What do Warren Buffett, Walt Disney and Ross Perot all have in common? Besides being iconic American businessmen, all three have "newspaper carrier" on their boyhood résumés. But don't bother looking for leaders of tomorrow's corporate America to be walking down your block at dawn: Your newspaper carrier today is most likely an adult in a car.
As recently as 1990, nearly 70% of newspaper carriers in the U.S. were teens. But that number dropped to 18% in 2004, and more declines are likely, according to Robert Rubrecht, director of circulation and marketing at the Newspaper Association of America."It's an evolutionary process," he says.
Although reasons for teens being edged out of this formerly youth-dominated profession are specific to the newspaper industry -- papers are delivered earlier now, and usually require driving -- the end of the boyhood (or girlhood) paper route reflects a dramatic but little-noticed trend: Teen unemployment has hit historic highs in the last three years. Experts in the field say employers who want to ensure a quality workforce down the line should sit up and take notice.
"It's a baffling problem. The economy is humming along, and employers are almost desperate for people they can hire and train. Contrast that with the lowest teen market penetration in 50 years. Somewhere the connection point is not being made," says Ken Smith, president and CEO of Jobs for America's Graduates, an Alexandria, Va.-based non-profit thathelps more than 40,000 youth each year transition from school to work.
According to data gathered for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 37% of teens nationwide worked in the summer of 2006 -- nearly 11% fewer than were working in 1989, the peak of a nation-wide economic boom.
Are teens working less because they are too busy with their MySpace pages, disdainful of teen job opportunities or just plain lazy? Adults are quick with anecdotal evidence to support such theories, but according to Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, there is no data to back them up.
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