest, teens are still working at relatively high rates. But teenagers seeking summer jobs are being hammered by more than just newly arrived immigrants. Seniors also are putting the squeeze on them. States with large populations of senior citizens also correlate with lower teen employment, according to Sum. And Oregon’s senior population is significantly higher than the national average.
Nationally, seniors have taken between 800,000 and 900,000 jobs that used to employ teens, most in retail malls and fast food restaurants, according to Sum. Until recently, he points out, grocery store baggers and clerks were almost always teenagers. Now, un-retired seniors are just as common in those jobs.
The minimum wage is also a factor, Sum said. His charts correlate a rising minimum wage with lower teen employment. Oregon’s minimum wage – which, unlike some states, is tied to the consumer price index – rose 45 cents last year to $8.40 an hour.
“The evidence is pretty overwhelming that kids get beat up a lot from raising the minimum wage that fast and that high,” Sum said.
Teen unemployment can have dire effects
The statistics get even worse, Sum said, when you look at Oregon teens who are classified as “underutilized.”
According to Sum, 38 percent of all Oregon teens who want work are either unemployed, have given up looking for jobs or are working at part-time jobs even though they’d like full-time employment. That rate is among the worst in the nation, Sum said.
It’s also dangerous, Sum said, because teens who have stopped looking for work are an especially bad predictor for the future. “You find it harder to get back into the labor market when you withdraw,” he said.
Some preliminary research indicates that higher rates of unemployed youths, especially in cities, can lead to an increase in property crime. One Massachusetts Institute of Technology study correlated higher teen pregnancy rates with girls living in areas where there were fewer teen job opportunities.
Summer jobs represent more than a few months of work, Sum said. Typically, they lead to winter jobs. And overall teen employment correlates with employment later on.
“The more we work when we’re 16 or 17, the more we’ll work in our late teens and mid-20s. We’ll work more and earn more because of the work experiences we gathered,” Sum said.
All of which is good reason for Erika Halloran to be feeling lucky. The 16-year-old senior from Lake Oswego’s Lakeridge High School found a job two weeks ago at a local Burgerville. During the course of a month, she’d applied to a dozen different grocery stores, retail shops and fast food outlets. “Anything that was close to my house,” she said. “I couldn’t really afford to be picky.”
Halloran actually thought she had another job secured for the summer serving meals to children at a Portland Police Activities League sponsored camp. But money for that job came from federal stimulus funds targeted for disadvantaged teens.
Most of her friends, Halloran said, have not been so lucky and are still looking for summer jobs, or giving up. The minimum wage Burgerville job – 10 hours one week, 20 hours the next – is far from the full-time job she had once envisioned getting. But getting it has taught her a lesson. Halloran said she’s going to keep working at Burgerville right through the school year so she has the job secured for next summer.