Youth at Work

Beatrice G. Reubens

We know much less about young people who are employed than we do about those without jobs. The reasons are fairly obvious. Since the early 1970s, youth unemployment has been a highly visible and persistent problem in the industrialized market economy nations. In most countries, youth account for a disproportionate share of total unemployment, whether measured by the youth proportion of the labor force or by historical records on unemployment. The result has been an outpouring of studies on youth unemployment, to the relative neglect of youth employment. Whatever has been true of the national tendency to concentrate on youth unemployment is even more valid for cross-national studies. The latter have focused on comparative studies of youth unemployment rather than on cross-national analyses of the composition and characteristics of youth employment, due to the immediacy of the social problem of out-of-work young people and the need to devise programs to assist them.

Yet, national and cross-national analysis of youth employment may be inherently as, or more, important than studies of unemployed youth for an understanding of the labor market problems of young people, since youth unemployment is the outcome of the interaction between the level and structure of the demand for, and the supply of, young workers. At any given moment, cross-sectionally as well as longitudinally, more young people are likely to be involved in employment than unemployment, and what happens in periods of employment is likely to be of greater consequence than periods of joblessness for differences in lifetime work histories.

Moreover, the types of jobs youth hold may be directly related to youth unemployment levels and patterns. Although we are familiar with the adverse impact of rising levels of youth unemployment on the number and type of jobs open to young people, there has been little study of whether the types of jobs held by the youth groups most prone to unemployment promote recurrent or prolonged unemployment. In this connection, Bowers1 (1981, p.21) points to the importance of obtaining information on youth’s jobs, employers, wages, working conditions, number of employers and number of weeks worked per employer, and reasons for job separation as “critical to unraveling competing hypotheses about youth joblessness.