The Youth Job Market

It might be easy for many of us to get distracted by the struggles inherent in strengthening the political influence of the youth constituency, especially among the press and within the Democratic Party, but Bob Herbert's column on Friday reminded us that there are lots of young people who couldn't care any less about these squabbles. Instead, this generation of young Americans is getting squeezed by the economy like no other generation in recent history.

The employment situation in the U.S. is, if anything, worse than most people realize. And huge numbers of young people, ages 16 to 30, are being beaten down in ways that could leave scars for a lifetime.

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The ones who are being hit the hardest and will have the most difficult time recovering are America’s young workers. Nearly 2.2 million young people, ages 16 through 29, have already lost their jobs in this recession. This follows an already steep decline in employment opportunities for young workers over the past several years.

Good jobs were hard to find for most categories of workers during that period. One of the results has been that older men and women have been taking and holding onto jobs that in prior eras would have gone to young people.

“What we’ve seen over the past eight years, for young people under 30, is the largest age reversal with regard to jobs that we’ve ever had in our history,” said Andrew Sum, the director of the Center for Labor Market Studies. “The younger you are, the more you got pushed out of this labor market.”

There were not enough jobs to go around before the recession took hold. So the young, the poor and the poorly educated were already suffering. Now that pool of suffering is rapidly expanding.

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Young men and women who remain unemployed for substantial periods of time find it very difficult to make up that ground. They lose the experience and training they would have gained by working. Even if they eventually find employment, they tend to lag behind their peers when it comes to wages, promotions and job security.

Moreover, as the economy worsens, even the college educated are feeling the crunch.

According to a report by researchers working with Mr. Sum: “While young college graduates have fared the best in maintaining some type of employment, a growing fraction of them are becoming mal-employed, holding jobs in occupations that do not require much schooling beyond high school, often displacing their less-educated peers.”

It's columns like this one that make me realize that the work done on this blog and by other people, both online and offline, should not be for any reason other than advocating for a set of policies that helps the youth mentioned above to rebound from a decades-old economic collapse.

Only now have we begun to hear stories about this recession's impact on the youth job market. Herbert's on to something when he discusses the consequences of the Millennials' dreadful job prospects and how they might impact the U.S. in the future. It'd be great if NBC News planned a Luke Russert special on this topic to further increase the exposure of this issue in the media (a story in Buffalo might be especially pertinent).

The Democrats have a large opportunity here, and while they are moving forward, the risk, of course, is to become complacent and ignore the nitty-gritty work of improving quality of life among Millennials, while instead throwing money at new service programs intended for young Americans. Our responsibility is to make sure we do everything we can to fight for the economic policies that get young Americans back to work.