A summer bummer: the teen job market

With unemployment up, adults are encroaching on typical teen job territory

By Peter Korn And Anthony Roberts

The Clackamas Review, Jul 7, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Clackamas senior Lauren Dey outside of Clackamas Town Center, one of the spots she scoured for a summer job.

anthony roberts / clackamas review

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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.

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