Teen summer employment is headed for its worst year since 1948

Jaelyn Chester will wait your tables or stock your shelves. She’ll wash your dishes or scrub your toilets. If only someone would give the 17-year-old a chance. “I’ve been looking everywhere,” says Chester, an A+ student, high school basketball star and aspiring engineer who has blanketed her community with dozens of applications. “I’m not unemployed because I’m incompetent. I’m unemployed because nobody’s hiring.” The summer job, a rite-of-passage for generations of American teenagers, isn’t so easy to come by. About one-third of 16- to 19-year-olds in the U.S. were employed last summer, federal data show, down from a peak of about 60% in the late 1970s. Experts’ pessimistic forecasts are combining with reports from frustrated jobless young people around the country to form a seasonal outlook far from bathed in sunshine. “The opportunities for workers at the start of the career ladder started to dry up,” says Nicole Bachaud, an economist for ZipRecruiter, saying teens are among the labor market’s “most marginalized groups.” Without a job, Chester worries her summer will be ruined. She wonders how she’ll fill her tank with gas and what she’ll do if she wants to go to a concert. A trip to look at colleges in North Carolina with some friends would be destined to be canceled. So her hunt continues. Chester keeps copies of her resume in her car and has a 30-second spiel memorized when she decides to pop into a restaurant or store and try to talk with a manager. She and her friends help ready one another when they set out on their job hunt, trading tips and professional-looking clothes from their closets. Positions that once sounded awful to her, like dishwashing, no longer seem so. “At this point,” says the teen from Lake Mary, Florida, “it would be hard to say no to anything.” Analyzing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas found the number of jobs secured by teens fell 25% last summer from the year pri