Jobs for teens: a stimulating idea

Put disadvantaged teens into summer jobs. Hook them into the world of work. They'll come home with new skills, discipline, contacts and, yes, money.

Seems pretty obvious — but apparently not in Washington, which in 2000 gutted the Summer Youth Employment Program. The program had been helping 600,000 mostly low-income young people find jobs.

The labor market is now caving teens from all backgrounds. But for low-income, black and Hispanic kids, it's the "Great Depression," according to a new report by Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies.

Andrew Sum, an economist who heads the center, recently testified before Congress that a jobs program for teens makes superb economic stimulus.

"You can create jobs more cost-effectively for young people than for any other group," he told me, "and you're getting an output as opposed to paying something for doing nothing."

This may sound all backward, but kids from rich families are more likely to have summer jobs than their poor cohorts. Last summer, only 29 percent of teens in families with incomes under $20,000 found work, while 50 percent of young people in families making $75,000 to $100,000 did.

In the inner city, minority kids work at extraordinarily low rates. Only 15 percent of poor black teens had jobs last summer — versus 60 percent of white teens in affluent suburbs.

Upper-income kids have an easier time finding summer work, Sum explains, because "Mom and Dad still play important roles brokering you into a job." They or their friends know who is hiring.

The suburbanization of retail has cut off many minority teens from the stores and restaurants that traditionally employ people their age. The new commercial strips are often miles away from black and Latino neighborhoods. Teens without cars can't get to them — and studies show that the longer the commute, the lower their employment rate.

But the job hunt is getting tougher for all young people. In the first three months of 2000, 45 percent of teens held some kind of paying work. By the same period of this year, only 34 percent did. This is the lowest teen employment rate since the government started collecting this data in 1948.

Of course, the current slowdown in consumer spending has made things worse. Stores and restaurants need fewer cashiers and servers — while older laid-off workers are swelling the number of job applicants.

But the downward trend in teen job-holding predates today's weak labor market. One decades-long factor has been the dive in factory employment, which has hurt young men more than women.

"When I was 18, I was able to work at U.S. Steel," said Sum, who grew up in Gary, Ind. That was in the late '70s.

Immigration has also played a role. In many areas, the kid who used to come by with a mower has been replaced by teams of immigrants. It's exceedingly hard for outsiders to join them.

Construction and landscaping services that depend on foreign crews typically screen new hires through people already on the truck. (The screening for immigration status may be less careful.) As a result, Sum adds, "you don't have posted jobs anymore."

Sum sees programs that combine a paying summer job with academic work as a tremendous boon for lower-income kids. Disadvantaged teens tend to lose more of their school learning over the summer than do their affluent counterparts.

One hopes that the new leadership in Washington will address the tragic, ongoing waste of America's precious human resources. A summer jobs program would seem a superior alternative to letting unemployed teens drift all summer — and the payback is no-brainer obvious.

Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com