Watch Left by the Recovery, Inner City Teens Struggle to Find Jobs on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
pbs | Paul Solman: Northeastern University economist Andrew Sum
is featured in our youth joblessness story on the NewsHour Friday. His
full picture of the crisis is essential reading, however, and so we
share more of my interview with him here. For example, if you are a poor
African-American high school teenage dropout, your likelihood of having
a job is -- 5 percent.
Paul Solman: You have used the term "age twist" to describe today's job market? What do you mean?
Andrew Sum: What has happened is not a flat trend
where every age group is moving up and down together as jobs grow and
shrink. The younger you are, the more likely it is that you've been
thrown out of the labor market. So for 16, 17, 18-year-olds, their
employment rates have dropped to about half what they were a decade ago.
Meanwhile, people 57 and over are more likely to be working today than
they were in 2000. But the younger you are, the more likely it is
you've been thrown out of the market.
Paul Solman: How does that compare to the historical relationship between age and joblessness?
Andrew Sum: Up until 1995, older workers were
retiring more from the labor market so their employment rate was
actually declining -- from the 1960s -- and then, starting in the 1990s,
it began to change. The baby boomers were getting older. They had
different work behavior and were more likely to stay in the labor market
than their predecessors.
Paul Solman: That's people like us?
Andrew Sum: That's absolutely right. But among the
young, we began to observe the problem after 2001. When the boom ended
in 2000, the labor market, like it always does, generated lots of job
losses for young people. What was different this time was that when the
economy recovered, it generated no net new jobs for teenagers. Then
along comes the 2007-2009 Great Recession, and the labor market for
young people is destroyed.
The sad thing is that since the nation began to add jobs in 2009,
we've created about 5.2 million additional jobs for America's workers.
Teenagers in the aggregate received none of them. Not one.
Paul Solman: So, there are no more jobs for teenagers today than there were when the recovery started in 2009?
Andrew Sum: That's right. Not one.
Paul Solman: How do you explain that?
Andrew Sum: The labor market is still in a depressed
state. Employers are telling us, and showing this in their behavior,
that they'd rather hire older workers and young adults than teenagers.
They find that they can do it. When we were talking to employers and I
asked them about customer service, "Why were you hiring younger college
grads rather than teenagers?"
They said, "For one reason, because I can." They've got choices about
whom to hire and teenagers just unfortunately are at the very back of
that queue.
