This article begins like most of these fake-analysis articles does, with an anecdote. We are introduced to fourteen year old Addison Taylor, who applies to three jobs and gets one, as a hostess. This apparently means that it’s super easy for teenagers to get jobs, as opposed to hot girls getting jobs as hostesses. We aren’t given a picture of Addison, but we can safely assume she’s in the latter category.
After this just-so story, we are treated to the unserious analysis.
CBC:
Teens who want a summer job this year will likely find it easier than ever to land one. While youth employment took a big hit when the pandemic started, it’s rebounded completely now, along with most of the rest of the employment landscape.
The unemployment rate just hit a record low of 5.3 per cent and Canada had more than 915,000 vacant jobs in the fourth quarter of 2021, according to the most recent data available, close to the record hit in September 2021 when vacancies topped one million.
Those jobs cross all kinds of sectors, including some where teens are most likely to work — food service and retail, according to Statistics Canada labour market analyst Lahouaria Yssaad.
I’m sorry, who is Lahouaria Yssaad?
Well she’s an analyst for Statistics Canada, and her job is to pretend that the job market is doing extremely well.
“The highest number of vacancies is in accommodation and food services,” said Yssaad, followed by health care and social assistance, which don’t employ many teens. “Third is the retail trade.”
A survey of Canadian businesses released last week — conducted by Angus Reid on behalf of the workplace safety non-profit Threads of Life — found that 75 per cent of respondents either already have young workers on staff or plan to hire them in 2022.
“You could almost say anyone who wants to work, can work,” Tim Lang, president and CEO of Ontario’s Youth Employment Services, told CBC. He says that’s a good thing because when kids get on the employment ladder, it helps both their families and the economy.
But because teens are less likely to pursue work than in the past, many of those opportunities will be left on the table.
That means if teens were as likely to work today as in 2008 there would be more than 100,000 additional workers, according to analysis of the data by Restaurants Canada, a non-profit association representing the food service industry, which has struggled with staffing shortages made particularly acute by the pandemic.
The CBC propagandist who wrote this piece.
It really is amazing how conservatives call the CBC a “left-wing,” news organization, instead of a privileged class PR rag. Look at the tenor of this piece, uncritically insinuating that teenagers are just a bunch of lazy bones, who won’t work. Amazing how “pay people more,” doesn’t appear to be the logical solution to this problem.
Howie Dayton — the director of community recreation with the City of Toronto’s Parks, Forestry and Recreation Division — agrees that there’s been a “noticeable change” in the availability of part-time teen workers.
“We compete with so many of the extracurricular activities and school pressures that we know young people face now,” said Dayton, who’s worked in community recreation for nearly 30 years.
“As a result, we need more people to fill the types of shifts that we could have filled with fewer people years ago because young people don’t have as much availability to work as many hours as we might need them to.”
This might be the one actual true part of this article. As universities have gotten less meritocratic, and more focused on bullshit extra-curricular nonsense, teenagers have naturally shifted from caring about work, and instead spend their time doing other things. A serious news organization would take a look at that, and really question whether that’s healthy or not, but that’s not the focus of this piece.
That certainly applies to Addison’s life.
“I play rep volleyball and basketball –
Remember earlier, when I theorized that Addison was a hot girl, and therefore got a job as a hostess a lot easier than other girls? Well now we get confirmation that she plays the sport most renowned for having tons of hot girls everywhere.
Hell, the above picture is from a site dedicated to the hot girls of the Russian National team. An entire site dedicated just to that.
Here’s another from that site.
But really, it’s not like it’s just the Russian Volleyball team that’s full of hotties.
It’s the sport for hot girls the world over. I have never seen a girls volleyball team that wasn’t pretty much full of girls I’d rail until my dick fell off. And it’s not just their athletic bodies, I’ve noticed those girls tend to take really good care of their hair and other things of that nature, that I probably don’t consciously recognize, but still appreciate.
– and since that was my first commitment, I do have to take those as priorities,” she said. “I have school. I have tutoring once a week … and of course, I like to hang out with my friends sometimes, too.”
Still, once she was hired, Addison was able to negotiate a schedule with the restaurant to work Tuesday and Thursday evenings only, when she doesn’t have practice or tournaments.
Although female soccer players come pretty close…
Addison is only 14, but, being a volleyball and basketball player, is probably fairly tall. She’s also probably in good shape, and somewhat cute. The idea that she could possibly be used as an anecdote for how easy it is for teens to get jobs is absurd.
Employers that hire a lot of teens say they’re competing to recruit young workers.
Cineplex offers perks like free movies and gaming, says Allison Dell, the theatre chain’s head of human resources.
It employs about 9,000 part-time staff in Canada and the U.S., around 80 per cent of them between the ages of 15 to 25, to do a range of jobs from scooping popcorn at the concession to operating games at their Rec Room and Playdium entertainment venues.
“Cineplex has a long history of being a wonderful first-time employer,” she said, adding that the pay is competitive and that the company puts a lot of focus on having a good employee culture.
I’ve actually worked at Cineplex before. In fact, not just one, but two, and a different movie theater chain as well. I’ve worked the floor, as well as the concession. I can tell you, they’re not that great of an employer.
What they do is intentionally give you poor hours so that you can’t get over 40 hours per week. They’ve also got no problem giving you 4 hour shifts at random, weird times. And they have a system where you can trade shifts, but it’s poorly used. So if you aren’t in school, then you can’t possibly make enough hours to fund yourself unless you’re living with your parents.
If you are in school, then they ruin your nights, since you get off around 1:00 AM, or even later. And many of the kids I worked with were too young to have a drivers license, so their parents needed to stay up until 1-2AM, often on a weekday, just to drive them home.
So adults can’t sustain themselves with that kind of work. But for highschoolers, it fucks with their sleeping schedule, as well as at least one of their parents. Lots of families probably decide that it’s just flat out not worth the gas money and sleep deprivation to have their kid working there. After all, if you get ten hours a week, that’s just $100, which is little more than spending money.
None of this will be mentioned in this propaganda piece, because the point is not to actually inform the audience, but to justify increased migrant labour to further destroy the job market.
