This column, written by LVEDC President & CEO Don Cunningham, originally appeared in The Morning Call and on the newspaper’s website on July 22, 2023.

I read a comment by an economist in a Wall Street Journal article last month that made me smile.

It transported me back 40 years to 1983 as if I was Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future,” minus a DeLorean and flux capacitor.

The story was on the summer job market for teenagers. 

It focused on how office internships are down, wages are up and a labor shortage persists in most of the country.

“That’s going to bring kids into the job market,” said Paul Harrington, an economist at Rhode Island College.

A very reasonable economic analysis.

Particularly, since in April, employers reported 10.1 million job openings, much more than the 5.7 million unemployed seeking jobs.

In the 1980s, economics weren’t part of my sociological reality as a high school and college student. The market was not a factor in our house. My dad was.

Regardless of pay, type of job or economic conditions, the edict was clear. You worked during the summer and usually the school year.

He was a bit of his own economic indicator.

The Journal story reported that about 37% of teenagers in the United States are working or seeking work this summer. That’s up from a pre-pandemic low of about 33% in 2014.

Times have changed.

Growing up in a working-class family with a steelworker father, there was only one participation rate – 100%. During college, the Old Man would start asking in April about where I’d work when I came home for the summer. I had about a week to start once I returned.

It appears I was not alone.

During the mid-1970s to 1990 the percentage of teenagers that worked or sought work was much higher, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics. It averaged 55%. The peak was about 60% in 1978.

My guess is that those numbers began to decline as more and more kids started going to college. Internships began to replace the summer job. Often, those came with no pay.

It would’ve been amusing to explain to the Old Man the concept of working for no pay just to gain experience. There were certain cultural challenges that came with being the first in the family to attend college.

Work meant sweat and old clothes and a paycheck.

He didn’t care what I did, so long as I got up and left each morning for work.

During college summers, I worked on a framing crew building houses, installed carpeting and tile, was a nonskilled, jack-of-all trades for a contractor and did lawn and garden care on the estate of a wealthy executive.

In reflection, what’s most amazing is how easy it was to find a job. No skills were required, and no training was provided. I don’t remember ever filling out an application. Word of mouth through a friend was the pathway.

“Hey, we need a guy on the framing crew. You want to do that this summer?”

The job interview went about like this.

“Kurt says you’re looking for work. Do you know how to swing a hammer?”

“Sure.”

“Show up Monday at 7 a.m. Kurt knows where. You’ll need a tool belt, work boots and your own hammer.”

No discussion of pay. No forms to fill out.

First day I was climbing up rafters to pull up plywood to deck a roof.

As summer help your role was clear. You got paid the least and did the worst jobs. Sometimes it took place 20 feet above the ground.

I retired from framing during my second summer after the entire crew was thrown off the top of a house trying to put in place a roof truss. Watching a guy nearly snap two fingers off turned me into a flooring installer.

The cost-benefit analysis on the lifetime use of fingers against the $4.25 per hour led to the conclusion.

Spending a day in a large room with a small window applying heavy-duty carpet glue to a concrete floor — and getting higher, and woozier, than an entire crowd at Grateful Dead concert — turned me into a landscaper the next summer.

I learned a few things that — theoretically — could be handy in my house today like installing flooring, building walls, mixing and pouring cement, planting perennials and weeding beds.

Unfortunately, for my wife, those skills are dormant.

Aside from the paycheck, the core benefit of each of those jobs was to learn what I didn’t want to do. It kept me going back to school.

Granted, I didn’t have the typical summer jobs. Most worked in retail, restaurants, bars, hotels, parks, movie theaters or summer camps, as is customary today.

There are also occupational and safety standards and training now that weren’t as common 40 years ago.

And much better pay.

“We have a widespread labor shortage in the American economy and that’s pushing up wages, especially teen wages,” Harrington, the Rhode Island College economist, said in the Wall Street Journal story.

He predicts that this summer the highest share of teens will hold jobs since 2008.

I know a way to drive that number even higher.

The Old Man is retired in Florida and has lots of time on his hands. Send me a note if you need help getting a teenager to go work.

He has a very special set of skills.

Don Cunningham is the President and CEO of the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp. He can be reached at news@lehighvalley.org.