Possibly related is that we as a society seem to be treating teenagers more as old children and less as young adults in recent years. Such treatment may lead teens to see themselves in the same way and be less likely to want to seek employment without external pressure to do so and may lead parents to seek to limit that sort of pressure.
To me it seemed the opposite. Working at a minimum wage job to have a few bucks to spend on pizza or clothes seemed childish. Working a minimum wage job has no connection or relevance to adult life unless you're planning on being poor. It's economically meaningless compared to the money a kid expects to earn after college, so what matters for a teenager's adult life is to get a leg up on college admissions by working on academics or extracurriculars.
Now, that attitude may not be accurate. Maybe working at McDonald's or some other typical teenage employment provides valuable experience or some skills that will be relevant to their adult life. However, few if any middle-class parents tell their kids that, because they don't want to encourage them. For kids to get used to working a minimum wage job -- to get a taste of self-sufficiency too early -- to believe that life is possible without college -- these are not things that ambitious middle-class parents and teachers want for their kids. They don't want their kids to see life as a highway with exit ramps and rest stops at various points along the way. They want their kids to see life as a railroad to lucrative professional employment, with any departure from the path resulting in a catastrophic derailment.
I strongly disagree that "working a minimum wage job has no connection or relevant to adult life." The self-sufficiency I gained when working for minimum wage at 15 helped put me on the path toward "lucrative professional employment" years later.
The experience of being paid according to your actual value, particularly when you're young and virtually worthless, is an important lesson you don't find in academics or extracurriculars.
"One of my earliest childhood jobs involved shoveling manure at my uncle's dairy farm in upstate New York. Things were going well until my uncle explained that no matter how well I performed, I would never be promoted to farmer. Or even cow. I had hit the manure ceiling.
I consider that experience my first economic stimulus package—the unwelcome realization that my current job was a dead end. While my classmates were building snowmen with carrot noses (mostly the girls) and carrot genitalia (mostly the boys), I started to do some serious career planning about how to get out of the fecal relocation profession and into the warm embrace of a loving corporation. I studied hard, and I earned money for college by mowing lawns, shoveling snow, shoveling even more manure, and (my personal favorite) shoveling frozen manure covered with snow. I saved my meager funds, and with the help of my parents, who both took extra jobs, plus a few scholarships, I clawed my way into college."
There's a bunch of lessons inherent in min-wage jobs, "You get stuff done by doing it", "Not showing up to work means you're fired", etc, that apply to all jobs.
While I agree with you, I don't believe that the current culture of college admissions agrees. In my (anecdotal) experience, most universities in the US value the kid who volunteered at all the politically correct places, took all the right AP classes and passed their corresponding exams, played varsity high-school sports, and knows how to write formulaic essays with minimal effort.
Also, any money that a teenager earns before college only raises the amount that the teen is expected to contribute to their college expenses, effectively lowering their financial aid.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page is, and always has been, garbage. Poorly sourced and poorly argued, whenever I accidentally come across it I always end up in a foul mood. Not that the other papers of record, Washpo and NYT, are all that great either.
This is just some guy with a blog, he's not the media.
The media are Very Serious People, and things like empiricism and statistics aren't part of Good Journalism. They have a much more impartial system, where they ask a democrat and a republican, then average the responses.
Actually, they don't have an impartial system at all; that's the concept, but not the practice. Journalism isn't just 'we report everything everybody says', true journalism means digging to find out the actual facts and report those, and then possibly include the opinions of those who have a vested interest in interpretation.
And saying 'just some guy with a blog' is not an argument. That's just the old trick of 'shoot the messenger'. What, exactly, qualifies someone with a television camera or a printing press as more credible than someone who is writing for a blog? Why would that make any difference as to the whether the content is true or not? It doesn't. When studying journalism in college, you learn that when someone tries to discredit the source of an article rather than attacking the article on merit, then it's a near-certainty that the content in the article is true.
Historic 30 year debt bubble collapses are a bitch, and there isn't much useful either side, left or right, has to say about them. It's like arguing whether to turn the wheel left or right after the car has gone off the cliff: it'd be funny if I wasn't in the car. Decimated productive capacity plus easy credit and the associated malinvestment and over-consumption equals charlie foxtrot every time.
Sociologically speaking, what I find curious is that so far the young haven't really started shooting back in this generational war. It will get interesting if and when they do.
Where are the statistics to suggest that people 55+ are taking all the minimum wage jobs? Why does this author mention "Bush" four times?
The blogger is editorializing worse than the WSJ here (not that the WSJ article was much better). Essentially all of the counter points were mentioned in the WSJ article up front, then they focused on minimum wage worsening the effect.
I'm not necessarily agreeing with WSJ on this one, but this guy's article is just as meaningless.
It was entirely warranted, because they're a newspaper and they were reporting in direct contradiction of the actual facts on this subject, in order to fit a pre-conceived narrative.
Did you actually read the WSJ article, or just the rebuttal to it?
The actual article mentions almost everything he does, then focuses on wage increases as worsening the effect. This blogger decides to focus on 55+ employment, which he already wrote about. How is one pre-conceived narrative and the other not?
They provide zero evidence for their contention that wage increases "worsen the effect", and their phrasing implies that everything would be peachy keen if not for a minimum wage increase which caused this unemployment.
Meanwhile, if you look at the graph, you see a straight line downward which flattens in 'ok' economies, and plunges during recession. Was flat through 2007, when the minimum wage increase was enacted. No mention of the fact that this phenomenon of jobless recoveries has applied to most jobs at most payscales over the time period they're highlighting. No mention of the fact that the minimum wage was higher in real terms for most of the 20th century, and teen employment was higher then (not that the one is likely to cause the other).
I'll admit that they did include the graph. Reading the article does not make the author sound more honest or truth-seeking, though. Check out some of the applause lines.
It was an editorial, clearly marked in the Opinion section. It's little better than a blog. You'd hope they'd have some editorial oversight, but after the WSJ was purchased by Rupert Murdoch I don't really have any such illusions. Editorial integrity is not something that Murdoch aspires to or holds in high regard.
Granted. However, in a post about how correlation between unemployment and minimum wage is overstated, I feel his defense should be more rigorous than: A) Irrelevantly point out Bush was in office, and B) Simply post another correlating statistics.
"Where are the statistics to suggest that people 55+ are taking all the minimum wage jobs?"
The evidence is only anecdotal and theoretical. In theory, the elderly cannot work as hard as young professionals but have a stronger work ethic than the very young, so they will compete with the young for low-wage, low-difficulty labour. For an anecdote, you can go to Wal-Mart and see all of the old people in the entry-level low-paying jobs there that high school students could also do.
"Why does this author mention Bush four times?"
Because it's a politically-motivated response to a politically-motivated piece that blamed a core Democratic Party principle for events that also took place when Bush was in power.
"The blogger is editorializing worse than the WSJ here"
It's some guy's blog. He's not pretending to be a professional journalist.
"Essentially all of the counter points were mentioned in the WSJ article up front"
The blogger's counterpoints are that 1) the current depression hurt teen employment and began before the minimum wage was raised, 2) the drop in teen employment began a long time before the minimum wage was raised, 3) certain numbers in the WSJ article are exaggerated or false, 4) youth in summer jobs have a lower minimum wage than the WSJ article says they do, and 5) the young have an increase in competition from the 55+. Only the first counterpoint is addressed.
State laws frequently call for higher minimum wages than the federal laws. Our Washington State law is above $7 per hour.
There's also the paperwork burden: Here in Washington State - it's technically illegal to pay a non-family memeber $20 to mow the lawn without filling out pages of L&I forms and withholding a percentage of the $20 and sending a check to the State.
Its the responsibility of the employer to follow employment law, and you can easily end up with the guy you hired to mow your lawn as your employee whether you like it or not.
At the federal level, there's enough special treatment for household employers that its not terribly burdensome, but many states make you jump through the same hoops as a small business (hoops that might be reasonable for a small business but can be quite burdensome for a household employer)
Also, incorporate? One need not incorporate to do business.
I don't believe your assertion that paying for the service of someone to come around and mow your lawn legally constitutes an employer-employee relationship.
One need not incorporate to do business.
Indeed, I was trying to be brief. Incorporate, register an LLC or DBA, or simply informally conduct business.
"You have a household employee if you hired someone to do household work and that worker is your employee. The worker is your employee if you can control not only what work is done, but how it is done. If the worker is your employee, it does not matter whether the work is full time or part time or that you hired the worker through an agency or from a list provided by an agency or association. It also does not matter whether you pay the worker on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis, or by the job."
"Household work is work done in or around your home. Some examples of workers who do household work are: ... Yard workers ... "
"If only the worker can control how the work is done, the worker is not your employee but is self-employed. A self-employed worker usually provides his or her own tools and offers services to the general public in an independent business."
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If you hire Jack from Jack's Gardening Service, and he comes with a trailer full of equipment and deicdes to use a riding mower the the bulk of your lawn and a weed eater around the edges, and sometimes sends his employee Jill instead, then he isn't your employee.
If you hire your neighbors son John when he's home from college for the summer, offer him to use your push mower and never mind the places too small for it to get to, and when John is out of town and offers for his dead-beat friend Jacob to mow your lawn that week and you decline, then John is your employee.
In my examples, there is certainly a grey area between John and Jack, but my point stands: the guy who mows your lawn can easily be your employee. Its best to err on the side of employee, because the law is very unforgiving if the IRS decides someone is your employee but you have been treating them as a non-employee.
The worker is your employee if you can control not only what work is done, but how it is done
That's the only sentence in there that actually defines what an employee is, and I fail to see how someone mowing your lawn fits the requirement of dictating "how work is to be done".
A guy who mows your yard every other week -- most likely along with a host of other yards in the area -- is most certainly not an employee. Sure, he could try to make a case if he were injured, but no normal-thinking human is going to interpret "provides occasional service" as "employee".
and when John is out of town and offers for his dead-beat friend Jacob to mow your lawn that week and you decline, then John is your employee.
Preferring the services of one person or company over another has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the definition of employee.
But here in Washington - if the lawn mower isn't a licensed business and isn't paying L&I insurance and he hurts himself on the job and starts to collect disability, the state will get their pound of flesh out of you as his employer.
I don't think the WSJ is lying to make it's point.The graph can be interpreted differently. Up until 2007 employment seems to be following a fairly regular cycle. In fact right before it seems to be going back up, then there is a sudden drop. That could be what the WSJ is talking about/
I am still amazed at the fact that the minimum wage was so low. In Ontario, the general minimum wage is $10.25 increased in March 2010 from what used to be $9.50 .
The student minimum wage (which applies to students under the age of 18 who work 28 hours a week or less when school is in session or work during a school break or summer holiday) is $9.60 increased from what used to be $8.90.
Where is the comparison to the employment ratio of the entire workforce? Without this it is difficult to look at subsets (like 16-19 yrs old, 55+) and draw much of a conclusion. I would guess that population/macro effects probably tell a lot of the story.
In that sentence, "one" is the subject and "in four teens" is a prepositional phrase. When choosing the verb form, we look at the subject, which is this case is singular. So, "is" is in fact the correct form to use.
Well, consider how the idiom works. It is asking us to consider a representative sample of four teens, and makes a statement about one of them. That's different than if you said "only 25% of teens are employed".
I'm pretty sure you are wrong, and the original author is correct. The subject of this sentence is "one teen", so the verb should be singular, so "is" is correct.
I was wondering the same. The question isn't actually answered by either the WSJ article or this blog post. Are high school diplomas and college enrollment up? Or is the same thing happening that is also happening in Spain: massive youth unemployment due to, plain and simply, a lack of jobs?
