We all know that the employment situation is bad and getting worse. But as a recent New York Times article detailed, the groups already feeling the squeeze, and most likely to be disproportionately hit as conditions worsen, are working poor and younger job seekers—who were already at the margins of the labor market.

The Times quotes Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Last month, when I heard Professor Sum speak about the silent crisis around teen employment in America, he highlighted a stunning trend in the nation’s summer employment rate for 16 to 19 year-olds over the last 20 years: it’s dropped by a third, from 48.4 percent in 1989 to 32.7 percent this year, the lowest percentage in 60 years. "If the employment rate had dropped that much for any other age group," he said, "we’d be calling it a depression." For this group, however, policymakers have been almost completely silent.

So, why should teen employment matter to American businesses?

The big reason is what social scientists call path dependency: once you start doing something, odds are that you’ll continue to do it. A young man who works at age 16 is more likely to work when he’s 17, hopefully earning a bit more money and taking a job with more responsibility. As he gets older, he becomes acculturated into the world of work—and areas of concern for the working teenager, from too-informal dress to difficulty communicating with colleagues or customers, are surfaced and solved by the time he reaches adulthood.

Primarily for this reason, early work experience is even more important for young people of modest academic attainment than for those who succeed in college. Unfortunately, the young people who statistically are most likely to work tend to be those from wealthier families who are more likely to go to college. Sum reports that 26.5 percent of teens from families with annual incomes of less than $20,000 worked this past summer; by contrast, teens whose families earned between $75,000 and $150,000 worked at a rate over 47 percent.

While teen employment is a concern everywhere, some communities have found success in creating work opportunities for their young people. Civic leaders in Boston have forged effective partnerships with local business leaders to create thousands of meaningful summer placements for city youth. New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program, the largest summer jobs program in the U.S., has expanded into more private-sector placements and begun to implement an effective education and life-skills curriculum for participants. Unfortunately, the federal Workforce Investment Act (WIA) eliminated dedicated funding for summer employment, making it harder over the last ten years for localities to create summer work opportunities for teens. Given the squeeze now facing the youngest jobseekers, President-elect Obama and the incoming Congress should revisit this question, either through WIA reauthorization or targeted legislation. Strong encouragement from the business community in this effort would represent both civic-mindedness and long-term self-interest: today’s lifeguards and sales clerks are tomorrow’s programmers and managers. Hopefully, at least. 

David Jason Fischer is Project Director for Workforce Development and Social Policy at the Center for an Urban Future in New York City (www.nycfuture.org)