Tag: working

How did Americans get so lazy?

Guest Post by Jared Dillian

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It’s estimated that the average person spends only 10% of their life actually working.

What? How is that true when you work 40 out of 168 hours in a week?

Well, you don’t work until age 18 or 21, for starters, and you don’t work after age 65. If you don’t work weekends and take four weeks of vacation a year … you can see how the free time all adds up.

What I find absolutely incredible is that we have built the society by spending only 10% of our lives working. Imagine if we spent 11%!

On a micro level, most people care about three squares and a roof over their head. Doesn’t matter the profession.

Continue reading “How did Americans get so lazy?”

American teens refuse to get jobs

My 19 year old got his old job back at Dunkin Donuts as soon as he got back from college. They had him working 36 hours his first week. They’ve hired three of his other college friends too. He also worked for his apartment complex at college and got free rent as his pay. That saved me $7,000. My 17 year old works as a waiter at an old folks home. There are plenty of jobs for teens if they want to work.
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Fewer than one in three American teens gets a summer job

Paramount/ Courtesy: Everett Collection
Alicia Silverstone in the 1995 movie “Clueless.”

More teens than ever are shunning summer jobs.

The number of jobs that people ages 16 to 19 secured in May — the start of the summer hiring surge — was just 156,000, down 14% from last year, according to an analysis of government data by career outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas released this week. And last year, the number of teens who got summer jobs was nearly 11% lower than the year prior.

That’s all part of a decades-long trend in which fewer teens than ever work summer jobs: While more than half of teenagers worked summer jobs in the 1970s and 1980s, these days fewer than one in three do, according to a survey released in 2015 by the Pew Research Center.

“The general trend in summer employment among teens has been downward and that trend has been going on since the late 1970s,” said John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Continue reading “American teens refuse to get jobs”

WTF CHART OF THE DAY

This chart blows my mind. How can 91% of all 16 to 19 year olds in the country not be working this summer? If the economy is in its sixth year of recovery and the unemployment rate is really 5.3%, why is the percentage of teenagers working at an all-time low? I was 16 in 1979. I worked every year from the time I was 16. My oldest son worked at a golf course at 16. My middle son started working at Dunkin Donuts at 16 until leaving for college last week and working as an RA. My youngest son just turned 16 and immediately got a waiter job at a local retirement home.

I see help wanted signs at fast food joints, restaurants and retail stores in malls. If a teenager wants a job they can get a job.

So why aren’t teenagers working? Are they lazy? Are their parents too easy on them? WTF is wrong with this country?