Jobless Summer

When students return to class next fall and pen the traditional compositions entitled "How I Spent My Summer Vacation," an unusually large number will have to write: unemployed. Some 2.7 million youths aged 14 to 21 are temporarily flooding the labor force looking for summer jobs. Instead of seeking only to put cash in their own pockets between school terms, many will be trying to balance the budgets of families whose older members are out of work. But so few summer jobs are being offered that the teen-age unemployment rate is likely to rise well beyond its already high 21.8%.

In New York City, for example, private businesses will offer 10,000 to 12,000 summer jobs to disadvantaged youths this year, v. 25,000 in 1974, through the National Alliance of Businessmen, which sponsors the program. Even that estimate may be overly optimistic: to date, the N.A.B. can count pledges of only 7,000 jobs in the city. Nationally, the N.A.B. expects 200,000 job offers, a drop of more than 25,000 from last summer.

Everywhere, competition for the few summer jobs is bitter and no longer involves only youths. Six Flags Over Georgia, a huge amusement park outside Atlanta, has received four applications for every one of its 2,000 summer jobs paying $1.80 an hour. When Personnel Manager Jerry Oliver asks youngsters why they want to work, many tell him, "My dad lost his job, and I have to help pay the bills." In addition to high school and college applicants, Oliver notes, "we get older people, 35 and up. They have been laid off by General Motors and Ford or by other companies."

Rivalry from older people and middle-class youths scrambling for summer jobs is elbowing other needy youngsters into a painfully crowded corner. The official unemployment rate for black teenagers already is 39.9%; according to Economist Bernard Anderson of the Wharton School, if statisticians counted the youths who have become too discouraged to look for work, the rate would be at least 65%. Their chief hope for even temporary employment lies in programs financed by taxpayers' money, which provide employment in hospitals, police departments, parks and other recreational areas. But most of these programs have long since been swamped by applicants.

In San Francisco, 12,000 youths have applied for 4,400 part-time jobs paying $2.10 an hour; the program is open to youngsters from families that are on welfare or earn incomes below the poverty line, now set at $5,050 a year for a nonfarm family of four. In St. Louis, 30,000 to 40,000 youths are expected to sign up for about 4,900 public service jobs, and Chicago will have at most 42,000 positions to offer to three times as many applicants. That assumes that some federal funds will be forthcoming to supplement the city's own cash. If they are not, Chicago will have to slash the number of summer jobs available by more than half and pay for them with money borrowed from year-round employment programs. In effect, jobs for youths would be provided at the expense of jobs for their parents.

Acute Need. At the moment, no federal money to pay for these summer jobs has been voted. President Ford recently requested $412.7 million from Congress to create about 760,000 summer jobs. Congress voted $456.3 million for 840,000 jobs--but lumped that sum into a $5.3 billion bill that also provided far more money than the White House had requested for such other programs as public works and unemployment compensation. Ford vetoed the bill, and last week the House failed by five votes to override. This week, though, Congress will probably pass a scaled-down version of the bill that contains the earlier summer jobs appropriation, and the President presumably will sign it. The need is acute. Some social workers fear that youths forced onto the street by a lack of summer jobs will vent their frustration through crime and other kinds of antisocial behavior.

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