It's Getting Harder and Harder for Teens to Get Summer Jobs

I've spent a considerable amount of time in the restaurant industry and the restaurant industry employs a significant number of teenage workers. But the poor economy and unemployment numbers are making it difficult for some teens to find jobs this summer.

According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, (www.stltoday.com) the overall unemployment rate for teens jumped from 15.4 percent in April to 18.7 percent in May, which is the highest rate since 1993. Roughly 200,000 teens started looking for work, an unusually high number. One wonders if the rising cost of everything is causing some of these teens to seek out jobs to help support the family, rather than to just have a little extra disposable income for the summer.

The teen job market started changing quite a number of years ago, at least for us in the restaurant business. When I first started working at a restaurant out near Six Flags over Mid-America, it was easy to get summer help. We had a total of about 30 college kids who were seasonal. This worked out great because the restaurant was the busiest one the company had in the summer, being next to the park. It became the slowest in the winter because the small tourist town that it was located in only had about 3 or 4 thousand people, and there were a huge number of restaurants to accommodate them. We used to have a saying at the store: "In the summer it's too busy to make mistakes and in the winter you can't afford to." Anyway, right after spring break the 30 employees would arrive, work whenever you needed them throughout the summer, and then leave when school started.

Many of the students belonged to the same fraternity so you didn't have to worry about recruitment either. If there was some attrition from year to year, they referred their friends. They also trained them when they started working at the store. A lot of them liked working together because they worked the same hours and could party together after work.