Posted on 06/16/2019 2:19:02 PM PDT by Twotone
Though their population has increased, there are fewer Idaho teenagers in the workforce than there were 20 years ago. In 1998, more than 25,000 Idahoans between the ages of 14 and 18 were employed, two decades later, about 24,500 Idaho youngsters earn a paycheck, according to government data.
That four percent drop in the number of young employees today versus 1998 is amplified by the fact that Idaho’s population was 1.2 million then, and 1.7 million now. The state’s total workforce has grown by 35 percent.
And while policymakers are stoked about Idaho’s unemployment rate remaining below 3 percent, the job participation rate for Idahoans age 16-19 stands at about 41 percent.
The impact of youth unemployment on Idaho’s labor market is palpable, with consequences both immediate and long term. Today, employers are practically pleading for people to come work for them. Help wanted signs abound, but too few applicants are in the queue. Auto shops, lawn care companies, restaurants, stores, and many others worry about filling positions. Customers complain about long waits for service, but there are too few employees to respond to rising demand. More young workers could certainly help fill the gap.
Young people who stay out of the workforce until their later years arrive in the workforce lacking basic skills they should have acquired earlier in life. Employers fret about young adults they’ve hired who can’t perform menial tasks, or who can’t perform either as part of a team or independently. Such employees either won’t remain employed or will be the first on the chopping block when the labor market invariably contracts. Lacking a job, these skill-free teens will be the first to sign up for government entitlement programs.
(Excerpt) Read more at idahofreedom.org ...
Helicopter mommies protecting their sweethearts from everything are one part, stupid state laws limiting the ages one can begin working are another. It’s 16 or 17 in Maryland. Insane. I was earning money at 12 and a real paycheck at 14.
We are doing a lot of work to the house we bought in the Idaho Panhandle a year ago. Every single contractor I’ve spoken to says he could put ten more GOOD people to work right now (general contractors, carpenters, roofers, electricians, landscapers). They hire teens and they typically last no more than two weeks. They often just stop showing up or they complain “You want me to work THAT HARD all the time? For THAT pay?” Then they come in late, complain about the pay WHILE working and the boss in earshot, and won’t put their phones down. “What do you mean I can’t bring my phone onto the site?”
The business owners are incredibly hard working and put in long hours. But not their employees.
It is not a pretty picture. You’d think this “last outpost” in CONUS would still have a good work ethic, but not the case.
My father was a contractor who put me to
work while I was in junior high school,
so we were about the same age. When I joined
the Navy right out of high school, it’s
more like I was finally running away.
Child labor laws were — at least theoretically — made to keep kids out of coal mine and away from dangerous machines in textile mills.
In my opinion, they serve basically no purpose today. Let the kids work at anything they are capable of doing, if they are willing to do it.
You are lucky they waited 15 minutes to take a break.
Real colleges (as opposed to the jokes currently out there) would make a solid work record of at least one year’s worth of real work) a requirement to get into any creditable academic major.
Without knowing how many there are between the ages of 14&18 this story makes no sense.
People are having fewer kids and the increase in population may be people from out of State moving there and they may not be or have kids.
“Entitlement Attitudes,”
Has the lower age at which kids can legally be employed changed?
Here in Cali, when I was a kid, I went to work in the summers at age 12. Worked digging irrigation ditches and clearing weeds in the potato fields.
Then the laws changed and it was illegal to work before age 16.
Us kids still went to work, we were just paid under the table. It beat the heck out of sitting on our arses all summer, bored to death, and we had spending money for the school year.
Why should they work? Mom & Dad will give them whatever they want, or they’ll steal it. When Mom & Dad won’t do it any more, they’ll just steal it. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, Ozzie & Harriet are OVER. So much for libtard rearing and educating of children.
You’re missing a stat in there....how many 14-18 year olds were there in 1998 as compared to today.
Two words: Financial Aid.
Even in the Trump Miracle Economy it’s not easy to find jobs that you can do from mom’s cellar with both hands wrapped around a smart phone or a game controller.
I hired the son of a friend of mine to do some grunt work in my attic. Stapling up soffit baffles. It took him four hours to do about five baffles. I fired him and hired his brother who did the other fifty baffles in about 8 hours. His brother is a seriously good worker.
When my son came home from his Freshman year in college, he said he needed to get a job. I told him to call my buddy, the contractor who needed a grunt.
I told my son that I knew too many engineers who couldn’t operate a screwdriver and he needed the experience.
He worked for my friend for two summers, even running jobs and is now a skilled aerospace engineer
My next door neighbor’s kid just finished 6th grade. He hates school. He couldn’t wait for summer vacation to start so he could work on his grandpa’s farm. He’s been doing stuff like skidding logs for the last couple of years, at least. While in school (I sub there) he is sullen and convinced he’s stupid. Later that afternoon while doing chores he’s cheerful and full of energy.
If school doesn’t crush his spirit, he’ll do fine.
I sometimes tell people I was a “draft dodger”, I joined the Navy at seventeen to avoid the draft. Actually I joined to get away from the forty acres where I had walked behind a plow since I was ten or maybe even younger. I know I had work to do from the time I was big enough to pick up a single piece of firewood and carry it up the front steps to a wooden box on the porch. By age fourteen I was an experienced farmhand and expected to go and do what needed doing without supervision. If I was lucky I got a chance to help a neighbor or relative for a few days during the summer and make maybe three dollars for a day in the hot sun. Navy boot camp was more like a vacation than my summer “vacation” from school ever was. Of course, according to my father, my youth was a bed of roses compared to his.
Sounds like a great kid. As usual, the educational establishment shows their hatred for kids when they keep shoving the whole college for all scam.
One of my other kids had little use for school beyond the basics. He is a trucker and loved the lure of the road.
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