After a decades-long decline in teen employment, Gen Z is reversing the trend

Alicia Sasser Modestino:

I don’t think so.

So, back in the 1970s, 1980s, we were seeing labor force participation rates of around 50 percent. And pretty much every wave of recession that we have seen since then, we see those rates drop because youth are typically the last to be hired, the first to be fired, but they have never quite recovered back to their pre-pandemic levels until now post-COVID.

The reasons why we have been seeing the steady decline in youth employment has been a couple of changes going on in the labor market. So, first of all, a lot of the jobs that teenagers used to do have been automated or outsourced. So think about your Blockbuster Video store. We don’t have those anymore. We’re all streaming our videos.

Or those automated grocery checkout lanes that annoy all of us, right, we don’t see teenagers staffing those anymore. Or even if you look around your neighborhood, it’s mostly immigrant labor, right, who’s mowing lawns, instead of teenagers.

The second thing that’s happened is that employers have become more picky and also states have been regulating youth employment more. So we see that you need to have not just a signature from your employer on your work permit, but also in some cases from your school, from a physician. You can also work fewer hours.

And so that just makes other sources of labor more attractive to employers. And then, finally, we have seen for youth who are in middle- and upper-income households, they’re doing a lot of other things, right, aside from working, that might look good on a college application.

So they’re volunteering, they’re traveling, they’re having pre-college experiences. And so I don’t think we will quite get back to the levels that we saw in the ’70s and the ’80s, but I’m really encouraged by the opportunities that we have been seeing coming out of COVID so that at least we’re getting back to a position where youth who want to work and want to find a job can do so.