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Despite a competitive market, finding a summer job is highly beneficial for teens
A lifeguard overlooks an outdoor swimming pool.
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Etienne Laurent/Getty Images
Teenagers hoping to hold the whistle as a lifeguard or camp counselor, or just work any job this summer are having a hard time getting hired.
“They now have more competition. There may be fewer jobs available,” says Brad Hershbein, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “They kind of get stuck with the short straw.”
Many factors are contributing to the competition for entry-level jobs: AI, inflation, tariffs, even those oil tankers stuck in the Persian Gulf. But all signs are pointing to 2026 being the worst job market for teens in decades.
“So many people are increasingly desperate to find a job, any job, especially if they have college loans,” Hershbein says. “That makes it that much harder for someone younger to be able to compete.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 219,000 fewer teens working this May compared to last May. Their participation in the labor force has been sliding since a peak of nearly 58% in the 1970s. Today, about a third of teens are in the labor force, either working or looking for summer work.
Mariella Silva, 19, had to hustle before finding a summer job as a barista at Zeke’s Coffee, a roastery and coffee shop in Washington, D.C.
She says now that she’s working, she feels more grown up. She is learning from her older coworkers and starting to understand and appreciate the value of money. She says, “Every time I spend something, I’m like, oh, this is like two hours of work.” She says she really feels the pinch of inflation when she considers whether to buy a meal out in the world, “I’m like, hmm. . . there’s food at home.”
Her boss, Jesse Lauritsen, doesn’t actually hire many teens. For starters, their schedules are hard to accommodate. Teens often have school or sports commitments and are new to the idea of carving out big chunks of time for work shifts.
“If they can only work one day a month, there’s no point in really hiring them,” Lauritsen says.
Economist Brad Herschbein notes that hiring managers may view teens as an investment that won’t pay off right away. “It’s almost a community service, rather than getting that productivity right away,” he says.
The dwindling job opportunities for teenagers means that plenty of them won’t get their first workforce experience while they’re still young, he adds. “A growing share of 18- to 19-year-olds are neither employed nor in school. They’re not really engaged in child care either.”
Economists call such people “idle.” It’s a strong term, but might be accurate, according to time-use surveys.
“They do seem to be engaging in a lot of leisure,” says Hershbein “The quintessential stereotype is, you know, someone’s playing video games all day.”
That pattern doesn’t just worry their parents. Many cities and school districts are trying hard to line up job opportunities for young people.
At a community pool in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Gayle Hurn hires over a hundred lifeguards and swim instructors every summer: She says she’s got a roster full of teenagers from around the city. “I think we need to start viewing teens as a really important part of the infrastructure of the workplace.”
Hurn says everyone who visits the pool feels the joy that her young workers bring to their job, even if she admits that teenagers can be hard to manage. “It’s my job to help them not just get a paycheck, but really build them so that when they move on from me, they can be super successful and really great contributors to whatever other work environment they join.”
Hurn makes them put away their phones, she works around their vacation schedules and she helps them through difficult conversations.
Happily, she adds, her teen employees are totally worth it.
A ranger who was assigned to a climbing patrol on Mount McKinley in Alaska, North America’s tallest peak, died after falling into a crevasse on Thursday, the National Park Service said.
Officials identified the ranger as Robin Pendery, 33, of Enumclaw, Wash., a seasonal employee for the park service, and said she had been near a camp that sits at about 14,000 feet up the mountain when she fell. Parks Service workers responded immediately, the agency said, but Ms. Pendery did not survive. It did not release further details about the incident.
Ms. Pendery’s death came just over a week after three members of a Latvian climbing expedition died in an accident on the same mountain in Denali National Park and Preserve.
The Park Service said that Ms. Pendery had joined the mountaineering staff at the park in 2024.
“We are heartbroken by the loss of a member of our Denali family,” Brooke Merrell, the park’s superintendent, said in a statement. “Our mountaineering rangers dedicate themselves to serving visitors and helping others in one of the most challenging environments in the world. Today, we mourn the loss of a valued colleague, friend and teammate.”
Ms. Pendery was a nursing student at the University of Washington, according to her LinkedIn profile, and then became a registered nurse. She had nearly a decade of experience as a seasonal mountain guide, including for Alpine Ascents International, an expedition company based in Seattle.
A biography page for Ms. Pendery on the Alpine Ascents website said that, along with Mount McKinley, she had climbed Mount Rainier, Mount Baker and Mount St. Helens in Washington State and Mount Hood in Oregon.
“She was a serious and compassionate professional,” Gordon Janow, the director of programs for Alpine Ascents, wrote in an email on Friday. “Highly respected by peers, thorough, competent and an absolute pleasure to spend time with. We guided together in India, and her level of care for clients and passion for the mountains were unsurpassed. We’re devastated and her companionship will be sorely missed.”
Mount McKinley, which soars to 20,310 feet above sea level, was renamed as Mount Denali, the name long used by Alaska Native tribes, by President Barack Obama in 2015, but last year, President Trump reinstated the name that honored the former U.S. president William McKinley.
The recent stretch of the climbing season in the national park, which typically runs from late April through mid-July, has been particularly deadly.
Last week, three members of the Latvian Mountaineering Association died and a fourth was critically injured in what officials described as an accident at about 18,000 feet on the mountain.
The recent death toll is above average for the mountain, where more than 130 people have died since the park started keeping records more than a century ago. Three people died in Denali National Park in 2025, according to Park Service data, and there was one death in the park in both 2024 and 2023.
The final matchup for the Los Angeles mayoral runoff remains unsettled, but precinct-level returns show the contours of the race. The incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, secured one of the two spots in the November election, but Spencer Pratt and Nithya Raman are battling for second.
The results on the map reflect the nearly 500,000 votes that were tabulated on election night, which include early and mail-in votes that were returned early and ballots cast in-person on Election Day. Election officials are still in the process of counting hundreds of thousands of ballots in the race, and high-level updates will continue to be reported each day through at least June 12. But updated precinct-level data is not expected to be released until the end of June.
That means these results reflect voters who participated earlier in the process. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, as ballots that arrived later began being processed, the updated results were notably more favorable to the Democrats than they were to Mr. Pratt. The lead Mr. Pratt had over Ms. Raman as of the end of election night had been cut in half as of Friday.
Even so, the incomplete results highlight the socioeconomic fault lines that have divided the city in this election and the coalitions that each candidate has built:
Karen Bass
Ms. Bass leads handily in the Black, Latino and white liberal strongholds that underpinned her 2022 election.
Three areas of support in particular stand out for her: South Los Angeles, where she got her start as a grass-roots activist during the crack cocaine epidemic; East Los Angeles and the East Valley, where organized labor routinely turns out Latino voters; and bastions of older white Democrats, like Mar Vista, which were part of her district when she served in Congress.
Wealthy precincts like Pacific Palisades, which was ravaged by wildfire last year, spurned her, but the Palisades also overwhelmingly opposed her in 2022.
Spencer Pratt
Mr. Pratt has done well so far in the most affluent parts of the city, including Pacific Palisades, where he grew up and where his family’s home burned down in the fires last year.
As a registered Republican, he also did well in pockets of MAGA conservatism like the Sunland-Tujunga area in the far northeast San Fernando Valley.
He won over some Jewish communities on the city’s Westside with direct appeals to pro-Israel voters and also did well in expatriate Iranian-American hubs like Tehrangeles in Westwood.
Nithya Raman
Ms. Raman, who was elected to the City Council in 2020 with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America, has maintained her urban progressive base in places like Echo Park and Silver Lake, where she lives.
Her focus on affordability and her public policy expertise yielded support in dense neighborhoods with lots of cash-strapped, educated renters, like Los Feliz.
She has also done well in precincts around college campuses like Occidental College and the University of Southern California.
Of course, these results will change as the rest of the ballots are tallied over the next few weeks. Election officials have not provided an estimate of how many ballots remain uncounted specifically in the Los Angeles mayoral race, but countywide figures suggest that a substantial share of the vote is still outstanding.
As of Friday night, Los Angeles County had reported 1.6 million ballots counted and estimated that roughly 540,000 ballots remained countywide, with more still arriving. Late mail-in ballots have been more favorable to the Democrats this cycle, so the final results may move toward Ms. Bass and Ms. Raman at even higher rates than they did for Ms. Bass in the 2022 primary.
Rick Caruso, a centrist Democrat and former Republican, led on election night in 2022, but Ms. Bass steadily gained ground over the following weeks. She ultimately overtook him, winning the primary with 43 percent of the vote to Mr. Caruso’s 36 percent.
Democratic candidate for governor in California, Xavier Becerra, speaks to supporters during his election night gathering at La Plaza de Cultura y Artes on June 2 in Los Angeles, Calif.
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SAN FRANCISCO — Democrat Xavier Becerra will advance to the November election for California governor, according to a race call by The Associated Press. After days of counting ballots, it remains unclear who will claim the second spot in the fall.
In California’s unusual primary system, all candidates, regardless of party, appear on a single ballot open to any registered voter. The top two candidates then move on to the general election. An estimated 3.5 million uncounted ballots remain. The state also counts mail-in ballots that arrive up to seven days after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.
The state hasn’t had a wide-open primary like this one since the late 1990s. The winner in November will lead the country’s most populous state, facing a large deficit and other obstacles, including the state’s high cost of living, homelessness and wildfire risk. Incumbent Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, is term limited and is widely thought to be running for president in 2028.
Becerra, former Health and Human Services secretary under President Joe Biden, has staged one of the most surprising comebacks in recent state political history. As recently as April, polls were showing Becerra — also a former member of Congress and California attorney general — languishing in single digits in a crowded field.
“The people of the great state of California, in the greatest nation on earth, have spoken — loudly and proudly,” Becerra said in a written statement. “We will not be bought. We will not be bullied. And we are never backing down. November, here we come.”
For second place, Republican businessman Steve Hilton still has an edge over billionaire Democratic activist Tom Steyer, but Steyer has been gaining ground as ballots continue to be counted.
Hilton was endorsed by President Trump in April, and in later polls, he pulled ahead of Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, the other major Republican in the race. British-born Hilton is a former Fox News commentator who also served as a political adviser to former British Prime Minister David Cameron. He has campaigned for change in California after 16 years under total Democratic control.
A Hilton win would set Becerra on a glidepath to victory. Winning statewide would be an uphill battle for any Republican in a state where there are nearly twice as many Democrats as Republicans, and no GOP candidate has won statewide in 20 years.
Steyer would present a rockier road for Becerra. If the billionaire former hedge fund manager makes the runoff, it will set up a costly intraparty fight. Steyer has spent more than $213 million of his own money to boost his candidacy, making the race the most expensive gubernatorial election in California.
It’s already been an election season of unexpected developments. Some of the state’s most high-profile Democrats — former Vice President Kamala Harris, U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla and California Attorney General Rob Bonta — all stayed out of the race from the beginning.
In April, the race was disrupted when then-U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign for governor imploded amid allegations of sexual assault and harassment. Swalwell resigned from Congress shortly after the accusations surfaced and has denied assault allegations.
Swalwell had been gaining in polls and racking up high-profile endorsements and his exit seemed to primarily benefit Becerra.
The narrowing field also quieted Democrats’ fears of splitting their vote to the extent that Bianco and Hilton would win the top spots in the June primary. That would have resulted in a guaranteed Republican governor in a state where Democrats outnumber GOP voters 2 to 1. Instead, though, Becerra surged. He has been aided by political groups operating independently of his campaign.
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