By Joan Gralla

Sat Jun 16, 2012 12:36pm EDT

(Reuters) – Job-hunting teenagers in cities across the United States face the third bleak summer in a row. They must compete for scarce slots in scaled-back government work programs and against adults forced into low-paying positions by the unemployment crisis.

The harsh summer job market for teens is compounded by this: The country has recovered only half the jobs lost from December 2007 through June 2009, the worst recession in 70 years.

Teens – often the last hired and first fired – suffered the toughest summers on the job front since World War II in 2010 and 2011. This summer, the outlook is chilly – again.

In April, the U.S. unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds was 24.9 percent – and much higher in some major metropolitan areas.

“What I would ask people to think about is: Who gave you your first work experience? Almost every one of us had a break to get their first job, and that work experience is essential to get your second and third job,” said Larry Frank, Los Angeles deputy mayor of neighborhood and community services.

Los Angeles – with the help of federal stimulus money – created around 15,000 summer jobs for teenagers in 2009 and 2010. But as the federal program ended, that was slashed to about 6,000 in 2011. It will not rise this year.

It’s a similar story in other major cities.

New York City had 52,000 summer jobs for teens in 2009. Now the program is half that size. It has five applicants for every job.

Boston hopes to get funds and private-sector placements to raise this summer’s teen job program to 10,000 slots, up from 8,800 in 2011, said Conny Doty, director of the Mayor’s Office of Jobs and Community Services.

The Obama administration’s stimulus funding helped support more than 370,000 summer youth jobs in 2009 and 2010.

But last autumn, a divided Congress failed to enact another jobs measure, which included $1.5 billion for summer and year-round jobs for low-income teenagers and young adults.

Federal officials are trying to persuade the private sector to fill some of the void to take the edge off the soaring national unemployment rate for teenagers.

LONG LINES AND A JOB LOTTERY

Brandon Hutchinson, 17, in line with about 200 other teens waiting to register for New York City’s summer job program, said he has made it through the job lottery two out of the three times he applied. He recalled 2010, when he was not chosen, as “a dead summer,” adding that although he had his friends, “I’d rather be getting paid.”

Hutchinson hopes for a repeat of last summer when he worked in the kitchen of Henry Street Settlement, a nonprofit agency that offers social services, arts and healthcare programs.

In the lottery, though, not all who are called are chosen. To land a summer job, each teen must bring certain documents showing proof of identity and family income.

Darian Beauchamp, 16, in line with the other lottery winners, said he could not land a job this spring because employers wanted people who were at least 18: “My age and not having a lot of experience limited what I can do.”

Nikya Floyd, a 32-year-old mother in line with her teen daughter, another lottery winner, got her first jobs through the same kind of program.

“Getting a paycheck every two weeks was a big motivator for me,” said Floyd, who joined the Navy and became a machinist. Her summer jobs – mainly caring for children – did not lead to a career, but they “got me working and my mind set for a job.”

KEEPING TEENS OUT OF TROUBLE

Some economists say the lack of job opportunities could push some urban teens to permanently disconnect from the workforce.

“If you’re a lower-income person, the income might be pretty valuable. If it does keep you out of trouble, that’s valuable because once young people are incarcerated, they are scarred for life,” said Harry Holzer, a professor at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute.

Without federal stimulus dollars, other major U.S. cities also cut their summer job programs in the last two years. Philadelphia plans to place at least 5,600 youths this summer versus 11,180 in 2010.

But Chicago is increasing its summer jobs program to 17,000 spots, up 3,000 from 2011. Some 500 teenagers who live in high-crime areas will take part in special mentoring programs. The University of Chicago Crime Lab will study whether the program cuts “violence involvement” and improves “school outcomes.”

The poorest Americans bear the brunt of the teen job crisis. Only one of every five teenagers whose family had income below $20,000 a year was hired last summer, a report by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies found.

In contrast, the teen employment rate was 41 percent for those with family incomes of $100,000 to $150,000 a year.

WORST AND BEST CITIES FOR TEENS

Washington, D.C.’s teenage unemployment rate was 51.7 percent, an analysis by research fellow Michael Saltsman of the Employment Policies Institute showed.

Gerren Price, Washington’s associate director of youth programs, tied its teenage unemployment crisis to local high schools’ high drop-out rate and competition from area college students.

Nearly 38 out of every 100 young college graduates with bachelor of arts degrees are working as cashiers, sales clerks, bartenders, waiters, waitresses and in office jobs, Northeastern University’s report found.

Unlike Washington, the Boston-Cambridge-Quincy metropolitan area has a fairly low teen unemployment rate – 14.8 percent – and one of the nation’s strongest summer job programs.

“You can walk through any of those hospitals and meet people in their 30s who say they got there because they had a summer job there,” Doty said.

(Reporting by Joan Gralla; Editing by Jan Paschal)

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Hi. I’m Scott Walker from Wisconsin.

Last fall, my wife Tonette and I had a chance to visit Independence Hall. It was quite an experience. You see, as a kid, I loved history and thought of our Founders as being, well, bigger than life … almost like super heroes … so looking at the desks and the chairs where they sat was really pretty amazing.

Standing there it dawned on me that those who had assembled in these chambers were ordinary citizens who did something quite extraordinary. They didn’t just risk their political careers or their business ventures; they risked their lives for the freedoms we hold dear today.

It reminded me that what has made America great, what has made us exceptional for more than two centuries, what has made the United States arguably the greatest country in the history of the world, is that in moments of crisis — be they economic or fiscal, be they military or spiritual — there have been men and women of courage who thought more about the future of their children and grandchildren than they thought about their own political destiny. We need leaders like that today.

Sadly, the president and many of his allies seem to measure success by how many people are dependent on government programs. Those policies have failed. In contrast, I and many other Republicans define success in just the opposite way — by how many people we can free from government dependence by growing the private sector.

Now, that doesn’t mean we want to throw folks off of unemployment. Instead, we want people no longer dependent on government because they have a job. When more of our fellow citizens have work in the private sector, there will be more freedom and more prosperity in our country. That’s a good thing … a very good thing.

In Wisconsin, we faced one of the biggest budget deficits ever when I first took office last year. During the three years prior to my tenure, my state lost more than 100,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate was above 9 percent.

Today, Wisconsin has a budget surplus. For the first time in history, we’re able to put money into our state’s rainy-day fund for two years in a row. Since taking office, Wisconsin has gained more than 41,000 private sector jobs and the unemployment rate — well, it’s below 7 percent for the first time since 2008. My state used to be ranked in the bottom ten of the best and worst states to do business in. Now, we’re in the top 20 … and climbing.

In Wisconsin, we made the tough decisions to tackle our economic and fiscal crises. Now it is time to do the same for America.

We can do it. We can do it — because we’ve done it before.

Thirty years ago, the national unemployment rate was 10.8 percent, but once President Ronald Reagan’s reforms went into effect, we saw one of the greatest economic booms in U.S. history.

We need that kind of bold leadership again today to get our fiscal house on track and to get our economy back in order. But more big government is not the answer as the president contends.

Instead, we need to confront the powerful special interests in Washington and put the hard-working taxpayers back in charge of our government. We need to think more about the next generation than we do about the next election.

That kind of courage may be rare in politics, but I see it every day in the moms and dads I meet at factories and farms and small businesses all across my state. These moms and dads work hard for a living for more than just a paycheck. They work hard for the same reason my wife, Tonette, and I do: we want our kids to have a better life.

Isn’t that what this is all about? I don’t know about you, but I want my two sons, Matt and Alex, to inherit an America at least — at least — as great as the America I grew up in.

The good news is that we can still do something about it. We’ll have to make some tough choices — but there is no doubt that it is worth it. Let this be the moment in history where we can tell our children and our grandchildren that we helped restore our country’s greatness again. I believe we can, because I believe in America.

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Steve Larsen, the government
administrator directing enactment of U.S. insurance regulations
created by the 2010 health-care overhaul, said he is leaving to
take a job with UnitedHealth Group Inc. (UNH)

Larsen will resign as head of the Center for Consumer
Information and Insurance Oversight in July to become an
executive vice president at UnitedHealth’s Optum unit, he said
in an e-mail. Larsen worked for Amerigroup Corp. (AGP), a Virginia
Beach, Virginia-based insurer specializing in Medicaid plans,
before joining the Department of Health and Human Services in
2010 and had served as Maryland’s insurance commissioner.

Larsen’s departure was announced by his boss, Marilyn Tavenner, the acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services, in an e-mail to her staff today. He will
be replaced temporarily by Mike Hash, an adviser to Health and
Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius while Tavenner
searches for a permanent replacement, she said.

“I am proud of our efforts to hold insurance companies
accountable to consumers and our work with states and others to
build a new insurance marketplace,” Tavenner said in the e-mail
to her staff.

Spending Rules

Larsen supervised new rules that limit the amount of
premium revenue insurers can keep for profit and administrative
costs. His agency is guiding states as they develop insurance
“exchanges” authorized by the law to sell policies to people
who don’t get coverage through work. The agency will install a
federal exchange in states that refuse to build their own by
2014 when the exchanges are supposed to begin.

Larsen’s position made him one of the country’s most
powerful regulators of the health insurance industry, said Joel Michaels, a partner at McDermott Will Emery in Washington who
represents insurance companies.

“His role was fairly prominent because the nature of the
law moved so much state insurance regulation to federal
regulation, at least in certain key areas,” Michaels said today
in a telephone interview.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule this month on a
case that argues that provisions of the law are
unconstitutional. Larsen’s work may be undone, and his agency
eliminated, if court throws out the law.

The Optum division of Minnetonka, Minnesota-based
UnitedHealth, the largest U.S. health insurer, provides health-
care services including pharmacy benefit management, consulting,
and wellness and disease-management programs for employers.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Alex Wayne in Washington at
awayne3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Reg Gale at
rgale5@bloomberg.net

Enlarge image

U.S. Health Insurance Regulator Larsen to Leave Government

Rich Clement/Bloomberg

Steve Larsen, director of insurance oversight at the Department of Health and Human Services, speaks during an interview in Washington on March 17, 2011.

Steve Larsen, director of insurance oversight at the Department of Health and Human Services, speaks during an interview in Washington on March 17, 2011. Photographer: Rich Clement/Bloomberg

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