After dropping in 2020, teen summer employment may be poised to continue its slow comeback
Last summer, businesses trying to come back from the COVID-19 pandemic hired nearly a million more teens than in the summer of 2020.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Last summer, businesses trying to come back from the COVID-19 pandemic hired nearly a million more teens than in the summer of 2020.
Fewer than a third (30.8%) of U.S. teens had a paying job last summer. In 2019, 35.8% of teens worked over the summer.
Veterans of prime working age generally fare at least as well as non-veterans in the U.S. job market, though there are differences in the work they do.
Despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage in the U.S. has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And most of what wage gains there have been have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
As we approach the 10th anniversary of the start of the Great Recession, five ways in which the U.S. workforce has changed over the past decade.
Although manufacturing jobs have fallen over the past three decades, improved productivity has kept manufacturing output rising – contrary to what many Americans believe. But over the past few years, productivity growth has been sluggish at best.
In April, there were more than 6 million nonfarm job openings, according to the federal government’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.
Although the unemployment rate gets most of the attention, the government’s monthly jobs report contains lots of other data that, properly interpreted, can provide a fuller picture of the U.S. economy.
Much of U.S. job growth over the past 25 years has been in occupations that require higher levels of education, training and experience – a trend that seems likely to continue, based on our analysis of official government job-growth projections.
More than six years after the Great Recession ended, almost 10.2 million teens and young adults in the U.S. are neither working nor in school.
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