Watching the Teen Job Market Disappear

Trends in the Summer Employment / Population Ratios of the Nation’s Teens 1989 – 2010

According to the Center for Labor Market Studies:

• Teens are at a unique disadvantage: No other age group of American working-age adults has been beset by such a dramatic decline in their overall employment rates over the past four years, or over the last decade as a whole.

• "During the summer of 2000, near the height of the early 1990s-2000 national economic boom, nearly 52 percent of the nation’s teens held some type of job."

•  "As a result of the national economic recession of 2001 and the largely jobless recovery of 2002-2003, the teen summer employment rate dropped considerably, falling to 41 percent by 2004."

• "The next four summers, from 2007-2010, saw the teen employment rate fall steadily and sharply from 42.6 percent in 2006 to 29.6 percent in 2010. Over that span, the summers of 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 each set post-WWII summer lows for teens."

• "There are no signs that teen employment rates will improve this summer."

Employment Rates of Teens (16-19) in

Selected Household Income/Race-Ethnic Groups in

the U.S. during the Summer of 2010

Additional observations from the Center for Labor Market Studies:

• "Accounting for race shows even greater disparities in summer teen employment rates. The breakdown by race and ethnicity of teens at work in the summer of 2010 shows about one in ten low-income, black youth and between one in seven and one in five black and Hispanic teens from low- and middle-income families."

• "Yet employment rates over the same span were 40 to 41 percent for white youth in families with incomes in the middle and upper middle income range. This means more affluent white youth were four times as likely to be employed as low-income black youth."