Not to sound too grandiose, but I think that the tradition of teenagers working in low-skilled retail and service jobs is also important for societal cohesion. Nothing is going to give you more empathy for the people working in those jobs than having done it yourself for at least a couple years. For teenagers in the middle class and above I’d say it’s actually the most important reason to work those types of jobs.
>Nothing is going to give you more empathy for the people working in those jobs than having done it yourself for at least a couple years.
Have you worked in a restaurant or retail? No one gets more abuse than those workers.
The real reason we want teenagers in low-skilled jobs is to keep wages low. That's it. Not tradition, not social cohesion, not to teach anyone "responsibility" or "empathy" but simply to undercut the labor market, because if more adults worked those jobs, they would be paid more.
No, but That's just the way capitalism works. Wages are a cost that, like all costs, businesses are constantly driven to reduce in order to stay competitive and maximize profits. Hiring classes of people to whom society affords fewer rights and less social value (such as teenagers and immigrants) as a means of cutting costs through lower wages has been a mainstay of business since it was legal to send ten year olds to work in factories and mines a century ago. Tech does the same thing through free internships and visas, cutting costs by means of an exploitable legal underclass.
The fast food industry wouldn't exist if it was treated as serious work for adults. But it's considered pretend work for teenagers to learn to build character on or whatever, so it's fine that it barely pays a subsistence wage.
