Teen job market is red-hot
As employers struggle to fill positions, plenty of summer work available for young folks
WASHINGTON — Talk to employers in America’s vast hospitality sector — hotels, restaurants, public pools, ice cream parlors, pick-your-own strawberry farms — and you’ll hear a similar lament. They can’t fill many of their summer jobs because the number of open positions far exceeds the number of people willing and able to fill them — even at increased wages.
Some help may be coming: The end of school for the summer is cutting loose millions of high school and college students for the next three months.
Teens — at least those who want a job — are in an unusually commanding position. Researchers at Drexel University’s Center for Labor Markets and Policy predicted last month that an average of 33% of youths ages 16 to 19 will be employed each month from June through August this year, the highest such rate since 2007.
And employers might get more help. After restricting immigration as a COVID19 precaution, the government is beginning to loosen up: The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has raised the limit on H-2B temporary work permits — used for seasonal work — by 35,000 visas.
Cape Resorts, which operates several boutique hotels, cottages and restaurants in New Jersey and New York, will employ about 120 international students this summer on J-1 visas, work permits that also serve as a kind of cultural exchange program. The company employs about 950 staffers.
“It is great to see the return of our international students as well as returning college students for the summer season,” said Cindy D’Aoust, a company executive.
Still, today’s level of teen employment isn’t close to what it used to be. In August 1978, 50% of America’s teenagers were working. Around 2000, teenage employment went into a decadelong slide. In June 2010, during the recovery from the Great Recession, teenage employment bottomed at 25%.
It was more than economic doldrums that kept teens away from work. Longerterm economic forces and changing personal choices contributed too. The U.S. economy now offers fewer low-skill, entrylevel jobs than in the 1970s and 1980s. Many such jobs that do remain, from supermarket clerk to fast-food burger flipper, are more likely to be taken by older workers, many of them immigrants.
And many teens from affluent families, eyeing admission to top universities, have chosen to forgo summer jobs for summer school or volunteer work that bears mention on college applications.
The U.S. unemployment rate is at 3.6%, just above a half-century low. This week, the government reported that employers posted 11.4 million job openings in April. On average, there are now roughly two jobs available for every unemployed American.
Suddenly, teenagers are in much greater demand. And the pay available to them — $15 or $16 an hour for entry-level work — is drawing some back into the job market. Teenage employment has already topped pre-pandemic levels even though the overall job market still hasn’t.
For teens who want to work and have their choice of jobs, economists and other analysts welcome the reversal in fortune. Summertime jobs give young people experience and make it more likely they will work later in life, the Drexel researchers say — good news for a U.S. labor force that is losing the vast baby boom generation to retirement.