Teenage Workland
Taking stock of teenage worker wellbeing (in words, numbers, and music)
As high school and college students stick a fork in their academic year, many enter a sorting ceremony in the shape of a summer job search — many, but not nearly as many compared to a few decades ago.
Most of us who’ve passed that time in our lives look back nostalgically at our early jobs — attributing to them our appreciation for hard work and the value of a dollar well earned.
Teenage employment, however, comes with both good news and bad news.
🔢 By the Numbers…
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) graph below shows that the teenage labor participation rate — the proportion of those employed (or seeking employment) — has withered since its peak around 1978.
The spikes occur each year from April through July, as students take on summer jobs.
Kudos to the hipster nerds at BLS for explaining the decline with a nod to pop culture:
Maybe some of their music can help us understand the story…
— In 1962, Brian Hyland’s “Summer Job” consisted of “taking care of the one I love” and “ice cream pops and groovy tans.”
— In 2021, Chris Lane’s “Summer Job Money” deals with a romantic infatuation, but the singer also laments the rising costs of a college education and laboring at a minimum-wage job to pay for it.
Structural changes in labor markets are at play here. As better-paid occupations have required more human capital, teens (and their parents) have devoted less time to earning a wage. Instead, they strive to advance their formal education. So, despite the claims of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out,” school continues to occupy young people’s minds and time even in the summer.
[Songs mentioned in this article are included in the playlist later in this post.]
Pew Research Center proposes1 additional explanations for the decline:
Fewer low-skill, entry-level jobs;
More schools ending later in June and/or resuming before Labor Day.
Declining teen employment may fuel tiresome notions that “no one wants to work anymore” (see the Snopes assessment of no-one-wants-to-work-anymore memes based on
's work). More importantly, however, it should motivate us to contemplate whether employment helps or hinders adolescent wellbeing.One of the most comprehensive analyses of teen work was conducted by the National Research Council2. It identified several benefits and risks of teen work.
👍 Benefits of Teen Work
Working offers teens with valuable lessons about:
Responsibility
Punctuality
Dealing with people
Money management
It increases self-esteem and promotes independence and skill-building. Working during high school may contribute to higher probability of employment and better wages up to a decade after high school completion.
👎 Risks of Teen Work
“Each year,” the study authors write, “tens of thousands of young people are seen in hospital emergency departments for work-related injuries; hundreds of them require hospitalization.” Teens’ job-related injury rate, at the time the report was written, was almost twice as high as it was for adults. The most common causes of work-related deaths among 16- and 17-year-olds — about 70 a year — involved motor vehicles, electrocutions, and homicides.
The same study found that working can lead to:
Problem behaviors, including substance abuse and delinquency;
Insufficient sleep and physical activity;
Less family time;
Increased likelihood of dropping out from high school;
Lower educational attainment up to 10 years later.
If some of these pros and cons strike you as contradictory, they are. What makes the difference? Most studies fault work intensity, a misnomer (in my opinion) for the number of weekly hours worked while school’s in session, with the cut-off between good and bad jobs generally being around 20 hours per week.
Surveys have shown that young and old alike tend to view work as virtuous without qualification. The report explains, “For the most part, children and adolescents, their parents, and many of the other adults in their lives are unaware of the adverse consequences of work.”
The study ultimately acknowledged that adolescent work is too complex to distill down to the simple question of good or bad, and hours-per-week is too simplistic a variable:
The quality of work is also important for adolescents' development. Dimensions of work quality, including skill utilization and learning, relations with supervisors, and job-related stressors, have been found to have wide-ranging consequences for personal and vocational development, as well as for adolescents' relationships with parents and peers.
Other conditions that may influence the outcomes of teen work include socio-economic status, cultural background, academic intentions, and job opportunities, to name a few.
The Research Council’s report was published in 1998.
Moderate, Steady Work
In 2010, Jeylan T. Mortimer, who spent much of her career studying work in the context of "life course," published a study3 that tracked 1000 people. While they were in high school, and every year after until they were in their late 30’s (75% remained in the study), they completed a questionnaire about their work experiences, including intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of work, stressors, relationships with supervisors and co-workers, job satisfaction, and commitment.
Agreeing with others that the question, “Is work good for youth?” is too simplistic, Mortimer’s team determined that teens’ experience is shaped by the steadiness of work as well as the so-called intensity. They conclude:
Work experience can promote the healthy development of some young people, especially when it is moderate in intensity and steady in duration—attributes that assure that employment does not interfere with other important elements in a teen’s life, and instead foster an appropriate balance between school and work.
Other findings from the cohort:
Steady work offers meaningful lessons in time management;
Employment may be especially beneficial for high schoolers who aren’t college bound;
Negative behavioral outcomes linked to teen work are largely attributable to self selection: “Youth who already exhibit problem behavior gravitate toward more intensive work.”
The Correlation Persists
Finally, a study published in 2020 asked “Is Adolescent Employment Still a Risk Factor for High School Dropout?”4 While it found that teenagers in the post-Great-Recession era stay in school longer — that is, dropout rates are lower — and spend less time working, the relationship between work hours and dropping out persists.
Though it found that “disadvantaged” people are over-represented among those that didn’t complete high school and those that held intensive jobs, it also found that, for teens in these groups, gender, race/ethnicity, and socio-economic status didn’t meaningfully influence the strength of the correlation between intensive work and dropping out.
In other words, there are disproportionately more marginalized high schoolers working 20+ hours per week, but they’re no more likely to drop out compared to non-marginalized people working the same number of hours.
This is a lot to sort out, and the “more research is needed” maxim holds true. Either way, however, Mortimer, the life-course researcher, advises parents:
Counsel teens to avoid hazardous workplaces;
Monitor their work schedules.
And she recommends encouraging teens to reflect on the challenges and opportunities that best align with their interests and capacities:
Teens may begin to think about what kinds of rewards at work are most important to them, be they intrinsic (e.g., autonomy, responsibility, opportunities to express creativity, a job that enables them to help other people) or extrinsic (e.g. high income, opportunities for advancement), or some combination of both… Some combination of paid jobs, internships, and volunteer jobs might encourage optimal career exploration and long-term benefits.
🎶 Speaking of Hipster Nerds
Data scientists at Spotify take it to the next level with their post Songs of Summer Jobs.
It’s possible that those with jobs also listen to more positive, higher energy music. As such, the music listening habits of America’s youth may prove to be a useful index of... the economic status of young people… To test our theory on jobs and music, we used characteristics automatically calculated by Spotify: energy, danceabilty, and valence (similar to mood)… based on a song’s non-lyrical content: beats per minute, rhythm regularity, dynamic range, and many more features.
Check their post to learn more about their methods and findings, which they’ve interwoven with their own analysis of youth employment.
🎤 Heigh Ho’s Teen Work Playlist 🎵
Spotify’s analysis matches music type with teen employment status population-wide, but it doesn’t feature songs about jobs. Fear not: I asked my social media connections to crowdsource a playlist about teen employment and/or summer jobs, favoring grit over summer vibe or romantic songs. A lot of cool tunes here, some closer to the theme than others. Give a listen, and let me know what you think. Use the Comments section, below, to suggest additional songs.
NYT Gift Articles 🎁
As promised last week, here are two New York Times gift articles, free for you to read for 14 days after publication of this post.
Why Some Companies Are Saying ‘Diversity and Belonging’ Instead of ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ The changing terminology reflects new thinking among some consultants, who say traditional D.E.I. strategies haven’t worked out as planned. (NYT, May 13, 2023)
Study Shows the Staggering Cost of Menopause for Women in the Work Force Some are taking sick days. Others are cutting back their hours. Still others end up quitting altogether. (NYT, April 28, 2023)
DeSilver, D. (2022). After dropping in 2020, teen summer employment may be poised to continue its slow comeback.
National Research Council. (1998). Protecting youth at work: Health, safety, and development of working children and adolescents in the United States.
Mortimer, J. T. (2010). The benefits and risks of adolescent employment. The prevention researcher, 17 (2), 8.
Staff, J., Yetter, A. M., Cundiff, K., Ramirez, N., Vuolo, M., & Mortimer, J. T. (2020). Is adolescent employment still a risk factor for high school dropout? Journal of Research on Adolescence, 30(2), 406-422.
Well done, Bob.