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For millions of American teenagers, summer means a time of fun and a break from school work. But increasingly today, under heavy family financial pressures, it also means trying to find a summer job or, in the case of those who have left school, any sort of job at all.
That has become tough- While we don’t have statistics for this area in Virginia, the national unemployment rate for the labor force as a whole in the first three months in 1977 was 7.4 per cent.
But 18.6 per cent of 16 and 19 year olds were jobless, including 37.8 per cent of the blacks in that age group.
Summer job programs sponsored by local governments usually are swamped by applicants. New York, for example, plans to hold a lottery to fill 1,100 summer jobs with the parks department. The demand is huge despite the .fact that the jobs involve heavy physical labor apd pay only $27 a day for three days of work a week.
Available jobs today go begging because young people regard them as demeaning. There is substantial truth in the feeling that rising expectations in this country are destroying the work ethic. Somewhere along the line, we are losing pride in simply having a working job. Kids no longer feel that whatever job they have, it has some dignity. They hold the trash man in low esteem, but where would town people be without him?
The main reason jobless teenagers have trouble finding work is that they lack marketable skills. Recognizing
92.8%