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Loser
Location: who the fuck cares?
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Teenagers Facing Hard Competition for Summer Jobs
Teenagers Facing Hard Competition for Summer Jobs
By KATE ZERNIKE
July 13, 2003
New York Times
Quote:
BOSTON, July 13 — Teenagers are facing the worst summer job market in years, with the percentage of those holding summer jobs at its lowest in 55 years and the unemployment rate at its highest in a decade.
Governments have cut money that used to help put teenagers in jobs. Retail stores are increasingly favoring older sales clerks. And teenagers are suffering a kind of push-down effect of the bad economy: older workers are returning to the job market, the laid-off are settling for jobs they might once have thought beneath them and college students unable to find better work are hanging onto jobs that used to go to high school students, squeezing out the youngest workers.
It stands in cold contrast to the situation three summers ago, when teenagers were snubbing jobs cleaning parks in favor of air-conditioned clothing boutiques and offices, sometimes bouncing from one job to a better-paying one in the space of a season.
David Solomon, 18, ticks off a list of retail stores he has been badgering for a job. "I stay on CVS, I stay on Toys `R' Us, I stay on Timberland, I stay on the Gap," said David, who had come for help to a job center for teenagers in this city's Roxbury section. "It's not like I'm lying down, letting days go by. I'm actually trying to get a job. But they just say, `We'll call you.' I think they put my application in the garbage."
Here, in a city that has long prided itself on its youth jobs program, City Hall has cut the summer jobs budget from $8 million in 2000 to $3.3 million. Mayor Thomas M. Menino has started a fund-raising drive to help pay for the camp counselors the city usually provides to the Y.M.C.A.'s and the boys' and girls' clubs. The city had to eliminate its Gray Shirts program, which for years has employed about 1,500 14- and 15-year-olds to clean city parks and streets. As Tim McCarthy, the director of the Boston Youth Fund, said: "We're closing firehouses and laying off policemen. It's difficult to hire a kid when you've fired his father."
A private group that typically places upward of 5,000 teenagers with area companies this year said it could manage only 4,000. Big corporations like State Street Bank and Fleet have absorbed 1,400. About 2,600 are still waiting for jobs at smaller employers that have traditionally taken the program's teenagers. But many of those places — stores, restaurants, the concession stands at Fenway Park — say they do not have room.
"Last year there was some residual good will, even in a bad economy," said Chris Smith, a director at the program, run by the Boston Private Industry Council. "This year it's stone cold."
The unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds, at 19.3 percent nationwide in June, is rising particularly fast for black teenagers. But the trouble finding jobs hits across the country, and all demographics.
In Portland, Ore., teachers with years of experience took jobs as playground supervisors in city parks — positions that traditionally went to college students. Knott's, which runs amusement parks and a resort in Southern California, drew three times as many applicants as usual to its annual summer jobs fair in March, prompting the company to cancel the one it usually holds in April. Even last week, the parks got 500 applications. At Valleyfair, a summer amusement park 35 miles south of Minneapolis, 500 applicants, mostly high school students, showed up for an annual recruiting fair in mid-May — twice the usual number.
"We told them they didn't have to wait in line, they could just drop off the application, but they stood in line for two, three hours," said Amy Maikkula, the park marketing manager. "Generally we're not fully staffed until the end of July. This year we were done by early June. We've never been in a situation like this."
Since 2000, the employment rate for teenagers has dropped about 9 percentage points. "If you had a nine-point drop for adults, you'd call it a depression," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University here. If the pattern of the past three summers holds steady, July and August will not look any better.
Anita Yip, who just graduated from Boston Latin, the city's most prestigious public high school, has a scholarship to Wellesley College, but no summer job. Last year, her local Starbucks offered her a job, but she had a paid internship at a magazine. "Come back next year," Anita said the manager told her. When she did, the same manager said there were no openings. Last summer's internship was full, the one at the Museum of Science took only college students, and places at the mall said they were not hiring, Anita said.
Now, she has her heart set on a job at Winston's, an upscale florist where she saw a Help Wanted sign when she bought her prom date a boutonniere. Still, she has not heard back about her application.
"Every week I say, `I'm going to be working next week,' " Anita said. "This week I'm still saying the same thing."
Traditionally, most teenagers have found summer jobs in retail. But increasingly, retail stores, including big chains like Home Depot, are refusing to hire anyone under 18.
Renee Ward, president of an Internet job board called Teens4Hire.org, said most of the 1,300 retailers who have posted jobs in the past few years said they were not hiring teenagers under 18 this summer.
Some are pushing her to start Seniors4Hire: they are more experienced, often more reliable and willing to accept the same money.
This has made the squeeze particularly hard on younger teenagers.
In Fayetteville, N.C., Shari Dillard, 16, heard nothing about her applications to the stores at the mall, restaurants or telemarketers. She finally got her first interview last week, at a movie theater.
"I've been trying to prepare myself for what questions they might ask," she said. "The question I'm worried about is, Why do I want this job? The only reason I want the job is because I really want to start working."
In part, the low rate of teenagers with jobs simply reflects fewer teenagers entering the work force. The teenage participation rate dropped from 51 percent in June 1993 to 45 percent this June, and has generally declined since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records in 1948.
The bureau says the lower employment rate partly reflects more students staying in summer school.
But sometimes, students volunteer for summer school simply because they cannot find jobs — the choice Ricardo Santiago, a 17-year-old high school senior in Chicago, made after hearing "We'll call you" one too many times.
"You wear baggy clothes, they think you're a gang-banger," he said. "I cleaned up my appearance, I threw on some khakis and a nice shirt. I was hoping it would work, but they just tell me they're going to call me. I wait and I hear from nobody."
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I see this as a slap of reality to our youth who think they can get their dream job (let alone ANY job) with nothing but a high school degree. And they're also seeing how important appearance is for some of these jobs. No one cares what you look like as you pick up their garbage, but when you're in the service industry, looking like a gangster isn't cool.
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