Jobs Crisis Hits Young Workers Hard

The unemployment rate for young workers between ages 16 to 24 has skyrocketed as millions of young people have lost jobs and school enrollment has steadily increased over the past decade.

The jobless rate nearly doubled among young workers to a peak of 19 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 and has remained high, averaging 17.4 percent in the second quarter of this year, compared with 6.7 percent for older workers and 9.1 percent for all workers.

At the same time, the proportion of workers 55 and older in the workforce has increased as the Baby Boom generation ages and older workers are delaying retirement, especially following huge drops in home values and investments during the recession.


Workers 62 and older were the only age group that gained jobs during 2008 and 2009, when some 8.7 million jobs were eliminated, Richard Johnson, director of the Urban Institute’s retirement policy program, told the Daily Labor Report (subscription required).

Young workers will discuss strategies to mobilize to turn the economy around and create more jobs during the second annual Next Up Young Workers Summit, Sept. 29-Oct. 2, 2011 in Minneapolis. For more information and to register for the summit, click here.

The problem isn’t that older people are taking jobs from youth, said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). He tells the Daily Labor Report:

What’s keeping young people from getting jobs is not competition from other people but a lousy economy that nobody seems to be doing anything about.

Younger workers are trying to get a foothold, and when there are no jobs being created it’s hard for them to get a foothold.

Sarah Watt, an economist at Wells Fargo Securities, told DLR that older workers with more experience can command higher wages, but younger workers competing in a large pool of unemployed workers for relatively few job openings are less able to demand better pay when they do find jobs.

With fewer workers retiring, businesses are not hiring as many workers as they typically would, particularly for the entry-level positions that often are filled by youth, Watt said. As a result, some young adults are going back to school, but others “are having trouble finding jobs,” she said.