The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Teen Employment Isn't Exploitation
Few things set the tone of adult life like taking on a job as a teenager. Journalist Mark Hemingway argues that few things also set the tone like not getting a job as a teenager.
More than once, I've been drawn into a conversation among friends and family about who had the worst job. To the extent this is a competition, I always win because when I was 19, I spent a summer working at a port-a-potty place.
He says the job was actually pretty great, but he relays a particular episode that would have most people suppressing a gag reflex. That proves his point, though — he did the job and he’s better for it.
Anyway, for the cognoscenti out there reading all of this, I know what you’re probably thinking — how could I, an otherwise capable and well-intentioned young man, have let myself be exploited like this? Voluntarily submitting to the most distasteful whims of my employer is exactly the kind of false consciousness that allows the capitalist machinery to be greased with the blood of vulnerable youth.
If it seems like that last bit is a joke, it’s not much of one. I got my first hourly wage job when I was 14 and worked more strange and demanding jobs as a young man than I can possibly remember. That’s a pretty common experience for my Gen X peers. As I get older, I hate to default to variations on “get off my lawn” and “it builds character,” but you can imagine my reaction to the emerging idea that teenagers working is exploitation.
Hemingway then ventures into some debates over child labor laws, and he marvels over how quickly opponents of teen workers shift from making sure kids are safe “to being shocked that teenagers work in… fast food.” …
Have we reached a place where Americans are so — there’s no better word for this — privileged that people can claim to be shocked and upset by the idea that 14-year-olds are working at McDonald’s?
The depressing answer here is a resounding “yes.” Younger generations of Americans simply haven’t gone out and gotten jobs as teenagers the way previous generations have. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 1978 and 2016 the teen labor force participation rate in the summer fell from 72 percent to 43 percent. What’s more, of the teenagers that were unemployed in the summer, less than 9 percent said they were looking for work.
It’s hard to understate how novel and alien the idea of unemployed teenagers is in human history.
The trouble, he says, is that with fewer Americans taking jobs at young ages, “a substantial percentage of Americans have come of age without either the cultural or financial incentives to go to work as teenagers, so naturally we have a lot of people with no frame of reference who view the prospect of making kids work menial jobs as exploitative rather than formative.”
After rebutting a particularly noxious socialist writer’s attack on parents, Hemingway continues:
Speaking of immaturity, the fact that large numbers of Americans made it to adulthood with a comfortable lifestyle divorced from any understanding of the effort needed to sustain it has obviously disturbing cultural and political implications. …
Now I acknowledge that younger generations are being screwed economically in alarming ways. As of last month, baby boomers were still the largest cohort of home buyers in America. America’s once-vaunted economic mobility is obviously stunted compared to the past, and fixing this may well require some drastic political solutions.
But, while acknowledging the limits of dealing in generational generalizations, it is also hard to be sympathetic to a cohort of people that never needed jobs as teenagers, have developed toxic attitudes toward work broadly, and are now making a hard-left political turn as a result.
The bottom line, he says, is this:
The truth is that one does not wake up one day at age 21 understanding the value of work and what it takes to be productive toward your personal goals. Working as a teenager, ideally a time when you still have some adult guidance at home, goes a long way toward cultivating those skills — even if the jobs most teenagers do aren’t necessarily validating, aren’t always well-paid, and are sometimes just bad experiences.
Learning to overcome your circumstances by reconciling effort and achievement is a pretty necessary life skill, to say nothing of learning to accept that we are all called to varying degrees to do work that we do not want to do. The fact large numbers of Americans apparently feel work is solely about personal fulfillment, not an end in and of itself, is an ominous sign for the future.
Oh, and by the way, he says:
If nothing else, spending a few hours sifting through piles of human excrement turned out to be far better preparation for a career in journalism than I could have imagined.