Paid employment begins at a relatively young age in the United States. While exact figures vary, depending on the means of measurement, a survey published in 2000 by the U.S. Department of Labor found that half of American twelve-year-olds have had some kind of work experience. While at such young ages work experiences tend to be informal and short-term, as American youth progress through their teenage years their work becomes more formal and more time-consuming. Researchers have been paying increasing attention to the effects on youth of working. In general, the results from this body of research lead to neither a blanket endorsement nor a condemnation of school-aged youth working for pay.
There have been several phases of research on youth and work. Before 1970, researchers paid almost no attention to students' paid work. The influential report of the Coleman commission of the President's Science Advisory Committee (1974) blamed schooling–because it isolates young people from adults and from productive work–for actually retarding youth's transition to adulthood. The report called for placing young people into work situations earlier, as a tool for social development. Presumably, work would provide a valuable educational experience, even if the work took place in an occupation not related to the eventual employment.
As national surveys in the 1970s and 1980s were demonstrating that paid youth work was very common, Ellen Greenberger and Laurence Steinberg's When Teenagers Work, which reported the results of research on primarily middle-class youth in California, brought attention to some negative consequences of work. This spurred a lively debate and further study among academics. In particular, some feared that work could have negative consequences on school engagement and performance. While youths tend to work more during the summer than during the school months, some data show that the majority of high school juniors and seniors do work during the academic year. At the start of the twenty-first century, researchers have been turning their focus to the quality of young people's jobs and proposing to increase jobs' learning content through formal linkages with school curricula.
In contrast to the concern over too much working, some find access to work for minority and low socioeconomic status youth to be a greater problem. Working during high school does reduce the risk of unemployment later. Racial and ethnic disparities in teenage job-holding and in the number of hours worked are well-established. Multiple studies indicate that minority teenagers, and teens in poor families and families receiving public assistance, are less likely to work than white or higher socioeconomic status youth. As Jeylan T. Mortimer and her colleagues reported in 1990, "employment is very much a middle-class phenomenon" (p. 208). In one study of several hundred youth in Baltimore, African-American youth reported equal or greater jobseeking as white youth but lower rates of obtaining jobs. Hence African-American youth started working later, and were less often employed. The U.S. Department of Labor reported in 2000 that African-American and Hispanic youth have much higher unemployment rates than do white youth. However, when they do work, Hispanic youth work more hours during the school year than do other youth.
Young people's first paid jobs tend to be informal (or "freelance jobs," as the U.S. Department of Labor refers to them), such as child care and lawn work. According to Mortimer and associates (1990), girls tend to start paid work earlier, yet their first jobs are more likely than those of boys to be of the informal type and concentrated within a smaller number of areas. Of the ninth-graders in this study, most of the girls were working in private households while the boys were more divided among informal work, sales work, and restaurant work.
Research has established that there are sex differences in industry and occupation of young workers. Male and female youth are about equally likely to work in eating and drinking places, with about 27 percent of fifteen-year-old boys and 31 percent of fifteen-year-old girls working in such establishments, but males are more likely to be employed in the agriculture, mining, construction, and manufacturing industries. Boys fifteen to seventeen years of age are much more likely to work in farm, forestry, and fishing occupations, as well as blue-collar occupations, while girls of the same ages tend to work in sales occupations such as cashier (this is true for the school year and the summer months).
Youth tend to give the reason for working as "to buy things," noted the Mortimer study in 1990. Katherine S. Newman makes the point that teenagers from poor families in particular need to work so that they have money with which to participate in youth culture, yet Doris R. Entwhistle and associates reported that lower-status youth are more likely than other youth to share their earnings with their family. The young fast-food workers in Harlem that Newman studied also sought work as a place to escape from violence in their own neighborhoods.
Earnings for teenage workers are generally just above minimum wage; in 1998 median earnings of fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds were $5.57 per hour, while minimum wage was $5.15. Hourly earnings do increase with age. White and Hispanic males tend to have the highest median hourly earnings while Hispanic and African-American females have the lowest. Mortimer's 1990 report found significant wage differences between boys and girls overall, with boys reporting a higher mean wage.
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