The Ninja Generation — Young Workers Still Suffering Economically
It is not an easy time to be a young person in America. This blog has written before about the struggles Millenials, or as they are other wise called the “Ninja” Generation (No Income, No Job or Assets), face in the current job market. Young people graduating high school or college and eager to enter the workforce (or simply struggling to support themselves) are left with few options. There is the finance major who has been unemployed for two years. Or the factory worker who was the last one hired and the first one fired when his company cut shifts.
A report released last month by the Joint Economic Committee confirms these personal stories with startling numbers. From The American Reporter,
one in five workers between the ages of 16 and 24 was unemployed in April. The current youth unemployment rate of 19.6 percent is the highest for the age group since the government began tracking the data in 1947, the JEC said.
Although 16- to 24-year-olds make up 13 percent of the labor force, they represent 26 percent of the unemployed, according to the JEC report; 16- to 17-year-olds have it even worse, with a 29-percent unemployment rate. Since the current recession began more than two years ago, young people between 16 and 25 have lost more than 2.5 million jobs, making them the hardest-hit age group.
In short, if you’re under 30, you’re more likely to be out of work. You’ll now find yourself competing against people twice your age with college degrees and decades of experience for entry-level positions. If you found a job before the recession got really bad, you’re more likely to be the first one laid off. And, if the current “jobless recovery” continues for the next couple of years, the 80 million people under the age of 30 will have a hard time making up lost income and job experience.
The numbers get even grimmer when you focus specifically on teenagers and take out the fresh-out-of-college crowd. Time reports:
Teens now make up just 3.2% of the nation’s working population, down from a high of nearly 9% in the mid-1970s. In all, 4.5 million teens have some form of employment, about half the 8.2 million who were employed three decades ago. Carlton Tucker, a store manager at Best Buy in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, recently told a group of teens at a nearby job-training program that it was unlikely they would land positions at his store — because they are up against much more experienced workers. “We have a lot of people filling out applications who used to make $20 an hour and work in an office,” says Tucker. “I try to have a mix, but it is a much harder choice to make these days to hire that teen.”
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Sum estimates there are 4.2 million teens who can’t find a job, have stopped trying or would like to be working more than they are. That’s up 84% from 2007. A job used to be a rite of passage for a teen and, anecdotally at least, a first step to a successful career. Ross Perot, Warren Buffett and Walt Disney had newspaper routes. As recently as 15 years ago, nearly 60% of all newspaper carriers in the U.S. were teens. These days, that figure is less than 20%. Across the country, only 17 out of every 100 high school students have jobs. For African-American high schoolers, it is a mere 9 out of 100. For students who are both African American and from a low-income family, the number drops to 4 out of 100.
For teenagers, this means less money for personal spending, to contribute to the family, or even to save for college. Again from The American Reporter,
Young people are told to go to college if they want make something of themselves, yet tuition rates for four-year public universities have more than doubled since 1980, while financial aid has dwindled. As a result, nearly two-thirds of students graduating from four-year colleges in 2008 left school in debt.
Both reports stress how unemployment early in life can have detrimental effects on the individual, leading especially to a lower earning potential over a lifetime. From Time,
One reason to worry is that the timing of your first job often influences your future earning power. This summer, Yale economist Lisa Kahn completed a study that found that even 15 years after they entered the workforce, college graduates who first went to work in a weak economy (in her study, the early 1980s) tended to have lower incomes than those who entered the workforce when the economy was expanding. That could be explained by the normal salary arc of a professional life: one paycheck builds on another.
But the persistent lower pay suggests that workers who stumble getting their first job remain somewhat lower-skilled even decades later. Growing teen unemployment — a problem that started before the recession and has been exacerbated by it — could lead to an American workforce that lacks the skills to compete with the rest of the world. “If we lose a generation of workers, there is no way this economy is going to stay competitive,” says Joseph Walsh, director of the District of Columbia’s Department of Employment Services (DOES), which recently launched a new year-round youth-employment program. “This is an immediate crisis.”
This is a huge problem which is not receiving needed attention in the economic dialogue. Unless something is done, it has the power to seriously cripple the country in the long run.
Tags: unemployment, young workers
