High school students gather outside The Goldenrod, a popular restaurant and candy shop, Wednesday, June 1, 2022, in York Beach, Maine. Many seasonal businesses are struggling to find enough workers agin this summer. – Mary Jane Riva, CEO of the Pizza Factory, has a cautionary message for her customers this summer: Prepare to wait longer for your Hawaiian pie or calzone.
Among them is Samuel Castillo, a 19-year-old four-year veteran of Miami's Summer Jobs Connect program who's already built an impressive resume. In one former job with the program, he worked in a legislative office, registering constituent complaints. His first summer, he saved $900 to buy parts to build his own computer.
“It was a little crazy,” said Beckius, a 19-year-old from Avon, Connecticut. “It went from, ‘Am I going to have something this summer?’ to having four opportunities and, ‘Which one am I going to take?’ ” Still, today's level of teen employment isn’t close to what it used to be. In August 1978, 50% of America’s teenagers were working. Around 2000, teenage employment went into a decade-long slide. In June 2010, during the agonizingly slow recovery from the 2007-2009 Great Recession, teenage employment bottomed at 25% before slowly rising again as the economy recovered.It was more than economic doldrums that kept teens away from work.
Suddenly, teenagers are in much greater demand. And the pay available to them — $15 or $16 an hour for entry-level work — is drawing some back into the job market. Teenage employment has already topped pre-pandemic levels even though the overall job market still hasn't. Never in her four years of running Nomad Candle, and 15 years before that as a hiring manager for a national financial services firm, has Mroczek had so much difficulty hiring.