Article courtesy of Forbes via “The Rundown”
Summer jobs are disappearing.
The number of teens working during their summer breaks has shrunk from about half to roughly a third since the start of the millennium, according to a report released by the Pew Research Center.
While the working-age teen population in the nation has grown since 2000, only about 5.7 million of their peers are in the labor force compared to 8.1 million in 2000.
As the percentage of teens in the summer workforce has declined, the kind of jobs they are filling are changing as well.
Increasingly, summer teen workers are punching time clocks in hotels and restaurants and decreasingly in stores.
Since 2000, the percentage of teen summer workers in lodging and food service has climbed by nearly half from 22.6% to 33.8%.
At the same time, the share of all teen workers in the summer who clerk, stock shelves and perform other duties for retailers has declined by 24% to 21.4%
“The decline of summer jobs is a specific instance of the longer-term decline in overall youth employment, a trend that’s also been observed in other advanced economies,” the report noted.