Summer Jobs for Teens: Yet Another Archaic Practice
[guest post by JVW]
Those of us of a certain age on this site probably have memories of our teenage summers spent working at minimum wage jobs, a tradition designed to expose us to life in the working world as well as provide us with some spending money and/or some savings for college. (I knew schoolmates too, of course, who worked to help make ends meet for their families, but they typically had year-round after school jobs and perhaps were able to pick up extra hours in the summer.) According to a piece on government radio, summer jobs are now joining obtaining a driver’s license and going on dates as coming-of-age milestones less and less known to the latest generation:
Pedraam Faridjoo of Kensington, Md., is spending his summer volunteering and traveling. Ryan Abshire from Carmel, Ind., is using the time to be with his family. Meme Etheridge of St. Simons Island, Ga., is attending a music camp where she plays percussion.
What do they all have in common? They’re teenagers, and they are not working summer jobs.
A summer job, like lifeguarding or scooping ice cream, used to be a rite of passage for teens. Thirty years ago, nearly two-thirds of U.S. teenagers worked summer jobs. Twenty years ago, more than half of them did.
Now, only a third of teens are in summer jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The article goes on to list some possible reasons for the decline in teen employment. They range from the plausible (the recession and glut of college graduates looking for jobs has forced credentialed people to take jobs that used to be filled by teens) to the dubious (teens are choosing to study or take unpaid internships over the summer) to the aggravating (teens express a preference for hanging out with family and friends or playing video games over work).
I can understand and sympathize with the idea that teen jobs are harder to come by. The sort of jobs available when I was that age were at fast food restaurants, movie theaters, lawn care, city parks, and retail. Where I grew up, these jobs were either largely seasonal (people in Colorado mowed their lawns mostly from mid-May through mid-September) or else, as in the case of fast food and retail, the summer months when everyone was out of school which was an especially busy time, necessitating the hiring of more employees. Here in Southern California, however, I note that lawn care is a year-round concern and as such is largely handled by immigrant workers, and in the age of online movie tickets and fast food ordering kiosks fewer employees are required to sell tickets and take orders.
Yet at the same time there is plenty of data suggesting that seasonal jobs go unfulfilled because teens are not entering the workforce. Lifeguarding, a job at which I spent two glorious summers, is suffering from a diminished pool (of course it’s a bad pun) of qualified applicants, as fewer teens are willing to take the lifesaving and water safety instructional courses necessary for certification, despite the fact that they have lowered age requirements since my day. Summer resorts are struggling to hire dining staff, desk workers, maids, babysitters, and the rest of the army of young, nimble, and eager recruits to take care of the grunt work. I was in Jackson Hole last summer for the eclipse, and I was amazed that all of the hotels in the area had brought in overseas students to staff the entry-level positions. Meanwhile, American teens work two afternoons per week at the dog rescue center, post pictures on Instagram, study for the ACT, and play the latest release of Call of Duty.
Feel free to reminisce on your summer employment back in the day, or tell us if teens in your community are any better or worse about seeking employment than the NPR article suggests.
– JVW
As I mentioned above, I had two great years lifeguarding at a public pool in my town. The pay was minimum wage my first year ($3.35/hour), then a slight raise my second year ($3.75/hour). The job entailed teaching three sessions of hour-long swimming lessons in the morning, then lifeguarding at open swim from noon to 6:00 pm. On weekends we had family swim from 9:00 to noon, which was so quiet and relaxed that it was a plum lifeguarding assignment, then the general mayhem when we opened to the public from noon to 6:00. Sometimes we were able to work private pool parties after closing hours, to supplement our paychecks just a little bit more. We were young and barely dressed, and the summer was a running soap opera of pool romances and trysts. It was glorious. The year I was 18 I became the assistant manager of a public pool, and it was the single worst job I’ve ever had because I had to deal directly with city bureaucracy.
JVW (86242b) — 8/1/2018 @ 12:27 pmThis is no good cause this is the age where people can learn something about the ethos of customer service, which can facilitate the development of an advantageous skill set!
On the other hand we’re entering a new era where we’re gonna have plenty of seniors looking for part-time work.
Plus robots.
It’s important to remember your brighter kids are either going to be the ones who do find work or are otherwise going to be just fine.
This trend mostly just hurts stupid kids who were probably going to fall through the cracks anyway and do opioid epidemic all up in it.
happyfeet (28a91b) — 8/1/2018 @ 12:37 pmI think it was around this time last year that Malia Obama wrapped up her internship under Harvey Weinstein.
Summer days drifting away but oh
happyfeet (28a91b) — 8/1/2018 @ 12:45 pmMy father owned a few businesses and we kids automatically worked there during the Summers, each according to abilities displayed. I started working at age 12 – “late” joked my siblings whenever I griped about it. It seems they were born working. Anyway, I was thrilled to be called “sir” by everyone, including dad. Everything seemed so formal and organized. I saw my Father in a completely different light as I observed his command of strangers (to me) and the unquestioned directions they took.
I went from an allowance to a paycheck. From indifference and ignorance about money to complete contemplation of the properties and power of money. What a shame to lose the invaluable lessons that can be learned at the most opportune and impressionable time in one’s life. It wasn’t the work that I remember; it was the dignity of work.
felipe (023cc9) — 8/1/2018 @ 1:02 pmGreat comment, felipe. I probably gave short-shrift to the idea of work as providing a sense of self-worth and dignity to teenagers, because to people of our generation and political ideology that just seems so self-evident. But I think you are right that kids are missing out on the lessons of arriving on time, putting in effort, learning to cooperate with others, and understanding the true value of a paycheck. I loved the fact that my last two years of high school I had a bank account and could withdraw money for various things (though my parents were successful in prevailing upon me to keep most of it for college). I remember taking out $60 for homecoming my senior year to pay for dinner, dance tickets, and my date’s corsage. It seemed like a lot of money then, but I was proud that it was MY money and not something I had scrounged off of my parents.
JVW (86242b) — 8/1/2018 @ 1:15 pmHeh. Same exact thing with me.
This guy really did our yutes a service at the Teen Choice Awards.
felipe (023cc9) — 8/1/2018 @ 1:24 pmBabysitting, of course, which was really tough housework. Left that for a job in telemarketing, selling furnaces over the phone to people in the dog days of August! I called in sick two days because I was sick…of those phones slammed in my ear. Couldn’t understand why my boss got mad and fired me, lol.
Then my favorite summer job, waitressing. Nothing better than strolling home after a tough day with dollar bills rustling and change jingling in your pocket.
Patricia (3363ec) — 8/1/2018 @ 1:35 pmI also think a lot of kids don’t work because people have smaller families and are busy with activities to get them in a great college. In a way a better investment, but in the long run the lessons of doing scut work and being on the bottom of a totem pole are priceless.
Patricia (3363ec) — 8/1/2018 @ 1:37 pmI called in sick two days because I was sick…of those phones slammed in my ear. Couldn’t understand why my boss got mad and fired me, lol.
Yeah, but I’ll bet it toughened you up a great deal to become accustomed to having people rudely cut off your sales pitch. I love the idea of making people — especially those who are slightly introverted — have to learn how to sell. What a great life’s skill — and talk about character building!
JVW (86242b) — 8/1/2018 @ 1:40 pmAs an employer the number of applicants with either a college degree or who dropped out with no work experience was dishearting. It was also very evident in their work.
Showing up on time, dressing appropriately, working when on the clock are a few skills I expect of someone making 30k+ a year.
For their own benefit knowing how a bank account works, what taxes are and how to file, and how to take criticism and get fired would be very beneficial, all skills best learned by going through it.
Nate Ogden (223c65) — 8/1/2018 @ 1:57 pmThere’s also the fact that as the minimum wage goes up you are simply going to price more people out of the job market. I fully expect we are going to reach a point of fully automated fast food in the not-too-distant future, that the only worker will be the guy loading the hoppers and even that will eventually go away.
I recall seeing a piece (perhaps linked to from here) by a McDonalds exec talking about how many fewer employees each location takes than was the case even in the 80s. As I recall it was something like 40% of the staffing needed then.
Who is really interested in paying someone with zero work experience $15 an hour to clean tables, particularly if you have someone else available with even a modest employment history?
Soronel Haetir (86a46e) — 8/1/2018 @ 2:05 pmWho is really interested in paying someone with zero work experience $15 an hour to clean tables, particularly if you have someone else available with even a modest employment history?
Great point. I just checked the inflation calculator, and my $3.35 per hour wage in the late 80s would be about $7.50 per hour today. So instead of making $2,000 the summer I was 17 (I worked a hell of a lot of hours), I would be making over $4,400 these days. But if you swallow the garbage that the Sanders left is peddling and insist that I need to be paid $15/hour, I would be making close to $8,900. No way you could have a pool staff of lifeguards making that kind of dough. (By the way, my job as an assistant manager paid $800 per month for three months, or $2,400 total for the summer. That’s a bit over $5100 these days).
JVW (86242b) — 8/1/2018 @ 2:22 pmYou don’t think that the pool might have charged patrons a higher entry fee to account for the higher wage bill, JVW?
Leviticus (efada1) — 8/1/2018 @ 2:41 pmThe Summer before high school I started out as a 15 year old part-time bag boy at the local Colonial Store supermarket at 35 cents an hour plus tips.
Less than a month later I was promoted to full-time clerk in the Produce Department at $1.25 an hour, and cross trained in the Meat Department breaking beef, grinding hamburger, and cutting chickens.
It was a glorious Summer, I was on the day shift 7am to 4pm and had real money in my pocket – 10 or 20 times more than I ever made as a paper boy. Draft beer was 25 cents and for a 50 cent tip the hot waitress at The Purple Onion would pull up her skirt and shake her rear end.
A few guys had cars (regular gas was 29 cents a gallon) you could get a ’49 or ’50 Ford for $25 to $50 bucks that ran. Frank’s dad put a bar box pool table in his garage and the guys hung out there most evenings.
The beach was close by and the Amusement Park was open till midnight everynight, the fishing was always good, crime was petty or none existent. The night air was usually perfumed by the sweet smells from the nearby cantaloupe fields and from the intoxicating night blooming jasmine unless you were downwind of one of the many beer joints that featured steamed crabs, they stank of stale beer and vinegar.
Those were great days, we thought they’d never end.
ropelight (9514ab) — 8/1/2018 @ 2:49 pmYou don’t think that the pool might have charged patrons a higher entry fee to account for the higher wage bill, JVW?
It was $1.50 for adults and $1.00 for children in the late 80s, or, roughly $3 and $2 today. We were a public pool in a community with lots of poverty, so I think we were probably charging about as much as was feasible. The middle and upper classes largely belonged to three different private clubs, each of which had a pool, or they would go swim out at our county reservoir which charged something like $3 per person (I can’t quite recall the exact amount). Since I left town 30 years ago, two of the five public pools have closed and the parks and rec department is now down to only three summer pools (two of the three private clubs have closed too). I very much doubt that my city could get patrons if they charged $4 or $5 per swim; that’s about what Southern California public pools charge.
JVW (30a532) — 8/1/2018 @ 3:00 pmWe also had “free day” every other Wednesday in the summer where people swam without having to buy a ticket. Man, what a s**t show that was. My pool had built in a giant water slide my first summer there, so on those free days we would be full to capacity and we had to bring in six extra lifeguards to have ten on duty at any given time rather than the usual six. During the second free day we must have had 400 people at our pool (probably twice the usual daily crowd), and so we started calling around the other pools (who also had free day on Wednesdays) to see what it was like there and being told that they only have 40 or 50 people at their pools.
JVW (30a532) — 8/1/2018 @ 3:08 pmI was in Jackson Hole last summer for the eclipse, and I was amazed that all of the hotels in the area had brought in overseas students to staff the entry-level positions. </em
No different from Mar-a-Lago H-2B visa hires. Doing jobs no American wants to.
Ripmurdock (8f0cf2) — 8/1/2018 @ 3:16 pmNo different from Mar-a-Lago H-2B visa hires. Doing jobs no American wants to.
Maybe, maybe not. Mar-a-Lago, like other Florida resorts is presumably a year-round operation and thus not all that practical for high school or college workers. A lot of these resorts I am referring to are summer only (lakefront places in the upper Midwest or beach towns out on Long Island and Cape Cod) or perhaps have both a summer season and a ski season but are otherwise closed from Labor Day to Thanksgiving and again from April 1 to Memorial Day (like the ones in the Teton Mountains).
Or was this just another attempt to get us talking about Trump on every single post here?
JVW (30a532) — 8/1/2018 @ 3:44 pmJVW, I sure did toughen up! They really don’t have any sympathy for me, I thought to myself.
//
Nice memories, ropelight. 🙂
Patricia (3363ec) — 8/1/2018 @ 9:44 pmProbably, it was an opportunity to develop a work ethic, some actual experience, now they go by theory,
Narciso (f64a5a) — 8/1/2018 @ 9:47 pmWeeding beans, detassling seed corn, bailing hay, shoveling hog, cattle and chicken schiff, mowing greens, raking traps, changing cups and my favorite job as a kid was running the fairway water hose ion the pocket gophers hole and shooting them with a 22 when they came out. 75cents per gopher and uncle George furnished the shells.
mg (9e54f8) — 8/2/2018 @ 12:21 amI mowed lawns to earn spending money during the summer in high school; one summer my buddy whose dad owned a paving company hired us to work as flagmen, but since I didn’t turn 16 and get a drivers license until the start of my senior year in HS, there were fairly limited opportunities for real jobs.
In college, the first summer I washed dishes in a hospital; the next I went to Elk City, Oklahoma with some friends and worked a bit in the oil patch, but steady work was hard to find that summer (my friends had made a ton of money the year before, when things were apparently booming). The next summer I was in graduate school and getting paid to do physics…
Dave (445e97) — 8/2/2018 @ 4:29 amThe summer before my junior year in high school I worked for a local construction contractor. We had to put a rather large ranch-style house on jackstands and replace the concrete foundation underneath it in Crawford Canyon in the OC. The next summer, I worked Park and Rec for city of Anaheim… I drove a van and kept all of the locations stocked with candy and snacks during the week. On Friday and Saturday afternoon and evenings, me and another guy ran the Concert Under the Stars at the old Pearson Park amphitheater. We’d set up 750 folding chairs, work the sound and lights, and then tear down what we set up each night. I remember listening to the moon landing on the radio during one of those days.
During college, I got a job delivering and recovering pool tables for a small manufacturer, Sports 100, in Orange, Ca. I worked my way up to the service manager, still delivering and recovering, and did that thru college. 20 hour days, between school and work, making a salary of $575 per month.
Drove a GTO, didn’t need no government loan.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/2/2018 @ 5:15 amDrove a GTO, didn’t need no government loan.
Wear a uniform?
JVW (30a532) — 8/2/2018 @ 6:26 amNope, lol. But have a few friends and cousins who did.
Iggy Pop… waste of space or National Treasure?
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/2/2018 @ 6:43 amI’ll forever remember when a friend of mine came over, when we were just teenagers, and picked me up in his brother’s GTO that had a beefy rebuilt engine in it. He let me drive it and it was just amazing. ‘Loved its look and all that power.
Tillman (d34303) — 8/2/2018 @ 7:36 amDuring some of my high school summers, I worked with 2 of my aunts at an FW Woolworths (a “five and dime store”, probably the precursor to today’s dollar stores). I was a cashier – this was back in the day when the cash register had a row of typewriter-like keys, so to register a sale, I’d press a key for the pennies, dimes, dollars, and tens of dollars the items cost! I don’t remember my exact wage (too many years ago!) but I remember taking home $65 a week. I used my first paycheck to buy my first adult possession, a sterling silver watch on a chain. And I still have that watch.
Pat* (950457) — 8/2/2018 @ 7:58 amAt 16 y/o I got my driver’s license and a job at the neighborhood Flying A station. During school it was Friday nights and weekends; summer provided more hours. $1.35/hour. But much better than the $1/hr at the veterinarian (a truly s***tty job). I pumped gas, washed windshields, checked oil and scrubbed out the lube bay. I learned hustle, yessir, no sir, more hustle, and being on time in my Flying A uniform (I wish I had kept one of those shirts when they got purchased by Phillips).
HS graduation summer spent installing lawn sprinklers (I saw what Dad was taking about when he admonished me for questionable grades by predicting a life of digging ditches), but the boss was good about explaining the design concepts and he taught me to solder copper pipe.
Later summers were spent at ready-mix plants and shipyards, the latter becoming a fill in waiting for Uncle Sam to decide on my fate… and where I moved from yard-helper to assembly crew and when they discovered I could read blueprints I was taught to weld and became a shipfitter.
Not a one of these jobs paid what JVW got as a lifeguard, not even the union jobs at the shipyard, but it was am earlier era. For the following 50-odd years I have used every one of the skills learned at these jobs in my daily life. Looking back I would not trade any of them for what occupies teen’s time these days.
Gramps (85597f) — 8/2/2018 @ 10:50 amIn my high school/college summers, I
-bagged groceries and mopped floors at Food Lion. My first job, straight minimum wage which was then $4.25
radar (177444) — 8/2/2018 @ 12:59 pm-stocked produce at Winn-Dixie. Ate my share of mangos and strawberries
-worked at a country club, cleaning and maintaining golf carts and driving the range cart (you know, the one that everyone on the driving range aims for). This one was the best because you could get some sweet tips setting up carts during tournaments. Also was a source of free beer as golfers sometimes left a unopened can or two. An important perk when you’re 19.
-worked the counter at a bagel shop. The boss let us have free bagel sandwiches for lunch, which was awesome until we found out later on that he was withholding taxes from our paychecks but not actually paying the taxes. Ended up going on the lam.
-worked for a small law firm as a courier, which was pretty sweet because they paid me 32 cents per mile on top of the $7 an hour. Also handled their mail for them, filed updates to their law library, did all the shredding, and did the firm’s banking. They primarily handled estates and trusts, some of which were big money. Being 20 years old and having envelopes with checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars was a weird feeling, although not as nerve-wracking as the time the senior partner had me pick up his Jaguar at the shop for him.
For more information read this article :
https://www.goodtoseo.com/eclipse-2018-when-is-the-next-total-solar-eclipse-in-the-usa-science-news/
GOOD TO SEO (717ff6) — 8/7/2018 @ 2:41 pm