Table of Contents

Letter from AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney

Introduction

Work and Today's Youth

Unions and School-to-Work

Questions and Answers

Alternate Funding Sources

Online Resources

Bibliography

Work experiences have a significant impact on the lives of youth. First jobs can give youth a sense of accomplishment and teach them important skills not taught in the classroom. Unfortunately, first jobs are often negative experiences. The jobs teenagers often have in fast food, retail sales, and building services are under appreciated. The skills these jobs require go unrecognized and their application to future jobs undiscovered.

This brief chapter explores how youth participate in the workforce and how working affects them.

Work is a Fact of Life for Most Teens

Whether out of necessity, a desire for extra spending money or to save for college, many teens have jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1999, 41% of high school students were in the labor force. Almost 25% of 14-year olds, more than 33% of 15-year olds, and nearly 75% of high school seniors held regular jobs during the school year. Add summer jobs and freelance work, such as baby-sitting and mowing lawns, and the percentages increase.

The average employed American high school student works 17 hours a week during the school year and spends six to seven hours a week on homework. That means these working teens spend nearly three times more hours on the job than they spend do on homework.

With statistics like these, we cannot afford to focus only on giving young people the skills, education, and motivation to enter careers with a good future. We must also help them make sense of the world of work they are experiencing now—before they graduate from high school.

The “Forgotten Majority”

For most high school students, views of life after high school usually include college. The vast majority of youth share their parents’ belief in education. They strive to obtain a college diploma as their pathway to a good career and the American dream.

About three-quarters of all high school students start college after high school graduation—a statistic that has remained relatively stable for the last few decades. And until recently, higher numbers of African-American and Latino students were going to college.

Unfortunately, only a small fraction of those who start actually finish college. Although academic achievement among high school students has improved (particularly among the college-bound), just over one-fourth of all Americans obtain a four-year college diploma.

Recently educators, employers, and unions have begun to focus on young people who do not complete college. In 1999, the AFL-CIO conducted a national survey of young workers between the ages 18 and 34, High Hopes, Little Trust: A Study of Young Workers and Their Ups and Downs in the New Economy. The study describes the three-quarters of young workers without college degrees as the “forgotten majority,” living from paycheck to paycheck.

For these workers, the on ramp to the new economy is paved with serious challenges and pitfalls… their experiences and concerns typically are ignored by the popular media and in conventional economic analysis. Their voices are rarely heard.

Workers without college degrees have more difficulty finding full-time permanent jobs than workers with college degrees. Part-time, temporary, or contingent jobs offer lower pay, less job security, and fewer benefits than those available with full-time jobs.

While young workers see education and training as key tools for survival in the new economy, they also see inequities that cannot be solved by education alone. Just offering young people opportunities for education and training is not going to alleviate the concerns of young people entering the workforce. They also want loyalty from employers to employees who work hard, and they want to see wealth shared amongst all who helped create it.

Teens and the Service Economy

Cheap teenager labor fuels today’s service economy. Young workers serve as the cashiers, janitors, office clerks and cooks that give us affordable fast food and other services.

Too often our society looks down on these jobs as requiring little skill or mental output, and offering few opportunities for growth. Society does not value the work of the people who fill these positions. In turn teens feel under appreciated and may develop poor attitudes toward their adult coworkers in the low-wage service economy.

Katherine Newman, a researcher who studies teen workers in the service economy, found many assumptions about the menial nature of jobs in the service sector are wrong. In No Shame in My Game, she writes of the skills necessary to coordinate food preparation and service at Burger Barn, a major fast food chain in New York City.

“It is true that the component parts…have been broken down into the simplest operations. Yet to make them work together under time pressure while minimizing wastage requires higher-order skills. We can think of these jobs as lowly, repetitive, routinized, and demeaning, or we can recognize that doing them right requires their incumbents to process information, coordinate with others, and track inventory. These valuable competencies are tucked away inside jobs that are popularly characterized as utterly lacking in skill.”

Teens can learn many valuable skills from these low-end jobs such as: customer service, teamwork, how to manage stress, and memory and information processing. It is important that employers, parents and unions recognize the value of this work. Otherwise, we risk alienating future generations of workers.

In addition, teen workers in the service sector share many of the same concerns and problems as adult workers. Stuart Tannock, studied the concerns of teens at work and found the number one factor of workplace stress among young workers is the lack of time to do the work they are expected to do. Other sources of job-related stress for teens include: managerial favoritism, abuse from customers, repetitive work with no opportunities for learning new skills, and the low status of grocery and fast-food workers. These are many of same legitimate concerns that we all have at work.

We need to listen more closely to the voices and concerns of working teens. In Youth at Work: The Unionized Fastfood and Grocery Workplace, Tannock suggests there are two widely held stereotypes of teens that prevent employers, parents and unions from successfully relating to teen workers. By recognizing these, we can be better prepared for helping youth have successful work experiences.

The two stereotypes are the happy teen workers and the alienated youth workers. The happy teen workers are middle class students working for extra spending money. These workers do not mind low wages, irregular hours or low status and monotonous work because they are just happy to have a job that puts extra money in their pockets. The alienated youth workers are a high school graduates from working or middle class families. These workers drift aimlessly from one dead end job to another. These workers do not mind poor conditions, bad benefits or meaningless work because they are focused on life outside in the workplace in a fast-paced and occasionally high-risk social life.

These stereotypes allow employers and older workers to discount the needs and concerns of younger workers. The lack of communication between generations and between workers and employers allows these stereotypes to fester. Unions and union members can help break down these barriers by participating in school-to-work activities that help workers—young and old—better understand one another.

How do these experiences affect young workers?

The experiences of young workers vary widely. The question of how early work experiences affect young workers leads to more questions than answers. Are young people developing more or less empathy for adults who work in the fast-growing, low-end service economy? Are they determined to obtain training or education that leads them to different kinds of work? Do they become interested in changing the nature of low-end service jobs in which many of them may remain for years or decades? What have they concluded about work habits, teamwork, workplace fairness and speaking up for themselves and their beliefs on the job?

How young people view work and their roles as workers will impact the type of economy and the type of society we have for years to come. Union members are in a special position to communicate to young workers. We have a broad knowledge of workplace issues and a unique understanding of employer-employee relationships. If we do not reach out to working teens, who will?

This guide describes how the federal School-to-Work Opportunities Act has helped to connect teens with union members who work in a wide range of industries and occupations. In addition to these success stories from which you can draw both inspiration and ideas, in this guide you will find a brief review of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act, concrete ideas about how to interact with teens on the topic of work and a list of resources to help you keep alive and growing the groundwork now in place.

What is School-to-Work?

School-to-work is both a federal law as well as a broad set of ideas about preparing young people for a successful transition to the world of work and lifelong learning.

In 1994 Congress passed the School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA), an initiative of President Clinton, which the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions endorsed. Before it sunsets in October 2001, the Act will have funded a wide range of grassroots activities in all 50 states and many local communities. The Act was not intended to be permanent—its funding was designed to serve as “seed” money.

The Act allows and even encourages the local partnerships to develop a wide range of activities based on their specific needs and available resources. Partnerships can involve students in three general types of STW activities, school-based, work-based and connecting activities.

School-based activities focus on teaching students about work in the classroom and providing guidance in setting education and employment goals.

Work-based activities focus on exposing students to the “real world of work” and teaching them through hands-on activities.

Connecting activities combine school and work based activities.

School-to-work programs vary widely across states and communities. In fact, it may not even be called “school-to-work.” Some initiatives have chosen to call themselves “school-to-career.” But for this guide, we will use “STW” and “school-to-work” as the general term.

Researchers have found that the most common STW activities were short-term, such as worksite visits or job shadowing. However, about 25% of the STW partnerships offered paid jobs and unpaid internships. A national survey also found that work-based learning opportunities became increasingly available to students as local STW partnerships matured.

Some principles in common

Although school-to-work programs vary from program to program there are some general principles to keep in mind whether the program is school based, work based or connects the two. These principles set an ideal standard for STW programs. No one should be discouraged from starting a program that aspires to fulfill just one or two of the principles. The principles were drawn from the American Youth Policy Forum and Center for Workforce Development’s Looking Forward: School-to-Work Principles and Strategies for Sustainability.

Keeping these principles in mind when developing and analyzing school-to-work programs will ensure that the needs of students are being served.