Most professionals remember their first teenage job. Whether it was flipping burgers, toiling with a landscaping crew, or operating a cash register, the experience offered not only valuable income, but a taste of real-world responsibility that carried over into adulthood. But these days, those jobs are far from plentiful; the percentage of working teens in Massachusetts has fallen by more than half in the past decade. This poses problems not only for work-starved youth, but also for the overall economy — which is why some area companies and agencies are trying to kick-start teen employment.

When college students arrived home for summer vacation in May, and high-schoolers put their books away in June, many of them began the traditional summer-job search that’s long been a way to sock away savings (and some spending money, too) while building key employment skills for the future.

Only, what they found this year is what teens who seek part-time work during the school year already know — the jobs just aren’t there this year. Not nearly as many as there used to be, anyway.

“Fundamentally, the summer months are particularly important in the labor market, in terms of its ability to absorb a certain number of young people now free of school who are looking for a summer job,” said William Ward, executive director of the Regional Employment Board (REB) of Hampden County. “It puts extra pressure on the labor market in its ability to generate jobs because there is such an immediate and large number of young people all at once looking for work. It’s a unique challenge.”

And one that was met much more effectively in the past than it is today. According to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, 52.5% of Massachusetts teens age 16 to 19 held paying jobs in 1999. That figure fell to 38.4% in 2003, where it remained fairly steady for the next four years.

Since then, the decline has been significant; the percentage fell from 38.0% in 2007 to 32.1% in 2009, and was tracked at 28.6% in the last four months of 2009 and 23.6% in the first four months of 2010. Granted, those last two numbers don’t account for the summer, when teen employment is traditionally at its highest — but the corresponding percentage from the first four months of 2009 was 48.8%.

In other words, the percentage of Bay State teens working during the January-April period fell by more than half from 1999 to 2010, just as the total-year figure fell by 20 points from 1999 to 2009. The report’s authors noted that “no other demographic group has come close to absorbing job losses of this magnitude in our state.”

There are several factors in play, among them the overall economic slowdown of the past three years and the fact that it has forced out-of-work professionals, desperate for income, to alter their expectations and take lower-paying jobs for fewer hours — sometimes two or three part-time jobs — that would usually filled by someone much younger.

Another factor is a contraction in the number and types of businesses willing to take on teenage and college-age help. According to the study, nearly 75% of working teens — both in Massachusetts and across the U.S. — are doing so in fast food; retail; arts, culture, or entertainment; or support industries for education or health. Fewer and fewer young people are working in construction, manufacturing, transportation, utilities, and white-collar fields like finance and insurance.

The REB is trying to change that, serving as a clearinghouse of sorts for federal and state job money and administering various youth-employment programs with local employers. In this issue, BusinessWest takes a look at why those programs are important — and what some companies are doing to provide jobs to young people in a drastically tightened market.

Youth at Risk

A closer look at the Northeastern report reveals more than a growing job shortage for teenagers, but worrisome demographic trends within those statistics.

Not only is there a widening gender gap — 29% of teenage girls in Massachusetts have jobs, but only 23% of boys — but a family-income gap as well. Only 20% of teens in families making less than $20,000 annually are working, and 25% of those in families making between $20,000 and $40,000. That rises to 30% when the family income is between $75,000 and $100,000, and tops out at 37% when family income is between $100,000 and $150,000. In addition, black and Hispanic teens are less likely to have jobs than their white counterparts.

Add it up, the study found, and in the most recent eight-month period, just 13% of low-income black youth and 16% of low-income Hispanic youth were working, trailing white teens from low-income families (29%) by a wide margin.

And it’s precisely this demographic — low-income, minority teenagers — that’s often most in need of a job, as both the structured environment employment provides and the responsibility it requires can fend off dangerous influences.

Kathryn Kirby, youth employment coordinator for the REB, told of one teenage boy who had applied for a job with the Martin Luther King Center’s YouthWorks Summer Job Program. About 4,000 had applied for 171 positions, “so someone wasn’t going to get a job,” she said. But the mother of this particular 15-year-old was especially concerned.

“She said her son had nothing to do, and was hanging out with the wrong people,” Kirby said. “She said he’s going to wind up in jail if we don’t get him a job, and they were praying that a job would come through for him.”

REB was able to procure employment for the boy through another federal program, the Workforce Investment Act (WIA). But there just aren’t enough resources available right now to keep every teenager who wants to work from falling through the cracks — and more is at stake than just summer spending money.

“It’s all about the value of work — connecting young people more closely to the economy and the job market, and helping them see as well the importance of learning job skills,” Ward said — and those go beyond mastering math, computers, communication, or whatever else is necessary to a specific job, to being instilled with values like reliability, respectful customer service, and showing up on time.

“Someone’s counting on you to be there. It’s not like you’re missing school,” where truancy mainly affects the absent student, Ward explained. “If you don’t show up at work, they’re not as productive, and can’t put as much product or service out the door. Your reliability affects the bottom line of the company. We take that for granted, but it takes young people a long time to realize that.

“Shouldn’t there be stronger government policies,” he asked, “that support low-income, urban youth who don’t have access to jobs?”

You’re Hired

Some companies have stepped up. For the past eight years, Western Mass. Electric Co. has operated its Summer Work Readiness Program through the REB, in partnership with Putnam Vocational Technical High School in Springfield and Franklin County Technical High School.

“It has a school component where kids take an online course related to energy, but the part they love the best is the work experience,” said Edgar Alejandro, WMECO’s manager of economic and community development.

The paid internship lasts six 40-hour weeks. They’re not allowed to work on anything that’s live, but they observe worksites and take on tasks ranging from taking apart and putting together transformers to digging trenches and pulling non-live cables. “A lot of it is observation, but a lot of work is involved, too,” Alejandro explained.

The idea — from WMECO’s side, anyway — is to spur interest in the utility industry.

“We’re concerned about our workforce, and looking to the future, it’s important to engage young people early on about energy careers,” he said. “Hopefully they’ll remain interested, and even work with WMECO.”

Of roughly 75 students who have come through the program, four are employed by the company today, and all were what might be considered safe hires, since they already knew so much about WMECO. “They’ve worked out great,” Alejandro said. “They know our culture, the supervisors, and the workers, and we know them, and appreciate what they bring to the table. So this program is very rewarding for them and us.”

He doesn’t fret that the vast majority of participants don’t wind up with the company long-term, but understands that efforts to expose students to utility work will benefit the entire industry.

And those efforts come at no risk to WMECO, since the entire program is administered by REB, so the utility doesn’t have to worry about dealing with the paperwork or fret over issues like firing for just cause when a placement doesn’t work out.

In a different vein, Big Y has worked with Springfield Public Schools on summer work-education partnerships for 16 years, and this year is no exception. In a four-week program stretching through July, 13 high-schoolers who struggled with their MCAS testing are attending a remediation course in the morning and working an afternoon internship either at Big Y’s corporate office or one of its supermarkets.

Lindsay Porter, employment specialist with Big Y, said the employees who oversee the program notice a marked change in the students’ skill levels over the four weeks. And participants are required to do more than show up for work; each is assigned to simulate creating a company, including the development of a business and marketing plan, and present the results. “You really see their confidence grow,” Porter said.

Big Y is one of the area companies that has long been open to hiring young workers, whether for the summer or part-time throughout the year.

“We hire kids constantly,” she noted. “Every day, at every store, you see kids from 15, 16 on up working for us. It’s a great place to grow, and a lot of people grow into positions of greater responsibility; our vice president of operations, a district manager, they started young and worked their way up.”

Bottom Line

Still, Massachusetts currently ranks 31st nationally in teenage employment. So the REB continues to promote the issue with area companies even as it waits on further government funding for jobs programs — money which has a tertiary, trickle-down impact on the economy beyond the obvious benefits to businesses and teenage workers.

For instance, Ward noted, if REB administers $3 million in wages over six weeks, that’s $500,000 per week being paid out — much of which is put right back into the local economy for dining, entertainment, and other expenses on which teens spend money.

But the REB’s main concern remains the future of Western Mass. teens, and what they’re missing out on when a tight job market translates to a summer of leisure — or trouble — rather than positive growth experiences on the job.

“Now, more than any time before, because of funding cuts, we’re reaching out to employers,” Kirby said. “They have to understand the important role they provide to young people. This is our future workforce, and they have to get that experience somewhere.”

Joseph Bednar can be reached at

bednar@businesswest.com