The Vanishing First Job: How We Priced Teenagers Out of the Workforce
The Vanishing First Job: How We Priced Teenagers Out of the Workforce
There was a time when a minimum-wage job was understood for what it usually was: an entry point.
When I was younger, teenagers worked at fast-food restaurants, grocery stores, gas stations, service centres and other basic retail and service jobs. Nobody expected these positions to support a family or finance an independent middle-class lifestyle. They were jobs you took while living at home, going to school and figuring out how the working world operated. The wage mattered, of course.
But the experience mattered just as much. You learned how to show up on time. You learned how to deal with an unpleasant customer without losing your temper. You learned that somebody else was depending on you to finish your shift. You learned how to take instructions, work with people you did not necessarily like, manage your money and gradually become more independent. Most importantly, you acquired something every employer eventually asks for: experience. Today, many parents are discovering that their teenagers cannot even get through the door.
Walk into a Tim Hortons, grocery store, big-box retailer or other business that traditionally employed large numbers of teenagers and look at who is working. An increasingly noticeable share of those jobs are being held by adults.
That observation raises an uncomfortable question:
If adults increasingly occupy the bottom rung of the employment ladder, where exactly are teenagers supposed to start climbing?
We Changed What Minimum-Wage Work Was Supposed to Be
Over the past several decades, the political discussion around minimum wage has gradually shifted.
Instead of asking what an entry-level job is worth in the labour market, we increasingly ask what income a person needs in order to live independently.
Those are not necessarily the same number.
The idea of a “living wage” sounds compassionate because nobody wants people to struggle financially. But economic policy does not operate on intentions. It operates through incentives, costs and trade-offs.
When governments substantially increase the cost of hiring the least-experienced workers, employers have reasons to become more selective.
If an employer must pay considerably more for an employee, why hire a 16-year-old who has never worked before when an adult applicant has years of work experience, greater availability and potentially requires less supervision?
From the employer’s perspective, that decision is entirely rational.
From the teenager’s perspective, however, the result can be devastating.
The young worker does not merely lose a few dollars of income. He or she loses the first line on a résumé.
And without the first job, getting the second job becomes harder.
The Experience Paradox
We routinely tell young people that employers want experience.
Then we construct a labour market in which obtaining that experience becomes increasingly difficult.
A teenager applies for a basic service job and competes against adults who may have ten or twenty years of employment history.
The teenager loses because he lacks experience.
But he cannot acquire experience because employers prefer experienced workers.
That is a dangerous cycle.
A first job was never merely about producing hamburgers, stocking shelves or collecting shopping carts. It was part of the transition from childhood into adulthood.
Young people learned workplace behaviour in relatively forgiving environments where the stakes were low.
They made mistakes.
They discovered that being tired was not necessarily a reason to miss work.
They dealt with supervisors.
They learned that customers could be unreasonable.
They discovered the relationship between work, effort and money.
Some learned very quickly that they did not want to spend their lives doing that type of work.
That lesson had value too.
A miserable Saturday shift could be an excellent motivation to finish school, learn a trade, attend university or develop a marketable skill.
When the Stepping Stone Becomes the Destination
There is another problem.
If society attempts to transform every job into a job capable of supporting an adult indefinitely, we may unintentionally reduce the incentive to move beyond those jobs.
There should be economic distance between work requiring little training and work requiring significant skill, education, responsibility or specialization.
That difference provides an incentive to develop.
Why learn a skilled trade?
Why complete difficult professional training?
Why improve weak English and communication skills?
Why pursue qualifications?
Why accept greater responsibility?
The answer traditionally included the expectation that acquiring valuable skills would significantly improve your economic position.
Compress the wage structure too aggressively and that incentive weakens.
This does not mean people working in low-skilled jobs deserve disrespect. Quite the opposite. Every legitimate job deserves basic dignity. But should one be relying on this job in this regard?
But respecting workers is not the same thing as pretending every job has the same economic value or developmental purpose.
Some jobs are naturally entry-level.
That is not an insult.
It is precisely what makes them valuable.
The Forgotten Cost of Good Intentions
Public policy often focuses intensely on the people immediately receiving a benefit while paying far less attention to the people who quietly lose an opportunity.
When minimum wages rise, the person who keeps a job receives a larger paycheque. That person is visible.
The 16-year-old who is never hired is invisible.
There is no termination notice.
There is no unemployment statistic showing that he lost a job.
The job simply never existed for him.
The employer hired someone more experienced, reduced staffing, shortened hours, installed self-service technology or demanded more productivity from fewer employees.
We then wonder why teenagers reach their late teens or early twenties without meaningful employment experience.
Society cannot simultaneously make entry-level workers increasingly expensive, encourage employers to demand greater productivity from those workers, fill those positions with experienced adults and then act surprised when inexperienced young people struggle to enter the labour market.
This Is Bigger Than Minimum Wage
Minimum wage is not the only reason this has happened.
The labour market has changed in many ways. Automation has eliminated some traditional teenage jobs. Retail has consolidated. Online commerce has changed staffing. Employers have become more risk-conscious. Scheduling requirements can favour workers with greater availability. Population growth and migration can increase competition for entry-level positions. Economic weakness can push experienced adults into jobs they would previously have avoided.
All of these factors matter.
But that makes protecting genuine entry-level opportunities for young people more important, not less.
Instead, we have largely ignored the developmental role those jobs once played.
Our Compassion Has Become Poorly Targeted
There is a broader philosophical problem underneath this.
We increasingly attempt to design economic systems around the proposition that every position must provide every worker with a comfortable adult standard of living.
It is an attractive idea.
It is also detached from how human development and labour markets actually work.
A 16-year-old working fifteen hours a week while living with his parents has fundamentally different economic needs from a 38-year-old supporting two children.
Trying to design one wage policy around both circumstances inevitably creates distortions.
In attempting to protect everyone equally, we may have neglected the group that most needs access to the bottom of the employment ladder: young people who have nothing yet to offer an employer except willingness, potential and the opportunity to prove themselves.
That first opportunity matters enormously.
We Need Entry-Level Jobs Again
The answer is not poverty wages, nor is it abandoning basic employment standards.
The answer is recognizing that entry-level employment serves a social function beyond the wage itself.
We should be asking whether teenagers are actually gaining access to the labour market.
We should examine whether wage laws, payroll costs, hiring regulations and other policies unintentionally encourage employers to choose experienced adults over inexperienced young workers.
We should consider whether youth employment deserves different policy treatment precisely because a first job is partly employment and partly education.
And culturally, we should stop pretending that every job must become a lifelong career.
There is nothing wrong with working at a fast-food restaurant if you are using that job to advance oneself. A career? No, I do not think that is acceptable.
There is something wrong with an economy in which a 16-year-old cannot get hired at one.
A functioning society needs a ladder.
Not everyone starts in the same place, and not every rung is supposed to be comfortable enough to remain on forever.
The bottom rung exists so people can step onto it, learn, grow and move upward.
If we remove that rung in the name of improving it, we should not be surprised when an entire generation has trouble getting off the ground.
Please share this, talk about it and understand how this has affected our society.
