The Nature of the Storm

Dark clouds loom on the horizon for teens and young adults seeking employment. Recently, negative teen employment trends were examined in a New York Times column by Bob Herbert (Flip Side of the Dream, June 16th, 2007). His commentary about teen employment was certainly intriguing and bore further investigation. It just so happens that lackluster teen employment rates have been a subject of discussion for some time now; the American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) covered this very subject on March 18th, 2005. What interested me most about low teen employment figures is that the trend fit very neatly into a broad prediction about future labor markets I made in previously in past columns.

The AYPF, in their online brief, effectively blamed poor teen employment rates on immigrants (of unspecified legal status) willing to work for low wages. Their rationale seems sensible enough, though it does not do justice to the forces at work that have ultimately deprived many teens and young adults of an opportunity to experience the joys of menial labor. Consider carefully why employers hire cheap immigrant labor in the first place: uneducated immigrants commit themselves to the workforce fully while earning wages historically reserved for "entry level" workers. Why hire teens or young adults prone to high turnover rates and low levels of commitment when you can have a dedicated adult worker earning a child's pay?

Here we are presented with one of many examples of American workers losing value in the labor market. Putting aside all the negative repercussions of teens being taken out of the work market (there are many, well-documented negatives), the widespread unemployment of American teens must lead us to conclude that employers are under mounting pressure to reduce labor costs by any means necessary. Employers are ready, willing, and able to marginalize workers of any age, race, or sex so long as it improves the all-important bottom line. Those corporations who will not behave similarly risk failure in today's hyper-aggressive marketplace. Migrant workers, legal or otherwise, are nothing more than a stopgap intended to keep labor costs down until human workers can be replaced by sophisticated automated systems. The fast food industry, long a bulwark against teen unemployment in America, seeks aggressively to eliminate many of its poorly-paid staffing positions in favor of automated systems designed to take orders, prepare meals, and clean restaurants from top to bottom.

The willingness and ability of Migrant workers to occupy positions formerly held by American teens is merely a byproduct of modern immigration trends mixed with the vulnerability of unskilled labor in the United States. Were migrant workers to demand the same wage that an adult American would require to sustain an acceptable American living, they too would find themselves without jobs. The worldwide trend towards unskilled, underpaid labor is fed by the advent of labor-saving devices in parts of the world previously too destitute and chaotic to maintain sophisticated industrial contrivances, and our continual forward march towards increasingly advanced automation systems will lead us to an economic climate in which labor-saving devices will become sophisticated enough to work on their own, thereby rendering unskilled human labor obsolete.

The process of human obsolescence in the workplace has already begun. Our nation's first casualties happen to be those most vulnerable to elimination, namely our teen and young adult workers who consistently have delivered sub-par results in relatively trivial positions while earning pay suitable only for teens, college students, and destitute foreign laborers. Migrant workers, frequently hailing from South and Central America, have temporarily occupied jobs once held by by teens while fleeing job markets devastated by foreign competition from China which happens to be enjoying an economic renaissance fueled by cheap domestic labor empowered by labor-saving devices. In the end, technology drives this trend towards teen unemployment at every level, and our teens will not be the last to feel the bite before employment equilibrium is reached in our new automated paradigm.