Opinion: Why it was so hard for kids to find summer jobs this year – and why my generation had it easier

In the spring of 1985, a couple of months before I graduated from Grade 11, I applied for a summer job at Chi-Chi’s, a Mexican-style restaurant and bar that was opening an outlet not far from my home on Montreal’s West Island. Before serving its first meal, the place needed to find scores of waiters, cooks, dishwashers and – the position I was hired for – busboys. Most of us were students, and almost everyone was from the surrounding neighbourhoods.

The next year, old enough to serve alcohol, I was quickly hired as a waiter at another restaurant. Over the next few summers, I worked at three different chains, the last of which was Red Lobster. At the Loobster, as we called the place, I learned many things, the most important of which was respect for the skills of others. I was allegedly a good student (mostly I was skilled at bluffing my way through essays), but in the real world of customer service, I was a bottom-quintile performer. I couldn’t handle more than four tables at a time, so my colleagues earned more than me, often reaching the holy grail of $100 in tips in a night. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $225.

This past year, I’ve heard many parents share stories about how difficult it was for their university-age kids to find a summer job, or how they never landed one even after sending out dozens of applications. (Got your own story, positive or negative? Please send me an e-mail, or comment on this article online.)

In contrast, I don’t remember me or my friends having any trouble finding summer employment in the late 1980s. Am I seeing the past through rose-tinted glasses? Or are today’s kids a bunch of malingering job-shirkers?

For answers, let’s go to the Statistics Canada data.

Last month, 16.5 per cent of returning students aged 15 to 24 were unemployed. Canada had almost 2.9 million returning students, defined as attending school in the spring, with plans to return in the fall. The employment rate – the share with jobs – was only 49 per cent.

A group that Statscan calls “other students” – those enrolled in the spring, but not continuing their studies in the fall, or unsure about returning – had it even worse. More than eight out of 10 of them were in the labour force in August, which means they were willing and able to work. But 20.1 per cent were unemployed.

The figures are all worse than last summer, or the summer before. They’re also worse than before the pandemic. In August, 2019, student unemployment was nearly four percentage points lower than today, while the employment rate was more than six points higher.

And in August of 1988, when I was clocking dollars at Red Lobster, the returning student unemployment rate was just 7.8 per cent, less than half what it is today. The employment rate, at 64.6 per cent, was more than 15 points higher than today.

What’s more, those official figures likely understate the disparity between the two eras. That’s because people who give up looking for work are not counted as unemployed. They’re recorded as out of the labour force. A low unemployment rate tends to draw people into the labour force, but a lack of jobs discourages marginal or new workers – such as students – pushing some of them out of the work force.

The summer of 1988 was in many respects the opposite of what young people are experiencing today.

I was part of the baby bust that followed the baby boom. We represented a shrinking pool of entry-level workers. That made it a pretty good time to be an entry-level worker.

Statscan estimates the number of students and non-students aged 15 to 24 shrank by more than a quarter-million people between the summer of 1986 and 1988. The last of the baby boomers aged out, and my smaller count of Gen Xers replaced them.

In the past two years, in contrast, Statscan says the same age group grew by more than half a million.

I easily landed summer jobs in the late 1980s in part because there weren’t enough young people to go around. I was a rare commodity – exactly what today’s young, entry-level workers are not.

My good luck was an accident. Their bad luck is, at least partly, deliberate policy.

The problematic policy is not immigration. A generation ago, Canada’s immigration level was lower than it is today, but it was still higher than most of our peer countries. The 1991 census counted 16 per cent of the Canadian population as having been born overseas – a higher figure than in the United States today, and higher than at any time in U.S. history, going back to at least 1850.

Many if not most of the kids in my neighbourhood, my schools and my student jobs were immigrants or (like me) children of immigrants.

The difference is that Chi-Chi’s, Red Lobster and all the other surrounding restaurants and stores had no temporary foreign worker program to turn to. There were no puppy-mill colleges hocking work permits in exchange for tuition. We, the local kids, were the only entry-level labour force on offer.