The Teen Summer Job Is Back

The teen summer job was falling out of favor, until the funky economy of the past few years turned the trend around.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

“They Will Come”

Summer vacation: a time when many teens head to their gigs as camp counselors, cashiers, ice-cream scoopers, or—if they’re lucky, as I was one summer—pencil pushers in an air-conditioned local office.

The summer job is a chance for teens to make money, learn new skills (even if the learning is interspersed with heavy doses of drudgery), and stay busy in the months between school years. In the 1970s and ’80s, working at least part-time in the summer was the norm for  teenagers, but the teen job became much less popular in recent decades, especially after the Great Recession made employment harder to come by.

Now summer jobs are so back. Since the tight labor market of 2021 pushed entry-level wages up and left businesses with a tranche of openings to fill, more and more young adults have been clocking in. About 38 percent of 16-to-19-year-olds were either working or looking for work in May, according to federal data released earlier this month—rates that, until this year, hadn’t been seen since the summer of 2009. Teen labor-force participation has been up year-round in recent years but has tended to spike in the summer months.

Job prospects were bleak for teens (and many adults) in the summer of 2020. But in 2021, as a gusher of government checks, a.k.a. “stimmies,” flowed through the economy and the “Great Resignation” was in full swing, teen workers were suddenly in high demand. Many adults were quitting gigs to move to higher-paid ones or, having been laid off, were waiting to find a good job while flush unemployment checks supported them. Hospitality bosses, in particular, were desperate for laborers—so desperate that they were willing to pay inexperienced teens to come in and work. The pattern has continued in the years since: A persistently tight labor market means that workers are still needed—and inflation means that teens both want and need more money. (Demand for summer workers is down from last year but still well above where it was in 2019.)

As the hometown summer job flourishes, the corporate summer internship is flagging. Nick Bunker, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told me that he’s noticed a real disparity in job postings: Compared with pre-pandemic levels, general demand is higher for traditional seasonal jobs such as summer-camp counselors—but not for for internships in corporate, white-collar settings.

Because teens are plugging holes in the broader workforce, the new teen summer job is not only better-paid than those of generations past; it may also come with more responsibility. Now, in addition to the classic entry-level seasonal fare—think: lifeguard—teens are getting hired for jobs that previously went to more experienced workers—think: retail manager. “We’ve seen employers rediscover teenagers,” Alicia Sasser Modestino, an economist at Northeastern University, told me, adding that some employers are bringing back teens for repeated summers and giving them more responsibility each year. Some teens end up parlaying these high-school job experiences into postgraduation roles. Still, Modestino said, not every job setting is appropriate or safe for young people. Issues with teen jobs can range from the relatively mild—a young person misses out on time with friends—to the genuinely dangerous: Some workplaces have illegally overscheduled teens, and some states are moving to weaken child-labor protections.

Job opportunities for teens are not always distributed equally. White teens tend to see higher rates of employment, even as their Black and Hispanic peers have also been looking for work. Lately, in this very strong job market, “we’re seeing those racial differences narrow, but they’re still not narrowing enough to get us to a point of equality,” Modestino explained.

Young people have caught a lot of flak over the past decade for supposedly being lazy and not wanting to work. But the surge in teens working over the past few years shows that when they’re offered good opportunities to work and make money, many will go for it. Teens, Bunker said, are living proof of his riff on the Field of Dreams principle: “Raise the wages; they will come.”

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P.S.

When I spoke with Modestino, she emphasized that there is a big difference between a teen summer job and exploitative child labor, which has been on the rise as companies that do dangerous work, such as meatpacking and roofing, take advantage of underage workers. The New York Times’ Hannah Dreier has done some incredible, troubling reporting over the past year on the employers exploiting immigrant children. I recommend starting with her 2023 article “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.”

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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