NEW YORK (AP) — Jaelyn Chester will wait your tables or stock your shelves. She’ll wash your dishes or scrub your toilets. If only someone would give the 17-year-old a chance.
“I’ve been looking everywhere,” says Chester, an A+ student, high school basketball star and aspiring engineer who has blanketed her community with dozens of applications. “I’m not unemployed because I’m incompetent. I’m unemployed because nobody’s hiring.”
The summer job, a rite-of-passage for generations of American teenagers, isn’t so easy to come by.
About one-third of 16- to 19-year-olds in the U.S. were employed last summer, federal data show, down from a peak of about 60% in the late 1970s. Experts’ pessimistic forecasts are combining with reports from frustrated jobless young people around the country to form a seasonal outlook far from bathed in sunshine.
“The opportunities for workers at the start of the career ladder started to dry up,” says Nicole Bachaud, an economist for ZipRecruiter, saying teens are among the labor market’s “most marginalized groups.”