During the pandemic, teen summer employment hit its lowest point since the Great Recession

During the pandemic summer of 2020, teen summer employment in the United States plunged to its lowest level since the Great Recession, erasing a decade’s worth of slow gains, according to Pew Research Center’s latest analysis of federal employment data.

Fewer than a third (30.8%) of U.S. teens had a paying job last summer, as many of the places most likely to employ them – restaurants, shops, recreation centers, tourist attractions – were either shuttered entirely or had their operations severely curtailed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, 35.8% of...