When I was a teenager, in the late '70s, there was one thing my friends and I all had in common: Jobs. We all worked. Most of us had worked since we were physically big enough to do so, as many of our families farmed, or knew people who farmed, and farm work starts young. I was driving my grandfather's tractor when I was 10 or 11 years old, and at 14, my friends and I were walking beans, haying, and detassling. I worked some in my uncle's livestock auction barn from 14-16, and between that summer work and winters running a trapline, I managed to support my hobbies, which made my parents happy - all they had to do was feed me, which I'm sure entailed no small expense.
Then, when I was 16, I got a part-time job at the Woolco store down in Cedar Falls. For those who don't remember Woolco, it was the F.W. Woolworth Company's big-box discount retail chain. I worked in Sporting Goods, which meant a great part of my job was standing around talking about hunting and fishing, which was something I had already been doing for free anyway. In my senior year, I went full-time, and I ended up working there for around three years. I learned a lot about the world of employment from that job: How to make your name known, how to deal with other employees, who could be trusted and who couldn't, and how to learn the difference between the two. I did pretty good; by May of 1980, I was making a princely $3.40 an hour, paid in cash money every Friday, and I thought I was living the life of Reilly. It was a valuable life experience that I couldn't have gained any other way. All of my friends, back then, had similar experiences.
Teenagers today don't seem to be getting these lessons. The labor force participation rates for teens (16-19) are at near-historic lows. The highest this statistic has reached since 1948 was in late 1978, a year after I hired on at Woolco; the rate then was approaching 60 percent of 16-19-year-olds who had nonfarm jobs. That had dropped slightly to 57 percent in May of 1980, when I graduated from high school.
In April 2025, the most recent month for which records are available, that figure stands at 36.3 percent. That's up from the COVID-era May 2020 low of 29 percent. The number - see the chart at the link above - started to crash in 2000.
What happened in 2000? Well, a lot of teens started spending a lot of time in front of computer screens, later tablets, and smartphones. Several factors could have contributed to the dropoff in teen employment, and I'll get into those. But first, why should a teenager work?
Because an organized workplace offers life lessons you just can't get anywhere else.
Whenever I've had occasion to offer career advice to a young person entering the workforce, I have always pointed out that success in the workplace isn't hard; you just have to do three things: 1) Show up before the other guy, 2) Work a little harder than the other guy, and 3) Never pass up the chance to learn something new. I learned those lessons, primarily, at Woolco, my first real corporate job, and those lessons stuck with me.
All work is worth doing, and if anyone ever harbors any doubt about whether the work they are doing is worth doing, I would ask one thing: Is someone paying you to do it? If so, then you are producing value, therefore, the work is worth doing. There are no lousy jobs, my father used to say, only lousy people. A part-time job for a teenager instills all these lessons early, which means when one settles on a career, those values, those habits, those skills are already in place.
There are a couple of things that are likely causing the dropoff in teen employment. One of them is a matter of policy: Minimum wage laws.
See Also: Minimum Wage Hikes Result in Fewer Jobs
Happy Labor Day! Remembering Those First Jobs
When I started at Woolco, the federal minimum wage in the United States was $2.65 an hour, and that's what Woolco paid me. But I worked hard, and I didn't stay there long, and that's the lesson. The minimum wage, we must note, was never intended to be a "living wage." Ill-advised as any such law is, the original intent was to establish a floor for entry-level workers. That's not the case now; in places like California, teenagers with few or no skills are priced completely out of the market by minimum wage laws implemented by economic ignoramuses who shout that one should be able to support a family on the minimum wage. This may sound heartless, but if someone is married and has two kids, and is making minimum wage, then that person needs to take a good, hard look at their life.
There's another factor: The entire "every kid must go to college" horse squeeze that permeates our education system. Young skulls full of mush are all too often going through the K-12 system with that as a goal, whether they can or want to do college-level work or not. The trades are de-emphasized, and that's bad. Not only do we desperately need skilled tradesmen, but entry-level jobs in the trades were where many of my friends found their first formal employment, and many of them went on to careers in those trades, careers kick-started by the skills they learned as teenage part-timers.
This is a societal phenomenon that should be turned around, and now. There are no good reasons why teenagers shouldn't have part-time jobs, and many reasons why they should. This will require some reforms: Changing minimum wage laws, perhaps (if it will make it happen), to implement a reduced minimum wage for those part-time workers under 20 to avoid pricing young people out of the entry-level workforce. I'd rather see minimum wage laws done away with completely, but politics is the art of the possible, and in this case, a tiered system may be the good that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of.
Working was good for us kids back then. It's good for kids now. It's gratifying, when looking at the statistics, that the teen labor force participation rate is at least 36 percent, but it would be better, for the kids, for the economy, and for the country, were it back to 60 percent. It would put money in kids' pockets, teach them the value of work, and, not least of all, drag their attention away from smartphones and laptops, for at least a few hours every day. That, in and of itself, would make the necessary policy changes worthwhile.
