How can we expect our youth to succeed in life when it seems as if our youth can’t even find a good paying job in today’s economy?
I don’t if any of you have being hearing the latest economic unemployment numbers but they are abysmal especially for our youth. In fact many newspapers are writing articles about what they call, “The Young and the Jobless.”
Simply put America, this adds up to young people being unemployed in a time when the minimum wage hike has driven the wages of teen employees down to $0.00 according to some economists.
Nonetheless when is it okay to be jobless in America especially for our youth who the first Latina Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis says, “25 percent of our youth are unemployment in this.
In fact the current unemployment figure, based on official August 2009 data produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is 18.2 percent. However the percent of youth, who are not employed, is currently 53.4 percent and I am among those youth.
The unemployment rate is the percent of jobless youth among youth who are working or actively looking for work. To assume that all youth without jobs are interested in working is a mistake.
However many 16- to 24-year- olds are engaged in other activities, including finishing school or volunteering. Nonetheless the percent of youth working or looking for work has been trending down since the early 1990s.
This could be a positive trend if more youth are taking steps to complete their studies. An educated, high-skilled young adult will be better equipped to receive a higher paying job in the future.
Still the number of young Americans without a job has exploded to 53.4 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept. — meaning millions of Americans are staring at the likelihood that their lifetime earning potential will be diminished and, combined with the predicted slow economic recovery, their transition into productive members of society could be put on hold for an extended period of time.
The number represents the flip-side to the Labor Dept.'s report that the employment rate of 16-to-24 year olds has eroded to 46.6 percent -- the lowest ratio of working young Americans in that age group, including all but those in the military, since WWII.
And worse, without a clear economic recovery plan aimed at creating entry-level jobs, the odds of many of these young adults -- aged 16 to 24, excluding students -- getting a job and moving out of their parents' houses are long. Young workers have been among the hardest hit during the current recession -- in which a total of 6.9 million jobs have been lost.
Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute said, "It's an extremely dire situation in the short run. This group won't do as well as their parents unless the jobs situation changes."
Then Al Angrisani, the former assistant Labor Department secretary under President Reagan, doesn't see a turnaround in the jobs picture for entry-level workers and places the blame squarely on the Obama administration and the construction of its stimulus bill.
"There is no assistance provided for the development of job growth through small businesses, which create 70 percent of the jobs in the country," Angrisani said in an interview last week. "All those [unemployed young people] should be getting hired by small businesses."
So there are six million small businesses in this country, those that employ less than 100 people, and a jobs stimulus bill should include tax credits to give incentives to those businesses to hire people, the former Labor official said.
However, "If each of the businesses hired just one person, we would go a long way in growing ourselves back to where we were before the recession," Angrisani noted.
During previous recessions, in the early '80s, early '90s and after Sept. 11, 2001, unemployment among 16-to-24 year olds never went above 50 percent. Except after 9/11, jobs growth followed within two years.
A much slower recovery is forecast today. Shierholz believes it could take four or five years to ramp up jobs again.
A study from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a government database, said the damage to a new career by a recession can last 15 years. And if young Americans are not working and becoming productive members of society, they are less likely to make major purchases -- from cars to homes -- thus putting the US economy further behind the eight ball.
Angrisani said he believes that Obama's economic team, led by Larry Summers, has a blind spot for small business because no senior member of the team -- dominated by academics and veterans of big business -- has ever started and grown a business. "The Reagan administration had people who knew of small business," he said.
"They should carve out $100 billion right now and create something like $5,000 to $6,000 job credits that would drive the hiring of young, idled workers by small business." Angrisani said the stimulus money going to extending unemployment benefits is like a narcotic that is keeping the unemployed content -- but doing little to get them jobs.
Still, Labor Dept. statistics also show that the number of chronically unemployed -- those without a job for 27 weeks or more -- has also hit a post-WWII high.
In fact September’s labor market report was lousy by any measure, with 263,000 lost jobs and the jobless rate climbing to 9.8%. But for one group of Americans it was especially awful: the least skilled, especially young workers. In fact some in Washington will deny the reality, and the media won't make the connection, but one reason for these job losses according to some is the rising minimum wage.
Earlier this year, economist David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, wrote on the pages of the Wall Street Journal that the 70-cent-an-hour increase in the minimum wage would cost some 300,000 jobs. Sure enough, the mandated increase to $7.25 took effect in July, and right on cue the August and September jobless numbers confirm the rapid disappearance of jobs for teenagers.
The September teen unemployment rate hit 25.9%, the highest rate since World War II and up from 23.8% in July. Some 330,000 teen jobs have vanished in two months. Hardest hit of all: black male teens, whose unemployment rate shot up to a catastrophic 50.4%. It was merely a terrible 39.2% in July.
The biggest explanation is of course the bad economy. But it's precisely when the economy is down and businesses are slashing costs that raising the minimum wage is so destructive to job creation some economists say. Congress began raising the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour in July 2007, and there are now 691,000 fewer teens working.
As the minimum wage has risen, the gap between the overall unemployment rate and the teen rate has widened, as it did again last month. (See nearby chart.) The current Congress has spent billions of dollars—including $1.5 billion in the stimulus bill—on summer youth employment programs and job training. Yet the jobless numbers suggest that the minimum wage destroyed far more jobs than the government programs helped to create according to some data and economists.Still Congress and the Obama Administration simply ignore the economic consensus that has long linked higher minimum wages with higher unemployment. Two years ago Mr. Neumark and William Wascher, a Federal Reserve economist, reviewed more than 100 academic studies on the impact of the minimum wage. They found "overwhelming" evidence that the least skilled and the young suffer a loss of employment when the minimum wage is increased. Whatever happened to President Obama's pledge to follow the science? Some politicians prefer to cite a few outlier studies known to be methodologically flawed.
Nonetheless, state lawmakers are also at fault some economists might say. At least 10 states have raised their minimum wages above the federal level in the last decade, largely in response to union lobbying and in the name of helping the working poor. Four states with among the highest wage rates are California, Massachusetts, Michigan and New York. Studies have shown in each case that their wage policies killed jobs for teens. The Massachusetts teen employment rate sank by one-third when the minimum wage rose by 88% between 1995 and 2008.
According to new numbers from the Labor Department, in 2008 only 1.1% of Americans who work 40 hours a week or more even earned the minimum wage. In other words, 98.9% of 40-hour-a-week workers earn more than the minimum. The data also show that teenagers are five times more likely to earn the minimum wage than adults. Minimum wage jobs are nearly all first-time or part-time jobs, and an estimated two of every three minimum wage workers get a pay raise within a year on the job.
Study after study reveals that there are long-term career benefits to working as a teenager and that these benefits go well beyond the pay that these youths receive. A study by researchers at Stanford found that those who do not work as teenagers have lower long-term wages and employability even after 10 years. A high-wage society can only come by making workers more productive, and by destroying starter jobs the minimum wage may reduce long-term earnings.
Another recent study across 17 OECD nations, also by Messrs. Neumark and Wascher, found a highly negative association between higher minimum wages and youth employment rates. But it also concluded that having a starter wage, well below the minimum, counteracts much of this negative jobs impact. If Congress won't suspend its recent minimum wage hike, it should at least create a teenage wage of $4 or $5 an hour to help put hundreds of thousands of teens back to work according to some economists. In fact, White House chief economic adviser Larry Summers has endorsed this in the past. Without this change, expect the teen unemployment to remain very high for a long time some economists say.
Still the reality is that America has a huge problem when it comes to the high unemployment rate amongst our nation’s youth. While a part of the problem could be the minimum wage but in this nation with everything costing so much, how can anyone expect our teens and youth to simply work for $4 or $5 when that won’t even buy a decent meal now deals even at a fast food restaurant.
Therefore those economists who advocate for such a notion need to use their college educated degrees to come up with a better way to improve the outlook of our nation’s youth job options.
Now more than ever, our youth in America needs just as much as the unemployed auto worker and countless other Americans. Many of us have graduated with our Bachelor’s and are working on post-bachelor degrees but at the same time, we are looking for jobs that offer us a steady pay at the least but at the most a steady paying job with benefits such as healthcare.
The unemployment rate among our nation’s youth needs to be dealt with properly and the Labor Department knows it and politicians all across this nation know it. We need to find jobs for youth like myself who have been looking for a permanent paying job for nearly a year since graduating from undergrad.
The truth of the matter is that the government is constantly hiring but our youth including myself have to compete with countless others for these jobs and the process of getting hiring by the government for some positions is a daunting task.
Nonetheless the fact is that in today’s economic recession, no longer can our youth suffer and the unemployment for youth and America continue to rise without our nation doing something about it.
So there should be no doubt, our youth need jobs, I need a job and America’s economists, and politicians need to find a way to provide jobs for us to do more to help this nation succeed.
The numbers show that our nation’s youth are suffering worst than all other age groups especially with older workers working past their Social Security age.
Therefore, now more than ever, we need solutions for our youth to live and prosper. We need solutions America.
Now let’s get to work to put our nation’s future to work on building a greater nation than the one they inherited not now but right now.
The time is now to put our youth to work!
No longer can these numbers continue and if we are going to win this war on our youth than we must put our youth to work right here, right now!
Give our youth jobs and opportunities to grow! So let’s employ our youth today!
SAVE OUR YOUTH!
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