Do Young People Want to Work?

There is a popular idea that young people don’t want to work anymore. That Gen Z doesn’t have the work ethic of previous generations.

I don’t think young people have ever really wanted to work that much. A select few, yes, but for many it was something they were forced to do by necessity, needed to do for spending money, or were pushed to do by parents. All these things created a culture of young people working.

When I was in high school, among my group of friends everyone had jobs in the summer. I can’t think of a single person I knew who didn’t. I imagine that a similar group of friends today likely only has a couple of people with jobs. This culture of work meant that it was normal to have a job and if you didn’t have a job you were a bit weird.

So what has changed? A few important things.

The first, and I believe the most impactful, is that a lot of teens just don’t really have to work anymore.

In the past, a middle-class teenager would need to work to get money to pay for gas, go to a concert with friends, or take a date to the movies. Today, cheap digital entertainment and connection have replaced the teen culture that required actual resources to do things.

You can see this large drop in the number of teens who even care to get driver’s licenses. You can now stream or torrent most movies and shows for free (if you have your parents log in), you can chat with your friends on an app, and you can game without needing much money at all.

At the top of society, education has long been prioritized over work experience. It is more common now that teens are pushed into summer programs, instead of work, as a way of boosting their possibilities for post-secondary education. As college has become more expensive and less valuable, the top college brands have better held onto their value, so there is more intense competition than ever to get into top colleges and as a result, there is more effort (and money) than ever being put into getting teens into the top colleges.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are simply fewer teens who are in a position of needing to work to contribute to the family for financial reasons.

In the US and Canada, immigration continues to reshape society and culture. The belief in the value of work (and working from a young age) is held across many different cultures, but the Puritan work ethic that informed much of the culture in North America is becoming less and less prominent.

Then there are the external factors that make it harder to work, even if you’d like to.

Across most of Canada and the US, there have been large increases in the minimum wage and workplace regulations that make it much harder for a teen to get a summer job. The costs are simply too high for businesses to hire and train someone for 2 months. Instead, they focus on automation and older employees. With a wage floor, teens can no longer compete on price.

In addition to the loss of possible jobs, immigration has become the main source of employees for the jobs teens used to get. Especially in Canada, fast food, service, construction, and agriculture have come to rely almost fully on temporary immigrant workers or recent immigrants.

As a teenager, I worked in vineyards in the summer. At that time the lower-level agriculture workforce was a mix of teenagers, French Canadians on summer holiday, and occasionally some twenty-somethings doing work and travel stints in Canada. Today it is almost entirely Mexicans on temporary visas.

From a business perspective, an experienced adult foreign worker is at minimum twice as valuable as a teenager on summer break. If they are expecting (or required by law) to receive the same wage, then the teens don’t have much hope of landing a job.

So for a multitude of reasons, teenagers have stopped working in large numbers, and it’s now common to hear that they don’t have work ethic, but it’s also become much harder to get a job at the same time as the surface level incentives have diminished.

But in this dim scene, there are also some very hopeful things going on. There are lots of teens learning tech skills, creating their own self-directed education, starting Etsy stores, and learning how to be entrepreneurs. And with fewer people working from a young age, those who do will find they have greater advantages.