No One is Hiring: Frustrated Teens Searching for Summer Jobs
· Telemundo McAllen (KTLM)
Jaelyn Chester will serve you at your table or restock your shelves. She will wash your dishes or clean your toilets. If only someone would give this 17-year-old a chance. "I’ve looked everywhere," says Chester, an honor student, high school basketball star, and aspiring engineer who has flooded her community with dozens of applications. "I’m not unemployed because I’m incompetent. I’m unemployed because no one is hiring." Summer jobs, a rite of passage for generations of American teens, are not so easy to come by. Federal data shows that nearly a third of young people aged 16 to 19 in the U.S. worked last summer, down from a peak of around 60% in the late 1970s. Pessimistic forecasts from experts combined with reports of frustrated and unemployed youth across the country create a seasonal outlook that is far from positive. "Opportunities for workers taking their first steps into the professional world have started to dwindle," notes Nicole Bachaud, an economist at ZipRecruiter, pointing out that teens are among the "most marginalized groups" in the labor market. Without a job, Chester worries her summer will be wasted. She wonders how she will fill her gas tank and what she will do if she wants to go to a concert. A trip to visit colleges in North Carolina with some friends would be doomed to cancellation. So her search continues. Chester keeps copies of her resume in the car and has memorized a 30-second pitch for when she decides to walk into a restaurant or store and try to speak with a manager. She and her friends help each other get ready when they go job hunting, swapping advice and professional-looking clothes from their closets. Positions that once sounded terrible, like washing dishes, don’t seem so bad anymore. "At this point," says the Lake Mary, Florida teen, "it would be hard to say no to anything." After analyzing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas found that the number of jobs secured by teens fell by 25% last summer compared to the previous year. The firm argues that inflation, oil prices, and caution in hiring will likely result in even fewer jobs this year, which would mark the lowest total of summer hiring for teens since the federal government began collecting that data in 1948.
AI summary · Source: Telemundo McAllen (KTLM) →
