Part-Time Teen Workers: Arguments Pro, Con

The competition for the billions of dollars teen-agers spend has heated up in recent years: Movies, retail stores, fast-food restaurants, record shops, all want a piece of the action.

And in order for the teen-age Smiths to keep up with the teen-age Joneses, and vice versa--the old-fashioned weekly allowance just doesn’t cut it--they are entering the part-time job market in droves: More than 4 million teen-age students were working part-time jobs in 1985, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, and according to a National Center for Education Statistics study, nearly two-thirds of high school seniors and more than 40% of high school sophomores are working part-time jobs during the school year.

That may be good news for the economy, but is it good for the teen-agers?

Some psychologists and sociologists say part-time jobs help teen-agers learn the value of the work ethic, keep them from having too much free time to get into trouble and help them learn skills that will be useful in later life.

Others say jobs have the opposite effect, leading them into drug abuse and other delinquent activities, teaching them to sneer at the work ethic and giving them the money to throw away on frills.

Proper Approach

Almost everyone who has looked at the reality of part-time student employment says there can be benefits with the proper approach.

“The pressure for a teen-ager to work is great,” says educator Roxanne Bradshaw, secretary-treasurer of the National Education Assn., “and not just because of the economic plight in the world today. Much of it is peer pressure to have a little bit of freedom and independence, to have their own spending money. The concern we have is when that part-time work becomes the primary focus.”

Part-time work can be a beneficial experience, Bradshaw says, “especially when there is parental involvement and an understanding work environment, one that is supportive of them as students. The first priority should be school.”

Psychologists Ellen Greenberger and Laurence Steinberg, who have done studies on the subject and recently wrote “When Teenagers Work: The Psychological and Social Costs of Adolescent Employment” (Basic Books, 1986), conclude that teen-age student workers perform less well in school, experience a higher rate of delinquency and alcohol and drug abuse and are more likely than their non-working peers to develop a negative attitude toward working.

“Insofar as working today may be unproductive for many youngsters, or have negative consequences for their development,” Greenberger and Steinberg say, “the fault lies largely in the kinds of jobs we make available to youth and with the broader social context of their employment.” Greenberger is at the University of California, Irvine; Steinberg at University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Largest Employer

The fast-food industry, one of the areas targeted by Greenberger and Steinberg, is perhaps the largest employer of teen-age students. Spokesmen for that industry, which has a large turnover rate and a rapidly increasing number of jobs, insist they are as concerned for their employees’ welfare as they are in filling job openings.

“Given the labor shortage,” says Mary Maguire, corporate-level public relations manager for Roy Rogers Restaurants in Washington, “we want to do everything we can to attract and keep good employees. We’re going to work with the students and their parents to meet their schedules, as well as our own needs, in order to keep that employee.

“There’s no way we’re going to sabotage a kid’s performance in school, because then the parents will take them out of the restaurant. We need those employees.”

Working in a fast-food restaurant, or any other part-time job, says Maguire, calls for some level of maturity on the teen-ager’s part. The benefits of such work, she says, include learning to balance work, school and socializing. “They have to learn to keep the balance and to decide what their primary goal should be: Their primary goal should be schoolwork, and they shouldn’t be working too-long hours.”

NEA’s Bradshaw says there are a number of issues, including hours, that should be of concern to students and parents alike. Among them:

--”If kids are going to work part time, they should have some sort of guidance and counseling, not only from the school side but also from the parents, and there should be encouragement for them to seek employment that is maybe going to give them some sense of self-esteem, responsibility and independence without taking up a full amount of their time.

--”There should be limits on the number of hours students work, not only in number but also what those hours are in the sequence of the day. They should not be working after 9 or 10 at night.

--”There should be a space of time when students will have some quality time to do their schoolwork.”

The Parental Role

George Washington University Prof. Amitai Etzioni, who has written critically of fast-food restaurants as places of employment for teen-agers, agrees with Maguire and Bradshaw on the issue of hours. The deleterious effects of part-time employment, he suggests, might be controlled by parents, who could “set a school-night curfew, like 9 p.m., and limit kids to working 15 hours a week during the school year. That would go a long way to improve the situation.”

Also, Etzioni says, “The parents should agree with the children clearly about what’s going to happen to the money.” That, he says, might depend on the family’s financial situation. “For a poorer family, a good part of it should go for the household and not just be spent on trinkets. For the middle class, it should be for some agreed goal, like college or a car, and again not just pocket money.”

Maguire, who regularly is in touch with district managers “and other people who have worked their way up through hourly employment ranks,” says they regularly tell her that “ ‘the kids that work for me are working toward goals, and they’re saving money for college.’ Of course they’re going to buy records or something, but they’re going for goals. They’re good kids.”

With good managers, she notes, “the kids really can do a lot and learn responsibility--for being somewhere on time, planning their schedules and looking a certain way, and in working with the public--learning how to deal with customers who may be having a rough day themselves. They also learn teamwork.” Maguire points out that 25% of the Roy Rogers management staff started as hourly employees.

Disagreement on Drugs

Denise Gottfredson, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, says her own research--done when she was at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University--indicates that “the suggestion that kids who work are more likely to turn to drugs and delinquency as a result of working” just isn’t so.

“It could be the one thing that the student is unwilling to risk losing by engaging in delinquent activities. . . . It might provide attachment to other individuals that could give them something to become committed to, some conventional activity that they might become psychologically committed to.

“I remember being a teen-ager and working and I remember it as an overall positive experience.”