Teens are horrible workers. That’s not a “teens today” thing, it was how I was as a teen. We messed around so much in my high school/college job even at age 17, 18 and 19.
Right now I work with middle schools to high school aged kids in a youth program. As a group they don’t show up when they don’t want to, they don’t do work when they don’t want to be, they’re lazy, they give up. All exactly to my expectations of how a teen should be.
It’s not lack of ability, it’s a combination of lack of experience and lack of enough time to mature.
Teens quit jobs so fast. They don’t need a job. They won’t give up a school sport or the school play for a job.
So why do companies think that somehow they can start hiring a bunch of teens and be successful?
Do they think they’ll be able to hire teens as an alternative to hiring experienced workers?
This isn’t 1920, the jobs that haven’t been automated away or sent overseas tend to be service centered. Service centered jobs are jobs where attitude and purpose matter. Anyone can carry plates to a table, run a register or take someone to the right location in a store, but it takes maturity to do it despite the customer being a jerk or management being abusive.
Do companies not know that hiring workers that are more likely to give bad service because they haven’t matured enough is not a path to success?
And teens are not a replacement for paying better wages to someone with experience as well. Hiring teens comes with additional costs as it means hiring more often, putting money into training and mentoring.
Maybe they think they can have a bunch of low cost workers on hand when they want to cut higher wage workers, but teens can only fill certain shifts. Hiring teens does not replace paying enough to hire workers for most shifts. It’s not an alternative to doing better without teens.
Take it further, teens all go to school together. They have a better network than anyone in a town and teens having poor impulse control means they will tell everyone how bad a job is, no matter who the boss is of if they were really the problem. If a company becomes known for abusing workers it will be harder to hire teens.
And how exactly do they think these workers will get to their job? Outside of a few big cities these are kids reliant on family for transportation. Are these companies expecting to make space to park a bunch of bikes or to schedule shifts so their parent or sibling can bring them to work after football practice is over? How is being at the whim of the weather when a kid can’t bike in a downpour a good idea for a business? This isn’t like 100 years ago when most cities had a streetcar network that reached 90% of people so they could walk to work.
I just don’t see what companies expect to gain. It just seems like companies who want this are already failing and this is their last idea to not raise wages.