We have programs for this:

* http://www.jobcorps.gov/home.aspx -- This provides room, board, a stipend suitable for a teenager with no expenses, and vocational training for those under 25 years old (i.e, teens)

* http://www.fafsa.ed.gov/ -- There's really no disputing this one. Any one of them can hoof it over to the nearest community college and get some skills and a paid work-study job.

* http://www.army.mil/ -- Many of you probably don't like this, but it's probably the most successful organization at turning lazy teens into productive citizens, however, it carries the risk of death or dismemberment. My point, is there are many options.

To split hairs over the minimum wage because 95% of 1% of kids (the approximate dropout rate) don't have jobs is nonsense. So, because these kids who did not do their civic duty are unemployed means we should lower labor standards for everyone else, including those who have to feed families, such as the parents of these very children? It can only worsen the situation.

Min wage is already so low that it is not the driver to whether someone is getting hired or not. The big corporations that run most of the "small" businesses now, can pay. They just need to know they're indeed getting a valuable worker.

The other thing is, a lot of that 95% can be accounted for by kids who don't want a job. They'd rather play x-box, or work as a foot soldier in the local gang.

We have programs for this. Job corps, seriously. There's nothing stopping young people from working here. The jobs exist. The skills do not.

Teenagers in rural areas already have plenty of opportunities to be employed below minimum wage, but these opportunities largely do not exist right now in urban areas. I suspect this partially accounts for the employment discrepancies in rural and urban areas.

(Dropping the minimum wage for this should only be done for teenagers who have more social safety-nets than adults.)

A lot of these kids need exactly that - a change of environment. I have a second cousin whose mother is always getting fired from minimum wage jobs, is constantly getting kicked out of apartments, and couldn't provide him with a stable home life. His dad is long gone.

Job Corps provided him with a place to stay, training, and a job. But the best part of it was that he had to move an hour and a half away, close enough to visit but far enough where he wouldn't be distracted by all the trouble in our crime-ridden and poverty stricken city. They also teach personal skills and things like money management.

If you don't get the kid out of the ghetto, you'll have trouble getting the ghetto out of the kid.

I'm just saying that the Job Corps isn't a great fit for all teenagers, and that all teenagers would benefit from working at any sort of job (and that a lower minimum wage for teenagers would facilitate this. I think that work for the sake of work is good for teenagers, but that minimum wage gets in the way of this).

What jgreco suggests is good, as long as it's just for teens and doesn't go lower than it currently is (i.e., lets raise it for adults, since they often have to feed children)

I can agree to this, except, lets do it this way: lets leave the minimum wage where it is for teens, and raise it for everyone else. That'd also solve the problem of adults working jobs that are meant for teens.

Once the minimum wage was lower for "school jobs" the market would efficiently define which jobs can be given to school kids and which can't.

2) Need for government agency to enforce the age requirements. Modeled after immigration authority, such agency would need to be able to raid the businesses in order to do age verification, to ensure that teenager-compatible jobs are not given to adults. Also, such agency needs to ensure that people are fired on the day they reach 20th birthday, and thus lose the "teen" status.

And if their years of experience do not matter, they would be replaced with lower-cost younger labor well in advance of them reaching particular age group considered "older".

That said, it's pretty easy as a middle-income white guy to cast judgement on people living in a situation I can't even dream of understanding. This is a pretty complex subject.

When you look at one hour of one person's work, the difference between $9, $7, $5 and $3 an hour seems trivial. Surely the employer has a five dollar bill sitting around, right? But when you look at full work weeks of time, plus the costs of training the job, multiplied by all of the employees the company will hire, the difference in hourly wages emerges. And, equally importantly, the employer perceives this difference and given time will react rationally to a lower minimum wage. For every dollar of "labor standards" achieved, the minimum wage imposes a skill and manners floor with no ladder beneath it for people who need to get a leg up into the employment system with experience. Lowering this floor lets an employer take a chance on someone or even take a chance on two people where only one could be hired previously.

Job Corps, FAFSA grants, and the military all essentially pay below minimum wage for job training without economic benefit, i.e., productivity (ignoring the various effects caused by foreign wars.) Additionally, while the training provided is supposed to bridge over neatly to employment, it never does perfectly and sometimes does not match real-world needs at all. It would be better to just let companies directly pay lower wages and also provide the training by having the employee learn the actual job instead of a simulated job.

Not really. You won't train them with a $3 / hour worker. Their timesheet won't be done by a $3 / hour worker. Their workspace and equipment will cost more than $3 / hour. If they piss off a customer, or steal from the till, or break stuff, or bully other employees, or get you sued, the cost will be the same.

People in non-tech fields have to practically beg to get an internship which pays nothing. OK, internships should be about training, not work (it's the law), but we all know that's often a load of crap. That's because all staff have overhead, so even a free worker costs quite a bit.

As someone who has managed a variety of budgets, I assure you that the wage portion of an employee's total cost is still meaningful.

Correct. They'll just be cheaper. If value > cost, then it's worth it for a business to pursue.

If something is only slightly useful, then it's still useful and still worth having at some cost.

When I was a teenager for a time I was (legally) employed below standard minimum wage working as a farm laborer.

I'll give you my take on this.

What creates employment is consumption and people earning next to nothing don’t consume.

So if you cut the minimum wage all you'll end up doing is reduce the overall consumption, which in turn will drive up unemployment.

The truth might in fact be the reason the USA economy is so stuffed is because the minimum wage has not gone up in decades leading to greatly reduced levels of consumption.

So a negotiated minimum wage still covers a large proportion of jobs. In Denmark somewhere around 80% of jobs are covered by the negotiated minimum wage agreements, which are typically set at $20/hr. The main exceptions making up the 20% are small mom-and-pop stores (kebab shops and such) who don't join the employer confederation and therefore aren't subject to the agreements. But all jobs at large companies, like supermarket clerks and janitors, are covered by the minimum wage.

In Denmark this was basically the social-democratic outcome of the late-19th-century labor strife: the moderate wing of the labor movement reached an agreement in September 1899 with moderates within the business community to adopt a consensus-based approach to workplace conditions and pay. That held, so both the laissez-faire capitalist advocates and the militantly socialist portion of the labor movement were sidelined for a century or so.

Reference

If you raised minimum wage, you would just drive McDonalds to automate away more of its menial jobs and make Walmart replace all the cashiers with self checkouts, which I think is good (eliminate the useless wastes of peoples time) but it doesn't mean more people are employed for labor.

The real issue is that the distribution of economic resources has been direly concentrated in very few for 30 years, and they are now the predominant drivers of economic activity because nobody else has any prosperity anymore. It is a compound effect that the people with the money to hire and employ others have nothing to hire or employ them for, and thus they don't, instead they push their money into avenues that make profit off of regulatory exploitation rather than productivity (big banks & the fed, fortune 500 investments, lobbying for monopolies to get artificial markets).