ساختار استخدام نوجوان : زمینه های اجتماعی و مشاغل برگزار شده توسط افراد مسن دبیرستان

Although it is widely assumed that work careers begin after the completion of schooling, most enrolled high school students are also workers. Teenage workers are heavily concentrated in the low wage service sector, but they are also found as supplemental part-time workers in many occupations, including clerical, retail sales, and blue collar employment. Gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic origins are important determinants of the types of jobs that teenage students hold. Students from advantaged socioeconomic origins and students with above average grades are more likely to work in “good jobs,” defined by lower hours of work per week and higher status.

Work careers begin after the completion of formal schooling. This is a fundamental assumption of life course research, which identifies “the school to work transition” as one of the most critical stages of the early life course. Yet the reality is that most students are also workers. A third or more of high school students are currently employed, as are the majority of college students (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005a). The paucity of research on the overlap of student and worker roles and on the occupational structure of teenage workers is almost certainly due to the assumption that most students work in part-time jobs that are unrelated to post-schooling work careers. Indeed, one of the major “problems” of the first Occupational Change in a Generation Survey (the data source for Blau and Duncan, 1967) was that the measurement of “first job” may have conflated student employment and post-student employment (Duncan, Featherman, & Duncan, 1972: 210–224).1 However, the high level of labor force participation among students, and the fact that teenagers comprise four percent of the American workforce, suggest the need for more research on the prevalence of work and the structure of employment among adolescents prior to the completion of schooling. In this study, we explore patterns of social stratification of teenage workers. Prior research on teenage employment has focused almost exclusively on the impact of work on educational outcomes, including grades and dropping out. The primary theoretical and policy issue is the hypothesis that the roles of worker and student are incompatible, or at least incompatible with educational success (Greenberger & Steinberg, 1986). Yet most studies have concluded that there is little observable harm if students work a moderate number of hours per week; indeed, students who work less than 15 h/week generally have better educational outcomes than students who do not work at all (Carr, Wright, & Brody, 1996; McNeil, 1997; Mortimer & Finch, 1986). Students who work longer hours, especially more than 20 or 25 h/week, do have lower grades and are more likely to drop out of school (D’Amico, 1984), however, it is unclear whether high intensity work is a cause, a consequence, or just a correlate of poorer educational outcomes. The hypothesized causal impact of teenage employment on educational outcomes hinges, in large part, on the selectivity of students into employment and different types of jobs. Before addressing this question, we describe the occupational structure of teenage employment and its relationship to the adult labor market. Within the teenage labor market structure, we attempt to identify the dimensions of occupational status and preferable job characteristics. Then we address the question of selectivity of students to jobs within the classic analytical framework of social stratification research. Specifically, we ask if family background and ascriptive characteristics, such as gender, and race and ethnicity, influence teenage employment and the attainment of higher status jobs. Although we refer to teenage employment in general, our empirical focus is on the employment patterns held by several cohorts of high school seniors in a West Coast metropolitan area. Although this is a limited geographical and temporal sample, the patterns reported here are likely to be representative of teenagers more broadly. We find that there is a clear structure between the social backgrounds of students and the jobs they hold. Advantages of family origins and school achievement are positively associated with paid employment, and advantaged students are especially more likely to hold “good jobs” outside of prototypical teenage concentration in the fast food sector and related service sector jobs.

With almost 6 million workers – a little over 4% of all employed persons – teenagers are a non-trivial fraction of the American workforce. Although most high school and college students are working for pay, their work is generally considered to be marginal since most teenagers work part time to support lifestyle consumption and in occupations that are unrelated to their future careers. The one aspect of teenage employment that has generated considerable policy interest — the potential impact of student work on education outcomes—has been clouded because of the uncertainty of selectivity into student work roles. If students are negatively selected into employment roles, perhaps because the least successful students invest more in work than schooling, the observed correlation between work and education may be spurious. There is much more speculation than evidence on the meaning and consequences of student employment. The measurement of student labor force activities is complicated because student employment is frequently short term and concentrated in a small number of occupations and industries. Most students work part-time in occupations with low pay, high turnover, and few prospects for upward mobility. Students are prominent in the food service industry as waiters, waitresses, and busboys in restaurants, cashiers, courtesy clerks, and stockers in grocery stores, and most of all, as employees in fast food establishments. Many teens also work in a broad range of other low wage occupations as sales clerks, clerical assistants, and child care workers, both as paid baby sitters and in daycare establishments. The attributes of these jobs resemble those of others who were historically considered to be “supplemental workers,” such as women and the elderly. Since supplemental workers generally work part-time for “extra money” (not to support a family), low wages were all that were necessary to attract a competent, if highly transitory, workforce. The evidence presented here shows that many teenagers are in occupations that have historically been dependent on women workers. Indeed, the majority of teenagers working in clerical, sales and service occupations are female. Sex typing of work begins early and sex-segregation of occupations is one of the primary features of teenage employment. The one exception appears to be fast food employment, which attracts both male and female teenage workers in large numbers. In spite of the truncated variance of teenage employment patterns, there appears to be a clear, hierarchical structure of teenage occupations. The preliminary effort to classify teenage occupations in Table 2 by attributes of occupational incumbents shows that students working in stereotypical teenage jobs – food preparation, retail sales and personal services – have the lowest wages and work the longest hours. Although this is not true for every occupational title in these categories, it is an accurate description of most of them. Higher status jobs in white and pink collar occupations, such as coaches, tutors, and secretaries have somewhat higher wages and worked fewer hours per week. There was more variance in blue collar occupations, which tended to have higher wages, but entailed working longer hours. There are clear patterns of social stratification in teenage jobs. We examined two dimensions of teenage employment: hours worked per week and occupational patterns. The links between social origins and teenage work were higher for hours worked than for occupational roles, but generally similar patterns held for both. Congruent with other research results, we establish a generally negative association between ethnic/racial minority status and the likelihood of employment, relative to whites. In particular, black students seem to be disadvantaged in finding jobs, and in particular, good jobs— those characterized by low work intensity and those in the white/pink collar ranks. We suspect that social networks (which may be important for finding good jobs), spatial mismatch (lack of transportation), and employer preferences may play a role in these differentials. Our results indicate a shift toward more comparable rates of female and male participation in the teenage labor force relative to previously observed employment rates. For example, D’Amico (1984), among others, has established that males are more likely to work than females, and more likely to work longer hours. More recent studies have indicated a shift in gender-related work patterns, with female students’ employment rates rising to parity with males (Mortimer, 2003). The results presented here are consistent with this observed shift and show that female students are significantly more likely to work than males, and that females are over represented in both low-intensity and high-intensity employment. Although there could be many reasons for these gender-based patterns, we suspect that there has been a temporal shift in gender work patterns among teenagers just as there has been among adults. At present, female students are more likely to have working mothers than was the case a few decades ago. These changes in adult female labor force participation as well as other major societal changes probably had an impact on gender patterns of teenage employment. Despite the observed changes in rates of employment and work intensity between male and female students, teenage females are over-represented in sex-typed occupations, including positions as sales clerks, clerical roles, and assisting in child care. While some of these jobs may be relatively good ones for teenagers, they may be the precursors of sex typed employment so prevalent in the adult labor market. One of the most important and consistent associations relating student characteristics and work patterns is between socioeconomic background and job type. Students with a disadvantaged background (those whose parents have, at most, a high school diploma) are shown to be at a much greater likelihood of working in the teenage job sector relative to students with more advantaged socioeconomic origins. Teenagers from modest socioeconomic origins are also more likely to work in jobs with long hours while they are still full time students in high school. In addition, students with lower grades and lower educational ambitions are less likely to be employed in good low intensity jobs and in white/pink collar occupations. Students who do not plan to attend college may decide to invest more in working than in high school. The traditional hypothesis in the research literature generally assumes that student employment holds negative consequences. However, we find that there is positive selection into employment among high school seniors. In general, students with more social and academic advantages are more likely to work, and especially to work in good jobs with shorter hours. In addition to the income, some teenage jobs may provide skills, learning experiences, and contacts that facilitate higher education and socioeconomic attainment. Other jobs may provide only wages and the chance to become familiar with the discipline and routines of dead-end careers. Differentiation among these different types of employment is a fundamental prerequisite for research that examines the impact of teenage jobs on educational attainment and subsequent career outcomes.