The fading of the teen summer job
It’s shaping up to be another tough year for summer jobseekers. And the consequences are greater than you might think
THE GOOD NEWS if you’re a teenager: summer’s coming, school’s winding down — no more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks. The bad news: you might have too much free time, because it’s really hard for teenagers to get jobs right now.
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“The younger the jobseeker, the worse it gets,” says The Globe and Mail’s economics editor Matt Lundy, who published data this week showing the employment rate for those between 15 and 19 has plummeted by nine per cent since mid-2022. That data is pulled from a recent Indeed hiring report, which noted that “teenage employment rates have plunged, the net decline concentrated in retail trade and accommodation and food services.”
Under the hood, the data suggests teenagers are finding themselves at the back of the line for jobs and are now struggling to land the traditional teen summer gig — fast food, retail, etc. — in part because the upstream disruptions to the job market is pushing older workers into those jobs instead.
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In immediate terms, teenagers not being able to get jobs might seem limited in impact: annoyed parents and reduced spending money, sure, but it’s not as if mortgages aren’t getting paid. But that doesn’t mean that a teenage job crisis doesn’t have real consequences. Economic research over the past few decades has found the effects of not landing a job as a teenager might compound over the next five to ten years of someone’s career.
A landmark study on the effects of teenage employment from the late 1990s found that working as a high school senior, for instance, “substantially elevated future economic attainment, whether the latter is measured by earnings, wages, occupational status or the receipt of fringe benefits.” The study also found that even sacrificing a bit of study time could a worthy trade off, because even if “time spent on the job detracts slightly from educational human capital investments, it more than compensates for this loss through employment-related experience.”
Although the nature of work has changed substantially since the late 1990s, a follow-up study by the same authors in 2014 found the benefit of teenage employment held, and that working as a high school senior “continues to predict positive effects on labour market outcomes five to 11 years after the expected date of high school graduation.”
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So, while a teenager stuck at home all summer is annoying, the real damage is in the career scarring effects it potentially leaves for years to come.
“When shocks occur, whether those are recessions, pandemics or changes in particular sectors (such as the energy sector), dealing with the short-term impacts tends to be of primary concern to policymakers,” wrote the Toronto-based Future Skills Centre. “Job losses are easy to see and often demand a policy response, but the longer-term impacts — including on those who do not yet have a job to lose — can be even more consequential, even if they are less visible.” 
Kieran Delamont