I Want My Mommy… or a Good Job

It’s summer! Warm weather. Vacations. Good times, right? Not if you are young and looking for a job, worse if you are looking for a resume-enhancing summer job. While the rest of the nation is staring at raw unemployment numbers at 8.2% (with the alternative measure adding those who can only find part-time employment or who want jobs but have stopped looking approaching 17%), the non-seasonally adjusted (NSA) statistics for young adults are even nastier by comparison:

-- The youth unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds specifically (NSA) for May 2012 is 12.1 percent.

-- The declining labor participation rate has created an additional 1.7 million young adults that are not counted as "unemployed" by BLS because they are not in the labor force, meaning that those young people have given up looking for work due to the lack of jobs.

-- If the labor force participation rate were factored into the overall 18-29 youth unemployment calculation, the actual 18-29 unemployment rate would rise to 16.9 percent(NSA). PR Newswire, June 1^st.

God help you if you are a dropout, although depressed people still buy dope on street corners. But you’re a recent high school, trade school or college grad looking for work, with little more than unpaid or underpaid internships out there, how do you live? Who pays for your food? Housing? Stuff? That would appear to be pretty obvious. “In 1980, some 11 percent of young adults lived in multigenerational households, suggesting that a strong economy helped youngsters gain independence more quickly. Today, some 29 percent of 25- to 34-year olds either never moved out of their parents’ home or say they returned home in recent years because of the economy, according to the Pew report. Among 18- to 24-year olds, that figure is even higher – 53 percent of young adults in that age group live at home.” Christian Science Monitor, March 15^th.

“We are now at the end of the season when college graduates move out of their dorms and on to their new lives. But it seems as if many of them end up back in their old rooms at home. To support that observation, the [third week of June] saw the release of new census data pointing to the toll the recession has taken on certain kinds of domestic arrangements. Across the country, from 2007 to 2010, the number of adult children living with their parents increased by 1.2 million. Despite constrictions of space, and despite the sense that the economy has rebounded more successfully [in New York City] than it has in many other parts of the country, the trend is very much in evidence in New York. According to an analysis of census data by the Queens College sociologist Andrew A. Beveridge last week, 45 percent of the city’s 22- to 24-year-olds live at home. Among those ages 22 to 39, nearly a quarter — 22 percent — do. These numbers have increased since 2000 and went up more during the recession...

“As Anne Kreamer, a writer specializing in workplace issues, [noted]: ‘Post-recession, businesses are fueling growth through permanent interns. There’s an unwillingness of companies to actually put the real numbers of employees on their balance sheets, which means kids into their late 20s are working for zip and have no health insurance either.’ .. As grim as these realities are, it seems worth remarking that the current phenomenon unfolds at a time when parents and children — because of technology and the shared cultural affinities that are the product of hyper-attentive parenting — seem more connected than they had been before in this country. A Pew Research Center study, released this spring, revealed that 68 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 who were living with parents reported being ‘very satisfied’ with their family life.” New York Times, June 23^rd.

The long-term ramifications of this phenomenon may well turn out to be disastrous for a country looking to future generations of high-value-added workers to grapple with our long-term problems ranging from paying off our massive deficit to caring for an increasingly graying population. Not only are these young workers delaying entry into the marketplace, when they do get jobs they might actually want, the fact that they are achieving entry-level jobs later in life – at a time when real wage rates have effectively fallen for almost all but the most highly compensated Americans in the labor force – tells us that their raises through life, usually based on a percentage increase based on years past, will put them well-behind their parent’s comparable levels when they were at the same age. The net aggregate lifetime earning power of this large cadre of unemployed and under-employed youth will, corrected for inflation, be significantly less than the earnings of past generations.

While this trend may well be good for reinforcing familial ties that may have frayed during the industrial and post-industrial era, providing that “extended family” support system that predated Social Security and retirement plans, it is also a sign that our nation as a whole may well be contracting into that same economy that existed back then, before the United States become a global power. To create long-term economic sustainability at the levels most people think of when they picture the American way of life, we need a whole lot more young people with exceptionally high skill-sets in the labor force… now.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we better start believing in America and investing in her growth or in the very near future there won’t be an America anything like what we grew up with.