Something unusual has happened in the country's workforce over the last few years. Or maybe it's just me turning fifty, but I seem to notice younger workers more. I notice them when they're pouring my coffee on Chestnut Street, or making change for my sandwich on Market Street. Or asking me at the Target whether I want to sign up for a new credit card, or in any one of an innumerable number of similar service positions whose sole function seems to be the intermediate transfer of some products made by Proctor and Gamble, Apple, or Archer Daniels Midland to me.
Often they run through rehearsed, "mandatory" spiels that in my brief tenure in retail eons ago I never imagined having to suffer through. "Would you like to donate a dollar to Breast Cancer research?" "Are you a ---club member?" "Would you like to be? It's free." "Will that be on your Macy's card? If you sign up today you'll receive 15% off your final bill." And so on, and so on. None of them look particularly happy about it, either.
A couple years ago I wrote a diary here called "No, I Don't Want your Rewards Card." That was a reaction to all this corporate force-feeding. It was meant to be at least partly humorous.
But there's nothing really humorous about this by Eduardo Porter in yesterday's New York Times. Or this by David Leonhardt. Both articles are two utterly depressing faces of the same coin.
The Great Recession has been a disaster for the employment prospects of the young. Almost one in four teenagers looking for a job still can’t find one.
Americans 16 to 24 years old suffered the sharpest drop in employment between 2008 and 2010, and jobs for young workers have barely ticked up since then.
Where did their jobs go? According to Porter, they went to
my g-g-g--g generation, the Baby Boomers (I'm at the very tail end, like President Obama). We took them, I guess, because we had the power to, or maybe there was some collective decision by the Targets and Walmarts that older workers were bound to be less trouble in these service positions (after all, the drug tests were likely to be negative):
The story is quite different at the other end of the life cycle. Eighteen percent of Americans of retirement age hold a job, some 2 percentage points more than when the recession started.
Porter says that as Social Security gets stingier we should expect "employment," such that it is, of the elderly to continue to rise. Because now being "put out to pasture" is approaching a literal description of reality for the elderly poor.
That said, it's not exactly sacrilege to point out that the the economic catastrophe that precipitated this situation happened on my generation's watch. And although we're not to blame, we're hardly blameless.
But these are:
For all of Europe’s troubles — a left-right combination of sclerotic labor markets and austerity — the United States has quietly surpassed much of Europe in the percentage of young adults without jobs. It’s not just Europe, either. Over the last 12 years, the United States has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest.
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The grim shift — “a historic turnaround,” says Robert A. Moffitt, a Johns Hopkins University economist — stems from two underappreciated aspects of our long economic slump. First, it has exacted the harshest toll on the young — even harsher than on people in their 50s and 60s, who have also suffered. And while the American economy has come back more robustly than some of its global rivals in terms of overall production, the recovery has been strangely light on new jobs, even after Friday’s better-than-expected unemployment report. American companies are doing more with less.
Doing more with less is a euphemism. What companies like the retailers and service industries who employ these poor kids do is squeeze them as hard as they can, because we've reached the point where the American worker is a disposable commodity, particularly for these low-paying jobs that comprise the bulk of the "recovery."
And it's not hard to see where this is going. If you're young, and you want a job that doesn't involve standing behind a counter or carrying someone's food to them, your chances of getting hired are largely dependent on having connections. Otherwise you're just another resume, however stellar your qualifications may be. A word, a favor, are the keys to getting your foot in the door. It's easy to see which demographics will do well in this type of environment, and which will be left behind.
Stocks have soared since their 2009 nadir, and home prices are increasing again. But little of that helps younger adults trying to get a foothold in the economy. Many of them are on the outside of the recovery looking in.
The net worth of households headed by people 44 and younger has dropped more over the past decade than the net worth of middle-aged and elderly households, according to the Federal Reserve. According to the Labor Department, workers 25 to 34 years old are the only age group with lower average wages in early 2013 than in 2000.
Leonhardt cites economists Robert Moffitt and Lawrence Katz in suggesting that there is no single identifiable cause of the "jobs deficit," and factors such as lack of higher education, failure to focus on career counseling and retraining jobs, and poor support of families with children may be the root of the problem.
I think that's a cop-out.
Corporations aren't hiring because as a consequence of the Recession many have abandoned the pretense of actual concern for the lives of their employees. With high unemployment, corporate directors and managers could simply afford to implement policies to maximize the productivity of their rank and file that they couldn't get away with if the situation were less dire. It was both a philosophical shift and a natural consequence of the corporate structure.
And because those changes have proved so profitable, they are now permanent, the "new normal." The 38 hour week with no medical coverage. The unpaid internship that dangles the tantalizing possibility of future employment. The second, third interview that leads to nowhere.
As a result we have a generation shortchanged. And yet, they persist in believing that their fortunes will improve:
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the jobs slump is that the Americans in their 20s and 30s who have been most affected by it remain decidedly upbeat. They are much more hopeful than older generations, polls show, that the country’s future will be better than its past.
Based on what younger adults have been through, that resilience is impressive. It’s probably necessary, too. The jobs slump will not end without a large dose of optimism.