(H/T – Charlie Sykes)
Kristen Lopez Eastlick links the increases in the minimum wage to the two worst years since World War II for teen summer employment:
You don’t need a business degree to understand why employers are making these cuts. The classic summer jobs "” cashier, waiter, grocery clerk "” can help an employer with increased service or make up for full-time employees who take vacations.
When the minimum wage gets boosted, however, employers cut down on hiring teens who typically fill lower-priority slots. Most of the work still gets done, but customers may get stuck standing in longer lines, and teens suffer because they’ve been priced out of work.
These summer jobs are often teens’ first exposure to the workplace. They are where teens learn that life is a 52-week-a-year mix of work and fun, and how to balance the two. Take that away, and you get the shooting gallery that is the north side of Milwaukee (where unemployment both measured and unmeasured has always been far worse than average) as the unemployed youth seek “less-than-legal” means of getting the cash to fuel their “fun” and “less-than-legal” means of having that “fun”.
