Fewer Youths Are Singing: ‘It’s Off to Work We Go’

For 14-year-old Josh Breski, the hunt for a summer job had barely begun.

In years past, the Costa Mesa youth would have faced a pretty tough challenge. It is relatively late in the traditional summer job-hunting season, his only prior work experience is a paper route, he isn’t old enough to drive, and state labor law limits the kind of jobs that employers can give him because of his age.

But Breski, who graduates from junior high school later this month and would like to earn some money this summer from a steady job, was not sweating it as he began making the rounds late last week. And with good reason.

From seasonal employment giants like Disneyland to mom-and-pop proprietors like the Yogurt Connection in Newport Beach, employers are bending over backward this year to find enough willing and able teens to fill their summer jobs.

In an attempt to compensate for a declining teen-age population and virtual full employment in many parts of Southern California, employers in industries traditionally dependent on summer hiring are lowering age limits, providing transportation, raising wages and expanding their recruiting efforts to find help this year.

“Employers are having a hard time filling their jobs this year,” said Beverly Butcher, work experience coordinator at Anaheim High School. “There are more jobs available than people to fill them . . . and a student who really wants a job can get one doing almost anything.”

Butcher said she has helped place lots of kids in jobs that pay anywhere from the state minimum for high school graduates of $4.25 an hour to as much as $7 an hour for summer clerical and word-processing positions.

Across the country, the number of 16-to-24-year-olds will drop to 24.6 million this summer, down almost 3% from 25.3 million a year ago, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Standards. The teen-age population is expected to continue declining by about 500,000 a year through 1997, a legacy of the downsizing of the American family in the 1960s and 1970s.

In Orange County, where the soaring price of housing over the past decade has driven away many families with young children, the decline of the teen-age population is even greater. The number of 16-to-19-year olds in the county dropped a precipitous 22.6% last summer, to 123,000 from 159,000 in 1987, the BLS reported. Comparable figures for 1989 are not available.

Employers in Orange County not only have to compete for a dwindling number of teens, they must cope with an unusually low unemployment rate, averaging 3% over the past 16 months, which further diminishes the summer job pool.

And while the teen jobless rate is generally higher, Orange County’s is one of the lowest in the state. In 1988, the last summer period for which a figure was calculated, the teen rate was 7.1% in Orange County, contrasted with 16.1% in Los Angeles County and 14.1% in San Diego County.

Compounding the problem in some affluent areas of the county, the high family incomes that increase demand for

service, retail and tourism-oriented businesses work against them when it comes time to staff up for the summer.

Bluntly put, a significant number of high school and college students in Orange County simply don’t want or need summer jobs, employment specialists say.

The $4.25 a hour they can get flipping burgers at a Carl’s Jr. or selling beach wear at a Wet Seal won’t keep the BMW gassed up, complicates the family trip to Europe or simply doesn’t give them enough time to work on their tans.

“In the South Coast Plaza area, it is really difficult to find good, reliable people,” said Donna Montez, district manager for the Wet Seal women’s apparel chain. “Most (teens) in the Newport area just don’t need jobs.”

Only 80,000 of the 123,000 teens in the county were counted as employed or actively seeking work last summer, said Connie Lau, an analyst with the state Employment Development Department. Those numbers are expected to shrink again this year, she said.

“Everything you hear about teen-age employment (shortages) is true,” said Jeri Beals, manager of employment services at Disneyland, the Southland’s largest single employer of summer help.

“And you can add to it the fact that, as it gets more crowded around here, it is less desirable for people who live far away to drive in for a service job when they can find one closer to home.”

The reality for owners of the small businesses that do the bulk of Orange County’s summer hiring “is that you’ve got to pay more than the minimum to get decent help, or even to get any help at all,” said Lynne Graham, executive director of the nonprofit Costa Mesa Youth Employment Service.

“Most young people who work are working for the money,” Graham said. “And they are going to go for the job with the highest pay they can find, unless it is really a job that offers something they find interesting. So while we hear all kinds of things from employers, the thing we can generalize is that those with high standards and low pay have difficulty finding teen-agers to work for them.”

The fast-food business has been one of the hardest hit by the teen shortage and by changing attitudes about work.

Managers of many fast-food restaurants in the county say they have no problem finding cooks and food preparation workers because those jobs often don’t require good English language skills.

“But the big problem we have is getting enough people who speak English so we can staff the counters and take people’s orders,” said Lydia Hamilton, assistant manager of a Burger King in Santa Ana. “Right now we have enough, but we never have more than enough. We’re always just barely making it.”

Saeeda Ghani, manager of a Burger King in Fountain Valley, said he, too, has difficulty attracting qualified employees. “The high school kids just aren’t applying,” he said. “I don’t know if they look down on fast food or what.”

Ghani has been at the Fountain Valley restaurant for five years. For the first year or two, he said, there was an abundance of summer job applicants.

“But in the past three years,” Ghani said, “we are having a hard time getting high school kids to apply. I don’t know. Maybe it is too hard for them. Burger King requires you to learn the cash register and also how to cook and clean up, and a lot of people just don’t like the hard work.”

Montez, the Wet Seal manager, said a lot of applicants tell her they don’t like the fast food business “because it’s greasy and not as glamorous” as retailing.

One antidote to that attitude is higher wages.

In-N-Out Burger, a Baldwin Park chain with 54 restaurants in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura and Riverside counties, recently raised its minimum wage to $6 an hour, a whopping $1.75 above the state minimum.

“We hire teen-agers, and we hire in the summer,” said personnel manager Ken Iriart, “but we increased our minimum because we want to attract and keep people who want a career with us, not just so we could find bodies.”

Iriart said In-N-Out has been hit by the teen crunch as it expands and recently “began laying the groundwork with schools in the areas we serve so that the job placement counselors know who we are and so we can have a referral network.”

In-N-Out, like many other fast-food chains, also is increasingly turning to senior citizens to help fill positions.

“There are a lot of opportunities today that didn’t exist years ago,” Iriart said, “and the job candidates are aware of this. So all companies have to do a better job of recruiting from all sources.”

The situation has gotten so bad that Disneyland, which once hired only high school graduates for its summer jobs, has lowered its minimum age from 17 to 16 this summer.

A lot of the park’s summer jobs are in food services. “We were finding that by the time they came to us at 17 or 18, they’d already worked for a year at a fast-food place and didn’t want to do it anymore,” said Beals.

Disneyland, which hires about 2,000 summer workers each year, has found it necessary to deal with more than just a growing distaste for food jobs.

The company finds that teen-agers aren’t as willing to work night and weekend hours as they once were. And several high school employment counselors said students increasingly complain about the park’s strict dress code and the expectation that employees should keep regular hours and be available to work all summer long.

Disneyland’s summer job wages start at $4.75 an hour, 50 cents above the state minimum, and top out at $5 for seasonal employees.

Disneyland, like Magic Mountain, Knott’s Berry Farm, Wild Rivers and other amusement parks in the Southland, recruits summer workers all year long instead of just in the two or three months before summer starts.

“We’ve gotten more aggressive because we’ve had to,” Beals said.

All of the parks participate in high school job fairs and advertise on youth-oriented radio stations and in school newspapers.

Knott’s Berry Farm, for example, recently began running an employment ad on MTV, the cable music video channel. The park pays the state minimum for most summer jobs, but attracts employees by offering discounts at its retail shops, free passes for workers and their friends, special employee parties and other nonwage benefits.

Six Flags Magic Mountain, located in Valencia, is some distance from the densely populated portion of the San Fernando Valley, so Magic Mountain provides transportation for many of its workers.

Gary Vien, the park’s personnel manager, said he recently sent recruitment letters and job application forms home to parents of high school juniors and seniors and college freshmen and sophomores living in the areas nearest the park. The hope was that parents would push their kids into applying, he said.

One employer that boasts of having no recruitment problems is Wild Rivers, a water-theme park in Irvine. Operations director Dennis Moore said that even though 250 of the park’s 400 workers must possess lifeguard certifications, he turned away more than 800 applicants this year and maintains a waiting list of more than 100 names.

About 55% of the employees are returning veterans from last year, Moore said, a statistic sure to shake other amusement parks. The industry’s average retention rate is about 35%.

Wild Rivers doesn’t pay especially well; its scale runs from $4.25 to $6.50 an hour. And it doesn’t provide a lot of job security, because it is only open full time from June 10 through Labor Day weekend and shuts down completely from the end of October until the beginning of May.

Still, Moore said he has not had to expand his recruiting efforts beyond Orange County’s coastal high schools.

Why?

Well, Wild Rivers offers its employees one perk that few other summer jobs can match.

Most of the customers are young men and women who walk around all day long in bathing suits.

“I like to call it the glamour element,” Moore said, “and it helps with female as well as with male employees.”

Times staff writer Mary Ann Galante contributed to this report.