Beginning of the Big Ripple

Instilling a work ethic and a sense of responsibility has been a primary impetus to high school and college students over 16 finding after-school or summer jobs. This early experience shapes the way most of us have viewed life, and how we began to understand the value of time and labor in an entirely new way. Unfortunately, this opportunity appears to have been one more casualty of the recent economic downturn. “As we look forward to the August [30^th] unemployment snapshot from the Department of Labor, one part of the picture is already in focus: this was the worst summer on record for teens and young adults looking for work.

“This July, the typical summertime peak of youth employment, the share of young people with a job was just 48.8 percent, according to fresh data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This represents the lowest July rate since the Bureau began collecting such data, in 1948. Perhaps this grim statistic explains in part why the labor force participation rate -- those working or looking for work -- for Americans aged 16 to 24 also fell a percentage point from the previous summer to a record low of 59.5, as more kids simply gave up looking.” Huffington Post, August 29^th. That’s okay, because budget cuts have also eliminated hordes of after school programs, from sports to academics, and we have shortened the school year, increased class size, reduced or eliminated summer school and in more than a few cases cut hours of class from the regular schedule (in some school districts, an entire day of classes).

What exactly are we doing for our next generation? What education and opportunities do we feel the slightest need to retain, or is this going to be the “lost generation” where jobs and opportunities just weren’t there? In China, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), an entire generation, smarting from reeducation camps, hard labor on collective farms, and shuttered high schools, colleges and universities (too bourgeois), walked out of that experience into the modern era with no training, no skills and no direction. This could explain why so many relatively younger people are senior managers of major Peoples Republic enterprises. They’re the only ones prepared to do the job.

Indeed, if your progress through the work world is based on sequential promotions and raises based on past experience and your earliest earnings base, this younger generation is being deprived of that launching base, and their future salaries will be forever impaired by the fact that they started at a lower portal. Percentage-based raises will have had a lower starting point. The whole cycle will be with us for decades: “‘There are numbers of unpleasant consequences of this,’ said Carl E. Van Horn, a labor economist at Rutgers University and one of the authors of the recent report Unfulfilled Expectations: Recent College Graduates Struggle in a Troubled Economy. ‘Increased poverty, increased reliance on social safety net programs, potential increases in illegal or off the books work, perhaps illegal actives like crime, idleness, lack of skills, atrophy of skills, inability to get a job later when the labor market gets better -- the list goes on and on.’

“[E]conomists and sociologists say that a growing group of young Americans, so frustrated by their fruitless search for employment that they give up looking entirely, could have its own unique and troubling consequences -- not just in the immediate future but for decades to come, according to experts… ‘People who are the economic victims of recessions bear a burden that goes on beyond the duration of the recession,’ Van Horn explained. Those hardest hit, he said, are young workers and older workers, laid off and unable to find new employment. ‘These two groups really are going to pay the heaviest price. The older workers can't get back into the labor market and the younger workers can't get in to begin with.’” Huffington Post.

I’ve said before, and I probably will say it many times before this blog ends: Americans are vastly more concerned with their job future than the deficit. There are no polls remotely suggesting that our priorities are otherwise. Still, our politicians are obsessed with budget-cutting, even if we create the next “lost generation.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and our children deserve better than this!