My teenage summer jobs were typical: lousy and formative. One summer, I scooped ice cream by a dock for $5 an hour plus tips. The next, I bagged groceries, with an August promotion to check-out and the privilege of moistening the leafy vegetables with a spray bottle. These jobs were monotonous and ill-paid but also instructive for my obnoxious, eye-rolling, teenage self. Codes need to be memorized. Uniforms need to be worn. Bosses need to be heeded. I learned those lessons, and I remember them today.

But fewer and fewer American teenagers are having such early working experiences. From the 1950s through the 1990s, between 45 and 60 percent of teenagers had summer jobs, with the numbers ebbing and flowing with the business cycle. Today, just one in four American teens has a summer job. Indeed, over the past decade, summer employment among people ages 16 to 19 has plummeted to the lowest level since the government started keeping tabs after World War II. Why? And what are today’s teens doing instead?

One piece of good news is that they are not merely sitting at home or goofing off with their friends. According to a 2010 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the proportion of “idle” teens has actually fallen over the same time period. Nor does the recession explain the drop either. The youth unemployment rate has climbed precipitously, but young Americans started opting out of the labor market long before the economy soured in 2007.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board fingered one possible answer this weekend: recent hikes to the minimum wage. “One of the first acts of the gone-but-not-forgotten Nancy Pelosi ascendancy was to raise the minimum wage in stages to $7.25 an hour in 2009 from $5.15 in 2007,” the conservative-leaning board says. “Even liberals ought to understand that raising the cost of hiring the young and unskilled while employers are slashing payrolls is loopy economics.”

But it is also loopy to think that the minimum wage hikes explain what is going on with America’s teens. For one, businesses can pay workers under the age of 20 less than the minimum wage as long as they work for fewer than 90 days. More importantly, the phenomenon of teens electing not to join the labor force started long before the minimum-wage hikes, and previous minimum-wage hikes did not squeeze the young out of the labor market. Surely the minimum wage increase has some effect. But it is hardly a complete explanation.

So what is going on? There are two main answers. First, more teenagers are staying in school or choosing to do prep programs over the summer, at their own behest or by order of their helicopter parents. Second, young workers vying for menial jobs have faced increased competition from older workers and immigrants.

Indeed, a lot more teenagers are enrolling in summer school, and it goes a long way to explaining their dwindling participation in the workforce. In the summer of 1985, about 17 percent of teenagers attended some kind of summer school. Now, more than half do. On top of that, thousands more kids are taking other test-prep, advanced, and remedial classes. Community-service and internship programs have also become more popular, though there are no official statistics to show just how many kids are signing up for them.

The shift seems sociological as much as it is economic. “A number of factors suggest that teenagers are facing greater academic demands and pressures than in the past, which, together with the desire to achieve, may incline them toward placing greater emphasis on academics than on working,” economist Teresa Morisi of the Bureau of Labor Statistics explains. Families are wealthier. College admissions are more competitive. Secondary education has become so expensive that few kids feel it is worth it to save up for it over the summer. Add it all up, and more kids study and fewer kids work during the hot summer months.

Second, teenagers have faced increased competition for those poorly paid summertime jobs in the retail, service, and construction sectors. There are more immigrants, both undocumented and documented, to compete against for low-paying gigs. A model done by the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies found that a 10 percentage-point increase “in the immigrant share of a state’s work force from 1994 to 2007 reduced the labor force participation rate of U.S.-born teenagers by 7.9 percentage points.” Studies by economists at the Federal Reserve and the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University have also found significant employment effects.

Teenagers face competition from their grandparents, too. In the late 1990s, the oldest baby boomers started to reach retirement age, but many remained in or rejoined the workforce, often accepting less-taxing, lower-paying, part-time positions—exactly the type of jobs once favored by teenagers. Just as the proportion of teens working has fallen, the proportion of workers older than 55 has climbed.

So while fewer kids are scooping ice cream and bagging groceries for the summer, more are spending their weeks off on schoolwork or unpaid labor. Youth employment might be down, but we hardly need to be wringing our hands about the laziness of the next generation. Still, there is one extremely worrisome trend in the data: the youth unemployment number—the proportion of kids who want jobs but cannot get them. The recession inflated the rate of youth unemployment to levels unseen since modern record-taking started in the 1940s. It currently stands at 24.2 percent, and more than 40 percent for black teens. A substantial body of economic literature shows that bouts of unemployment prove particularly corrosive for young workers, leading to reduced earnings and further joblessness down the road. So forget the kids who don’t want to work. Worry about the kids who do.

Original Article: http://www.slate.com/id/2298442/

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It seems like a simple concept: Make employees feel appreciated, and they will work harder and be more loyal. But there is often a disconnect between the type of appreciation employees want and what their managers think they want, according to a recent study by the International Association of Administrative Professionals and OfficeTeam, a staffing company in Menlo Park, California. Managers responding to the survey ranked promotions and cash bonuses as the two most effective ways of recognizing employee accomplishments, but workers said they preferred an in-person thank-you or having a job well done reported to senior management. In other words, though a decent bonus will always be a highly coveted form of recognition, employers often underestimate the degree to which workers value kind words delivered face to face.

That may sound like good news for companies looking for inexpensive ways to show appreciation to employees. In many ways, though, it’s easier to hand out a bonus than to create a culture in which saying thank you is a regular occurrence. “Especially during tough economic periods, it’s important to give people face time and basic human appreciation on a regular basis,” says Debra Condren, a business psychologist and founder of Manhattan Business Coaching in New York City. “A plaque may be nice for 15 minutes, but once it goes on the wall, people tend to forget about it.”

Brown admits an employee-of-the-month program seemed like the least time-consuming way to make sure his staff continued to feel appreciated as Datotel grew. Based on information gleaned from employees during informal conversations, however, he realized a less rigid, more personal approach was in order. To encourage his eight-person management team to get in the habit of reporting employee accomplishments, he set aside part of his daily morning phone call with senior executives to discuss exemplary work, in addition to 15 minutes in the middle of each weekly management meeting. When an employee did something praiseworthy, Brown encouraged someone other than his or her direct manager to say thank you in person.

Brown also made a conscious effort to thank employees several times a week, often through handwritten notes mailed to their homes. “At a tech company, it’s all too easy to just write e-mails,” he says. “It takes time to sit down and write out a note, but it goes a long way.”

Stephanie Lewis, an engineer who joined Datotel three years ago, was pleasantly surprised to find a note from Brown in her mailbox this past June. In the note, handwritten on Datotel stationery, Brown noted that Lewis had been praised during several recent management meetings for working closely with a customer and thanked her for her hard work. “It made me feel important to get something so personal and unique, especially since I’m sure David has several hundred other things swirling around in his head,” Lewis says.

Thanking employees regularly may also help them accept criticism better, so long as the feedback is specific, says Rick Maurer, a consultant based in Arlington, Virginia, who specializes in guiding businesses through big changes. “If you make it clear that you are trying to make employees better at what they do, positive and negative feedback become a regular part of the conversation,” he says. And it’s important to discriminate. “If you say thank you all the time, even when people do mediocre work, you won’t build an environment where people handle criticism better,” says Maurer.

Persuading frontline managers to follow the boss’s lead and adopt a culture of appreciation may prove daunting. Ken Wisnefski, founder of WebiMax, an online marketing company in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, had to have a difficult talk with a manager at his previous company, which he sold last year. Wisnefski says the manager had a habit of “throwing employees under the bus” during meetings and taking credit for their accomplishments. Angel Foglio, a former employee of the company who has since moved to WebiMax, recalls spending her days tiptoeing around the manager, trying to stay out of trouble. “She would recognize when people did something wrong, but not when they did something well,” Foglio says.

Wisnefski finally called the manager into his office to explain the importance of recognizing people’s accomplishments. “I told her if she tried to take credit for everything, she was going to have an unhappy staff, and that it was already starting,” Wisnefski says. “I caught her off guard, and it was upsetting, but she was a lot more willing to give people credit after that.”

Last May, when Wisnefski launched WebiMax, which owns several consumer websites, he recounted the cautionary tale during a meeting with his new management team. The story resonated with Danielle Hopely, vice president of the WebiMax website JustWeddings.com, who realized she had been an unappreciative manager at her previous job. Now, she makes an effort to walk around the office each day looking for opportunities to praise the members of her 20-person staff. “I do have to remind myself to do it, because I’m busy,” Hopely says. “But I’m much happier as this kind of manager.”

Foglio, who now works for Hopely, is much happier as well. “Danielle makes me feel like a valuable part of the company,” Foglio says, citing a recent instance in which Hopely praised her for calming down a frantic bride. The best part, she adds, is that Hopely’s appreciative attitude is beginning to rub off on her co-workers. “I hear the sales guys complimenting each other every day,” Foglio says. “It’s not just corporate showing appreciation. It’s happening on a daily basis with the whole team.”

View original article here.

The study by the Pew Research Center, an independent research group, highlights a rapidly graying labor market due to longer life spans, an aging baby boomer population and a souring economy that has made it harder to retire.

Pew’s survey and analysis of government data, found the share of Americans ages 55 and older who have or were seeking a job rose to 40 percent this year, the highest level since 1961. In contrast, people 16 to 24 who were active in the labor market decreased to 57 percent, down from 66 percent in 2000.

Asked to identify why they’re working, 54 percent of older workers responded that it was mostly because they wanted to, citing a desire while they were still feeling healthy to be productive, interact with other people or to “give myself something to do.” A sizable number of them — nearly 4 in 10 — also acknowledged staying put at work partly because of the recession.

Among young people 16 to 24, nearly half the respondents said they weren’t working because they wanted to focus on school or job training, reflecting a growing view among Americans that a college education is needed to get ahead in life. About 4 in 10 said they looked for work but couldn’t find a job.

In all, the number of older workers is projected to increase by 11.9 million in the next few years. They will make up nearly 1 in 4 workers by 2016.

“When it comes to work, this recession is having a differential impact by age. It’s keeping older adults in the work force longer, and younger adults out of the work force longer,” said Paul Taylor, director of the Pew Social and Demographic Trends Project. “Both of these trends pre-dated the current downturn, both have been intensified by it, and both are poised to outlast it.”

Among other findings:

—The U.S. labor force is expected to increase by 12.8 million workers from 2006 to 2016, including the 11.9 million who will be ages 55 and older. Workers ages 25 to 54 will increase by 2.5 million, while those ages 16 to 24 will decrease by 1.5 million.

—After increasing for five decades, the share of women holding or seeking a job has flattened at 59 percent. That is about 13 percentage points below the rate of men in the labor market. Asked to identify their reasons for not working, women were nine times more likely than men to cite child care or other family responsibilities as a major factor.

—Older workers tend to be happier. About 54 percent of workers ages 65 and older said they were “completely satisfied” with their jobs, compared with 29 percent of workers ages 18 to 64. That reflected the fact that they were working primarily for more social reasons, rather than financial need.

—Most working mothers prefer a part-time job. Among those with a full-time job outside the home, 6 in 10 said they would like to have a job with fewer hours. By contrast, just 19 percent of fathers with a full-time job and a young child said they would prefer to work part-time.

“Public attitudes about women and work may have changed dramatically over the past generation, but mothers and fathers still experience the tug between work and family in very different ways,” Taylor said. “Mothers who have children at home and work full time would rather be working part time, or not at all. Fathers who have children at home are glad to have a full-time job.”

Pew based its findings on data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It also interviewed 1,815 people ages 16 and older by cell phone or landline from July 20 to Aug. 2 about their attitudes toward work. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.

View original article here.