Youth unemployment: Sacramento needs to invest in teenagers

Many students in Sacramento must work to pay for college, but they say the city's job market is unwelcoming to youth. According to Darrel Smith at the Sacramento Bee, just 21 percent of teens and 55 percent of youth 20 to 24 were employed in 2012,  a steep drop from numbers in 2000.  Jobs advertised online to teens were few, and primarily in the fast-food service industry, a job that doesn’t offer much experience for those who want to enter more professional arena later on.  “Most times, the only jobs available for teens are rat jobs and scab jobs. Rat jobs are jobs from a random person that you know and get paid for doing stuff- like moving a house. A scab job is where you are hired by a company because the people that they have fired originally are on strike.”  More about the teen employment experience, and their prospects at a youth job fair, on Access Sacramento.