I was just thinking about the "no one wants to work anymore" story everyone seems to be telling themselves lately, and wondering why it does appear to be harder to hire people for some kinds of jobs than it used to be. For instance, as far as I can tell, this has led to some locally owned stores and restaurants having shorter hours.
I'm not sure this isn't still just businesses trying to return to what passes for normal in this country after the huge disruption since March 2020. But if it is more meaningful than that, is it really because "young people are lazy" or "a lot of people have learned there's more to life than a grinding job"?
I was thinking about whether the young people — teenagers, basically — who I think used to hold a lot of these types of jobs, part-time, are less likely to seek them for one reason or another, and if so, what those reasons were. And maybe whether there were fewer young people in the correct age range as well.
Well, here's the Washington Post to the rescue with a just-published data story on this very topic. The teen employment rate (which is officially known as the employment-to-population ratio for ages 16 to 19) has had an interesting path over the past 70 or so years, post-World War II :
What I first saw in this chart is that Boomers around my age were the most likely of all recent people to have worked as teenagers (I was 16–19 from 1977–1979).
And of course I noticed the main point made by the WaPo author: that in the most recent years teenagers are significantly more likely to be working than their immediately preceding elders, and increasingly so.
The good news about why Millennials (and Gen Z members) are less likely to be working than the earlier three generations is because they are more likely to be in school. Obviously, some Gen X and Boomer teens were working and going to school, but we were also more likely to have left school altogether and therefore were more likely to be working (and possibly working full-time, filling out even more of those job hours).
I wonder if part of the loss of these young part-time workers is because of the way businesses have been doing scheduling in the past few decades, with just-in-time availability needed — basically shifting schedules for their convenience instead of consistency for or notice to the worker. Combined with the increased requirements of extracurriculars on college applications, maybe that accounts for some of the loss of teenagers.
The Washington Post story provides some examples to back up that idea, describing several businesses that have been successful with increasing their teen workforce by adjusting the way they scheduled and incentivized their young workers.
The story did not answer my other question about the absolute number of people in each of these generations. The graph is a ratio, or percentage, of the population, but a larger population with a smaller percentage could fill more jobs than a smaller population with a slightly larger percentage.
There are fewer people in Gen Z than Gen X, but there are more Millennials than either (and there are also more Millennials than Boomers) (source). So one would think the Gen X baby bust would have shown an earlier "no one wants to work" effect, and even more so for Millennials, despite their greater numbers, because their percentage was so low. The 2008 recession crushed their employment numbers, not surprisingly, but they were already substantially down well before that, enough to have created a dearth of young workers, I would think.
The Post story makes an additional point that may factor in, which is Trump's immigration crackdown. Possibly these earlier dips in youth employment were hidden by compensation from immigrant workers (documented and undocumented), which has become more difficult recently.
No comments:
Post a Comment