My son recently underwent what was once a common rite of passage: his first job. He now balances the demands of schooling with cleaning toilets, stocking shelves, and bagging groceries at a local supermarket. While once a normal experience for teens, compensated employment became rarer in recent years as young, inexperienced workers were rendered uncompetitive by rising minimum wages. The pandemic-era labor shortage made teens employable again. That opportunity may fade when adults return to the workforce and offer experience and maturity in return for artificially hiked pay.
“Honestly, without them, we’d have to close our doors,” the owner of several Texas smoothie shops told Marketplace about teen workers earlier this month. Like many other employers large and small, this businessman has trouble hiring adults, and so turns to teens despite their lack of experience and crowded schedules. The “why?” of the worker shortage is up for debate, but economists point to a combination many factors, including pandemic-era lifestyle adjustments that lowered cost of living for many people, resistance to perceived health risks and related mandates, and government economic handouts which made it easier for people to make ends meet without working.
“We know two things about human behavior: First, if people have more money, they work less,” Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane observed last month. “Second, if the rewards of working are greater, people work more. Our current...
A British science journalist-turned-attorney who initiated a lawsuit that saw a Harvard University-affiliated cancer centre pay $15 million (11 million) to settle claims of alleged data misreprese...