Teen unemployment skyrockets as the minimum wage goes up.
This has long-term consequences — minimum-wage jobs are often the first rung of the employment ladder, leading to work habits and better jobs. Congress basically pulled the ladder up beyond manys’ grasp.
Minimum wage laws arent the only culprit here…Many immigrants (legal and illegal) fills the same jobs that customarily would be the entry level jobs for teenagers but now as their main employment.
I live in the DC metro area and around here you cannot go into any fast food restaurant and see teenagers working their after school or in the summers. I imagine there likely are some here and there but by and large these positions are now career slots for new immigrants.
I honestly dont know what high school kids and college kids do for jobs these days. Even during good economc times. Back when I was their age (late 80s) there was fast food restaurants and landscaping/construction gigs which arent really an option anymore for today’s kids.
Fixed that for you.
…not that the outcome would have been different without a recession. I just still can’t wrap my head around a Congress so stupid as to let that law take effect right in the middle of the worst recession in recent memory.
“I just still can’t wrap my head around a Congress so stupid as to let that law take effect right in the middle of the worst recession in recent memory.”
You left out: “And vociferously claim simultaneously the intellectual and moral highground. Somehow.”
Fortunately there’s still the old-fashioned sort of teenage employment: Payment in cash, no paperwork or minimum wage, unregulated and untaxed.
And, with some luck, some of them will learn from experience that good intentions don’t make for good laws, and that the government’s highest priority is that the government gets their cut first.