Ok, so maybe I turned 40 and am getting cranky or maybe my memory of youth is fading away with my figure. However, it seems to me that when I was a kid, teenagers had a much better worth ethic then they do today. I remember my first job at Dunkin Donuts having to fill donuts and then spend hours scrubbing down the machines and washing the floors. This was my job every evening. I was never late and I never called in unless I was really sick. My next job was working as a cashier but I also had to break up stock boxes and stock shelves. It never occurred to me to complain about the job or the work. I am beginning to believe that we are spoiling these kids rotten to the point that they think they are doing the adults the favor by working at all.
Case in point; I run a small company and we employ three to four teenagers to work after school in clerical positions. This is a medical practice so they look for charts, do some filing, fax information as needed and other assorted duties like taking out the trash and opening up the mail. We pay them 50 cents over minimum wage. The kids are referred to us by the local high school which posts the positions for us.
Since September we have had 8 teenagers either quit or be fired. The most recent quit yesterday. She said that she “refuses” to file all the charts herself and demanded help from the full time employees. When she was told that it is her job, she took it upon herself to fax a few things to avoid filing. My front desk supervisor called her in to speak about this total disregard of her orders and she continued to argue that she shouldn’t have to be the only one doing this job and if she is, she quits. So she walked off in the middle of her shift.
During spring break, three of the four girls called in “sick” to go to Universal Studios for the day where they were seen. Often I see them chatting with each other while not working or sitting in the kitchen eating lunch while on the clock! If this was a random incident, I would shrug it off but it seems ALL of these kids are totally irresponsible and seem to think that showing up and working is optional. Am I getting old or is anyone else noticing this trend (if it is a trend)? 
Do some teenagers lack a work ethic? Indubitably–just like some adults do.
Do all teenagers lack a work ethic?
Considering that I’m going on 19, holding down one part-time job and looking for a second while studying for exams at university, I’d say no–from personal experience.
Speaking as a high school teacher with a fairly good memory…
yes and no.
Today’s youth, in general, are a bunch of lazy bums. But…so were we, as a group. But as society gets more and more technological, each succeeding generation gets more and more disconnected from the previous work ethic. They just don’t work very hard at what *we * worked at.
Buncha snot-nosed little punks… 
Well, I’m 24, so I can’t say anything about ‘kids these days’ but at one of my jobs, all my coworkers are teenagers (16/17 years old) and I have noticed some trends-
-Grades have absolutely squat to do with work ethic. The hiring process at my job is largely dependent on a student’s grades (which seriously makes me wonder how I got the job 
). I’m not saying that good grades=bad worker and vice versa, but rather my own experience has been that there isn’t really any association between them. Some of the best students are among the laziest and nastiest coworkers I have to deal with. But there are also good students who are great coworkers.
One gripe I have about this is that the managers seem to think that if they hire a kid with good grades, there will be less chances of problems. However, in 2 and a half years working there, seeing over 50 employees come and go, I kind of disagree. I wish there was a better kind of criteria for hiring than just grades.
-I do see a trend toward laziness. For some teenagers, a job is merely a means to an end (money) and they are going to put in the bare minimum effort to get by. It kind of burns me up when I see them act this way at my job, because the job I work at is an AWESOME ‘first’ job (flexibile schedule, short shift hours, good interpersonal feedback). The first job I worked at was at Target, working 50 hours a week and getting treated like absolute shit. The job I’m in is a godsend compared to that. But these other teenagers will never see that. I always laugh when I hear a coworker mention that he/she is quitting and getting a retail job. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater! Sure my job doesn’t pay much but the stress-pay ratio is much better than any retail job.
-If I were a hiring manager at my job, I think I would probably try to hire people over 18. There is no guarantee they will be better employees, but there is a better chance they will be a little bit more mature, since the job (like mine is now) may temporarily be their livelihood. I would be less interested in pure academic performance (SAT scores can’t gauge how well a person works in a group or multitasks, for example) and more interested in how open to feedback the hire is- are they open to change or am I going to hem and haw with them just to get them to do their job? Have they been able to hold their own in more stressfull lines of work? Things like that.
I realyy don’t think so from my own life. My roommates and I work and go to school full time. During the Christmas rush, we were all working upwards of 30-40 hours a week, studying for exams and packing to move out of the dorms. I also wrote and defend my thesis during that time period. I don’t feel that I lack a work ethic.
My wife works as a supervisor at a company which has to continually hire new young people to replace previous ones who had no work ethic.
Perhaps it’s a symptom of their age, but they seem to have no regard for the long-term implications of doing the absolute minimum until they get fired for it. They aren’t interested in whether the company prospers or fails. They have no wish to learn how what they do in their department affects what others do in theirs, and how the interaction of all departments leads to the desired result. They want to be able to come in late, without their ID badge, do as little as is humanly possible, disregard the dress policy, surf the web, eat at their desks, do their jobs improperly, and go home early. And then they pitch a hissy fit when they not only cannot get promoted (due usually to incompetence), but they come in after their third warning and don’t have a job anymore.
Maybe three people in a hundred last beyond the probationary period - and it often turns out that some of these are only at the top of the cesspool. They stay on the job, but they don’t understand how it works. They never learn how to do their job so that it doesn’t have to be redone until they get it right. They never see the big picture. And they wonder why they have to be handed their walking papers.
OTOH, there are so many things wrong with how management administers their policies, and so many doubts about their ability to manage and run a company, that they almost never achieve their goals. It’s a circle of hiring people to do a job they aren’t interested in, not getting the training to do it right, quitting or getting fired, and the remaining staff has to do their jobs. That, and a continuing maze of school-like rules that nobody feels like following.
My wife is ready to go and work with adults.
From the very tiny sample I have observed - that is, my daughter and her friends - some are hard workers, and some work hard at coming up with excuses about why they got fired. I don’t think it’s any different from my adult coworkers. I can name some teenagers who have no work ethic, and I can name some more who work their butts off. Such is life.
Curious. First, I absolutely do not think teenagers as a whole lack work ethic. There may be a substantial number that do (and, as another poster mentioned, many adults are guilty of this as well) but I don’t think they’re representative.
Growing up, I had a long list of jobs to do around the house (clean the bathroom to mom’s specifications twice a week, all vacuuming, dusting, some meals, dishes and other assorted tasks). If I didn’t do it, I didn’t get allowance. If it wasn’t up to snuff, I had to do it again. Since I wasn’t able to leave home and couldn’t buy anything without allowance, I made damn sure I kept up with everything.
Working outside the home wasn’t really an option for most of my teenage years because of where we lived, but I certainly learned that consequences of not getting things done on time or done well through the things I was expected to do around the home. If I did something above and beyond for my mom (washing walls, cleaning cupboards) I got a bonus. I needed that money if I wanted new clothes (beyond the basics) or to visit friends (gas) or to do pretty much anything. Maybe a lot of teenagers don’t have that kind of responsbility around the home?
IMO, it’s much easier for teenagers to get entry-level jobs today than it was when I was their age.
I’m 45, and when I was a teenager, there were always lots of applicants for even the crummiest jobs. And they all paid minimum wage too – when I got my first over-minimum wage job, I felt like a grownup.
Today, there are a lot more places looking for entry-level workers (e.g., a lot more fast-food joints today – I was in 9th grade when our town got it’s first McDonald’s), and fewer people to work in them than when the baby boomers were teenagers.
As such, if kids are lazier today, it may simply be a response to the conditions. A lot of us probably worked harder from fear of getting fired than because we were more ‘ethical’ than kids today.
When I was a twenty-something retail drone, my forty-something manager/boss complained to me that “today’s kids” didn’t have the work ethic with which “we” grew up. This despite the fact that he had a good eye for talent and a knack for nurturing that talent so that out of the 12 - 20 kids working for him at any time, he always had at least a half dozen outstanding employees (and ignoring the fact that I was only 6 - 8 years older than most of those kids).
When I was became a 30-year-old (career-changed) programmer, several of my “senior” fellow workers were early twenty-something recent college graduates who partied hearty and who (according to the operations staff) were extremely reluctant to come in to perform emergency maintenance, even on jobs that had clearly broken because of their bad code. A few years later, I heard one of the worst offenders, now a project manager in her own right, complaining bitterly about kids who didn’t put enough effort into their projects and refused to take responsibilty when their code broke.
I posit that a work ethic is a learned skill and, as with any skill, some people grasp it more quickly than others. Some kids come out of the home with a fully developed ethic. Some kids develop it in high school or college. Some people after they have actually gotten out on their own. On the other hand, I know plenty of 30-, 40-, 50-, and 60-year-old slackers. Given that it tends to be a cumulative product of learning, there will be a larger number of kids with a poor ethic than there will young adults and more young adults with a poor ethic than older adults. There are still a lot of hard working kids and not a few aging goof-offs.
As for a lack of work ethic being laid at the feet of the kids’ parents or home life: a guy for whom I used to pick up occasional odd jobs once complained to me that my younger brother was not sufficiently motivated to keep busy–a charge that was never laid against either my middle brother or me. My two younger brothers were close enough in age that they were usually treated like twins, so there was never a “spoil the baby” factor in their upbringing; the younger one had simply never picked up on the need to stay productive at work. By the time he was through college, he had overcome that deficit and he never has problems finding references or good recommendations for his work, now.
I’m not much younger than you (37) and I remember my first job. It was at Burger King, doing sandwhiches, cleaning, etc.
I was also never late, worked hard and did my best.
Now we had quite a few who didn’t do their jobs, showed up late and didn’t last long.
Now my 16 yr old stepson never does anything around the house except take out the trash once a week, keeps talking about getting a job, but not doing anything about it and my 16 yr old niece has applications at every place she can think of to get a job for this summer.
No, I don’t think that teenagers have less work ethic than 20 years ago, I think it’s just more of the same.
Last summer I worked at a resort-type hotel in Wyoming, where the staff was at least half teenagers. I observed:
They called in sick every single time they wanted to go to a concert or spend a day doing anything else. If the felt there was anything morally wrong with abusing the system like that, they sure didn’t express it.
If they stayed up late partying one night, they just showed up the following day several hours late.
In the restraunt, some of the waitstaff (including the restraunt manager) would sometimes hide in the back room and refuse to take any tables.
Sleeping on the job.
Watching TV on the job, and getting mad when the supervisor points out that the TV is supposed to be for the customers.
Drinking on the job. (I mean, what the fuck?!? You don’t get paid to drink.)
Being incredibly rude to customers.
That’s not to implicate every teenager who was there; there were a handful who were always prompt and courteous. But overall I understand why the managers wanted to avoid hiring teenagers as much as possible. Now I’ve seen adults who whined constantly when they were off the clock; who trash talked their customers, their co-workers, and their boss; and who tried to bully their way to higher pay and better hours. But I can’t immediately recall seeing any adult who essentially thought that doing actual work was optional even when they were getting paid.
I’m 22, by the way.
I am only 22 but I agree completely. Nowdays teenagers are spoiled lazy brats. Now back in my day - those were some devoted, hardworking teenagers. And the snow was whiter, and the sugar - sweeter.
The question shouldn’t be why teenagers today have no work ethic, it should be why teenagers in general do not. And the answer is - they have better things to do then put their best into some min wage+50c job they are doing to be able to buy computer games. The teenagers in your day were no better, your employers were just really lucky to have you.
I think this quote goes well with the spirit of the thread:
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator and writer (106-43 BCE)
Do Teenagers Lack The Work Ethic?
If their parents let them.