Why Only One in Four Teens is Employed
ritholtz.com
ritholtz.com
Now, that attitude may not be accurate. Maybe working at McDonald's or some other typical teenage employment provides valuable experience or some skills that will be relevant to their adult life. However, few if any middle-class parents tell their kids that, because they don't want to encourage them. For kids to get used to working a minimum wage job -- to get a taste of self-sufficiency too early -- to believe that life is possible without college -- these are not things that ambitious middle-class parents and teachers want for their kids. They don't want their kids to see life as a highway with exit ramps and rest stops at various points along the way. They want their kids to see life as a railroad to lucrative professional employment, with any departure from the path resulting in a catastrophic derailment.
Also, any money that a teenager earns before college only raises the amount that the teen is expected to contribute to their college expenses, effectively lowering their financial aid.
The experience of being paid according to your actual value, particularly when you're young and virtually worthless, is an important lesson you don't find in academics or extracurriculars.
"One of my earliest childhood jobs involved shoveling manure at my uncle's dairy farm in upstate New York. Things were going well until my uncle explained that no matter how well I performed, I would never be promoted to farmer. Or even cow. I had hit the manure ceiling.
I consider that experience my first economic stimulus package—the unwelcome realization that my current job was a dead end. While my classmates were building snowmen with carrot noses (mostly the girls) and carrot genitalia (mostly the boys), I started to do some serious career planning about how to get out of the fecal relocation profession and into the warm embrace of a loving corporation. I studied hard, and I earned money for college by mowing lawns, shoveling snow, shoveling even more manure, and (my personal favorite) shoveling frozen manure covered with snow. I saved my meager funds, and with the help of my parents, who both took extra jobs, plus a few scholarships, I clawed my way into college."
The media are Very Serious People, and things like empiricism and statistics aren't part of Good Journalism. They have a much more impartial system, where they ask a democrat and a republican, then average the responses.
And saying 'just some guy with a blog' is not an argument. That's just the old trick of 'shoot the messenger'. What, exactly, qualifies someone with a television camera or a printing press as more credible than someone who is writing for a blog? Why would that make any difference as to the whether the content is true or not? It doesn't. When studying journalism in college, you learn that when someone tries to discredit the source of an article rather than attacking the article on merit, then it's a near-certainty that the content in the article is true.
Sociologically speaking, what I find curious is that so far the young haven't really started shooting back in this generational war. It will get interesting if and when they do.
The blogger is editorializing worse than the WSJ here (not that the WSJ article was much better). Essentially all of the counter points were mentioned in the WSJ article up front, then they focused on minimum wage worsening the effect.
I'm not necessarily agreeing with WSJ on this one, but this guy's article is just as meaningless.
Granted. However, in a post about how correlation between unemployment and minimum wage is overstated, I feel his defense should be more rigorous than: A) Irrelevantly point out Bush was in office, and B) Simply post another correlating statistics.
The actual article mentions almost everything he does, then focuses on wage increases as worsening the effect. This blogger decides to focus on 55+ employment, which he already wrote about. How is one pre-conceived narrative and the other not?
Meanwhile, if you look at the graph, you see a straight line downward which flattens in 'ok' economies, and plunges during recession. Was flat through 2007, when the minimum wage increase was enacted. No mention of the fact that this phenomenon of jobless recoveries has applied to most jobs at most payscales over the time period they're highlighting. No mention of the fact that the minimum wage was higher in real terms for most of the 20th century, and teen employment was higher then (not that the one is likely to cause the other).
I'll admit that they did include the graph. Reading the article does not make the author sound more honest or truth-seeking, though. Check out some of the applause lines.
The evidence is only anecdotal and theoretical. In theory, the elderly cannot work as hard as young professionals but have a stronger work ethic than the very young, so they will compete with the young for low-wage, low-difficulty labour. For an anecdote, you can go to Wal-Mart and see all of the old people in the entry-level low-paying jobs there that high school students could also do.
"Why does this author mention Bush four times?"
Because it's a politically-motivated response to a politically-motivated piece that blamed a core Democratic Party principle for events that also took place when Bush was in power.
"The blogger is editorializing worse than the WSJ here"
It's some guy's blog. He's not pretending to be a professional journalist.
"Essentially all of the counter points were mentioned in the WSJ article up front"
The blogger's counterpoints are that 1) the current depression hurt teen employment and began before the minimum wage was raised, 2) the drop in teen employment began a long time before the minimum wage was raised, 3) certain numbers in the WSJ article are exaggerated or false, 4) youth in summer jobs have a lower minimum wage than the WSJ article says they do, and 5) the young have an increase in competition from the 55+. Only the first counterpoint is addressed.
Or spin another way what company could you create that would have minimum wage type jobs that you would trust someone older to do, but not a teenage?
edit: spelling
There's also the paperwork burden: Here in Washington State - it's technically illegal to pay a non-family memeber $20 to mow the lawn without filling out pages of L&I forms and withholding a percentage of the $20 and sending a check to the State.
Why is the burden on the buyer of the services? Isn't it the responsibility of the mower to have incorporated, then pay him/herself and file taxes?
At the federal level, there's enough special treatment for household employers that its not terribly burdensome, but many states make you jump through the same hoops as a small business (hoops that might be reasonable for a small business but can be quite burdensome for a household employer)
Also, incorporate? One need not incorporate to do business.
One need not incorporate to do business.
Indeed, I was trying to be brief. Incorporate, register an LLC or DBA, or simply informally conduct business.
But here in Washington - if the lawn mower isn't a licensed business and isn't paying L&I insurance and he hurts himself on the job and starts to collect disability, the state will get their pound of flesh out of you as his employer.
"You have a household employee if you hired someone to do household work and that worker is your employee. The worker is your employee if you can control not only what work is done, but how it is done. If the worker is your employee, it does not matter whether the work is full time or part time or that you hired the worker through an agency or from a list provided by an agency or association. It also does not matter whether you pay the worker on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis, or by the job."
"Household work is work done in or around your home. Some examples of workers who do household work are: ... Yard workers ... "
"If only the worker can control how the work is done, the worker is not your employee but is self-employed. A self-employed worker usually provides his or her own tools and offers services to the general public in an independent business."
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If you hire Jack from Jack's Gardening Service, and he comes with a trailer full of equipment and deicdes to use a riding mower the the bulk of your lawn and a weed eater around the edges, and sometimes sends his employee Jill instead, then he isn't your employee.
If you hire your neighbors son John when he's home from college for the summer, offer him to use your push mower and never mind the places too small for it to get to, and when John is out of town and offers for his dead-beat friend Jacob to mow your lawn that week and you decline, then John is your employee.
In my examples, there is certainly a grey area between John and Jack, but my point stands: the guy who mows your lawn can easily be your employee. Its best to err on the side of employee, because the law is very unforgiving if the IRS decides someone is your employee but you have been treating them as a non-employee.
That's the only sentence in there that actually defines what an employee is, and I fail to see how someone mowing your lawn fits the requirement of dictating "how work is to be done".
A guy who mows your yard every other week -- most likely along with a host of other yards in the area -- is most certainly not an employee. Sure, he could try to make a case if he were injured, but no normal-thinking human is going to interpret "provides occasional service" as "employee".
and when John is out of town and offers for his dead-beat friend Jacob to mow your lawn that week and you decline, then John is your employee.
Preferring the services of one person or company over another has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the definition of employee.
http://www.lni.wa.gov/workplacerights/wages/minimum/
...and we have the highest minimum wage in the nation. Here's a list of the minimum wages for all states:
The student minimum wage (which applies to students under the age of 18 who work 28 hours a week or less when school is in session or work during a school break or summer holiday) is $9.60 increased from what used to be $8.90.