Why Teenage Workers Are Leading the Recovery
Employers are filling more jobs than ever with the under-20 set, suggesting older Americans will follow suit as pandemic constraints ease.
Ready to work.
Photographer: Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images
The job market recovery is looking better for 2023 and 2024, even while this year's forecasts need to be reined in a bit. The best evidence for the optimistic outlook is coming from a surprising place: teenagers.
The last two jobs reports poured cold water on the hope that we could add a million jobs or more for a few months in a row, which means a full employment recovery to pre-pandemic levels is going to take longer than we thought. But booming employment trends among teenagers suggests that over the next few years, strong demand for workers should flow through into higher levels of labor-force participation than we saw in the late 2010s.