BOSTON — Teenagers in Utah and nationwide are facing the worst summer job market in years, with the percentage of those holding summer jobs at its lowest in 55 years and the unemployment rate at its highest in a decade.
Many municipal governments have cut money that used to help put teenagers in jobs. Retail stores are increasingly favoring older sales clerks. And teenagers are suffering a kind of push-down effect of the bad economy: Older workers are returning to the job market; those that have been laid off are settling for jobs for which they might be overqualified; and college students unable to find better work are hanging onto jobs that used to go to high school students, squeezing out the youngest workers.
It stands in contrast to three summers ago, when teenagers were snubbing jobs cleaning parks in favor of air-conditioned clothing boutiques and offices, sometimes bouncing from one job to a better-paying one within the span of a summer.
David Solomon, 18, recently ticked off a list of retail stores he has been badgering for a job. "I stay on CVS, I stay on Toys R Us, I stay on Timberland, I stay on the Gap," said Solomon, who had come for help to a job center for teenagers in this Boston's Roxbury section. "It's not like I'm lying down, letting days go by. I'm actually trying to get a job. But they just say, 'We'll call you.' I think they put my application in the garbage."
In Utah, the Lagoon amusement park in Farmington has about 2,000 seasonal employees — virtually all teens — and has seen more applications than in years past from 14- and 15-year-olds, according to Dick Andrew, vice president of marketing. The interest among teens 16 and older is about the same.
"I do know that when the economy was booming as it did for many years, it was more difficult to get adequate numbers of teenagers than it has been this year," he said. "This is just purely a function of what happens with the overall economy. It sure wasn't long ago that you'd drive down the street and virtually every storefront had a 'Help Wanted' sign in the window. Now there are far fewer of those."
The higher interest among the 14- and 15-year-olds likely is because jobs for that age group are difficult to find, but Andrew posed another possible reason. "It's purely speculation, but you wonder if maybe with the economy as it has been, that families are a little more money-conscious and are encouraging children to work rather than whatever else they might be doing," he said.
The Stop & Shop grocery store in Ogden is seeing about the same number of teen applicants as in years past, according to Gary Fuller, the assistant store manager. About 35 of its 110 workers are teens.
"What I've found is there doesn't seem be that many more looking for the jobs because there are so much more jobs available now where there weren't before," he said. "Twenty years ago, a grocery store was about it. Either that or on the farm. But now there are so many retail stores.
"And I don't think that there are many teenagers that want to work. Mom and Dad are paying for everything, so why work when you don't have to?"
That has led to what Fuller calls "a big difference" between qualified and unqualified applicants. "If you start people at a minimum wage, there are a lot not willing to take the job, and those that are have a hard time living up to customer-service levels," he said.
The Salt Lake Stingers baseball team has some teenage game-day employees, but senior citizens "looking for extra money" always have expressed strong interest, according to Dorsena Picknell, the team's vice president and assistant general manager.
"On a seasonal basis, it's a lot easier for seniors because they'll work the whole season," she said. "The way it is here, you might work for eight days and then be off the next eight days (while the team is playing out of town). Kids usually want to work 30 to 40 hours a week."
In Boston, a city that has long prided itself on its youth jobs program, City Hall has cut the summer jobs budget from $8 million in 2000 to $3.3 million. Mayor Thomas M. Menino has started a fund-raising drive to help pay for the camp counselors the city usually provides to the YMCAs and the boys' and girls' clubs. The city had to eliminate its Gray Shirts program, which for years has employed about 1,500 14- and 15-year-olds to clean city parks and streets. As Tim McCarthy, the director of the Boston Youth Fund, said: "We're closing firehouses and laying off policemen. It's difficult to hire a kid when you've fired his father."
A private group that typically places upward of 5,000 teenagers with area companies this year said it could manage only 4,000. Big corporations like State Street Bank and Fleet have hired 1,400. About 2,600 are still waiting for jobs at smaller employers that have traditionally taken the program's teenagers. But many of those places — stores, restaurants, the concession stands at Fenway Park — say they do not have room.
"Last year there was some residual good will, even in a bad economy," said Chris Smith, a director at the program, run by the Boston Private Industry Council. "This year it's stone cold."
The unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds, at 19.3 percent nationwide in June, is rising particularly fast for black teenagers. But the trouble finding jobs hits across the country, and all demographics.
In Portland, Ore., teachers with years of experience took jobs as playground supervisors in city parks — positions that traditionally went to college students. Knott's, which runs amusement parks and a resort in Southern California, drew three times as many applicants as usual to its annual summer jobs fair in March, prompting the company to cancel the one it usually conducts in April. Even last week, the parks got 500 applications. At Valleyfair, a summer amusement park 35 miles south of Minneapolis, 500 applicants, mostly high school students, showed up for an annual recruiting fair in mid-May — twice the usual number.
"We told them they didn't have to wait in line, they could just drop off the application, but they stood in line for two, three hours," said Amy Maikkula, the park's marketing manager. "Generally we're not fully staffed until the end of July. This year we were done by early June. We've never been in a situation like this."
Since 2000, the employment rate for teenagers has dropped about 9 percentage points. "If you had a nine-point drop for adults, you'd call it a depression," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University here. If the pattern of the past three summers holds steady, July and August will not look any better.
Anita Yip, who just graduated from Boston Latin, the city's most prestigious public high school, has a scholarship to Wellesley College, but no summer job. Last year, her local Starbucks offered her a job, but she had a paid internship at a magazine. "Come back next year," Anita said the manager told her. When she did, the same manager said there were no openings. Last summer's internship was full, the one at the Museum of Science took only college students, she said. And, Yip said, shops at the mall said they were not hiring.
Now, Yip said she has her heart set on a job at Winston's, an upscale florist where she saw a Help Wanted sign when she bought her prom date a boutonniere. Still, she has not heard back about her application.
"Every week I say, 'I'm going to be working next week,' " Yip said. "This week I'm still saying the same thing."
Traditionally, most teenagers have found summer jobs in retail. But increasingly, retail stores, including big chains like Home Depot, are refusing to hire anyone under 18.
Renee Ward, president of an Internet job board called Teens4Hire.org, said most of the 1,300 retailers who have posted jobs in the past few years said they were not hiring teenagers under 18 this summer. Some are pushing her to start Seniors4Hire: they are more experienced, often more reliable and willing to accept the same money.
This has made the job squeeze particularly hard on younger teenagers.
In Fayetteville, N.C., Shari Dillard, 16, heard nothing about her applications to the stores at the mall, restaurants or telemarketers. She finally got her first interview last week, at a movie theater.
"I've been trying to prepare myself for what questions they might ask," she said. "The question I'm worried about is, 'Why do I want this job?' The only reason I want the job is because I really want to start working."
In part, the low rate of teenagers with jobs simply reflects fewer teenagers entering the work force. The teenage participation rate dropped from 51 percent in June 1993 to 45 percent this June, and has generally declined since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records in 1948.
The bureau says the lower employment rate partly reflects more students staying in summer school.
But sometimes, students volunteer for summer school simply because they cannot find jobs — the choice Ricardo Santiago, a 17-year-old high school senior in Chicago, said he made after hearing "We'll call you" one too many times.
"You wear baggy clothes, they think you're a gang-banger," he said. "I cleaned up my appearance, I threw on some khakis and a nice shirt. I was hoping it would work, but they just tell me they're going to call me. I wait and I hear from nobody."