A burger is easier to lift than a shovelful of broken asphalt, but more high school and college students are seeking manual labor jobs in the summer for better wages or more interesting tasks, according to Du Page County teens and job assistance personnel.
Summer jobs are a significant but elusive part of the economy, and students no longer are spending their earnings on movies and bicycles. They are increasingly depending on the money they earn in the summer to pay for their schooling in the winter, those interviewed say.
Mike Ascher, 19, of Oak Brook, was looking for a business internship this summer but couldn`t find one. Wearing a suit, he came to the Oak Brook Public Works Department to interview for a job, but he didn`t bat a muscle when they asked him to start working on the streets the next day.
”This kind of work is not going to look good on my resume, but I really enjoy it,” he said as he took a break from shoveling broken pavement. ”The pay is way too low for the work. It`s hard labor. Some of the other villages pay $8 or so an hour. But I like the hours.”
The Oak Brook street crews work from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., and that allows Ascher also to work at Strictly Sports, a golf shop in Westmont, for $6 an hour. Those wages plus the $5 he earns an hour in Oak Brook all go to college expenses.
Youths aged 16 to 19 are more than 7 percent of Illinois` labor force, according to the Illinois Department of Labor. If these high school and college students didn`t work during the summer, many lawns wouldn`t get cut, burgers wouldn`t get flipped and pizzas wouldn`t get delivered. But students are looking for something better.
”The kids coming in want money,” said Cindy Dobroski, who runs a job service for Milton Township. ”I can`t get a $3.35-an-hour job filled very quickly. Not as many kids want to waitress anymore. They want jobs for $5 and $8 an hour, and it`s very difficult to find for them.”
Students don`t mind doing hard work as long as it pays well, Dobroski said. She said it took her two months to find three people willing to work at Burger King.
Dobroski`s job pool serves 1,700 youth, ages 13-21, who have registered with the service. She said most find work as cashiers, yard workers or computer operators.
”Students will wait for something better to come along,” she said.
”Pretty soon the summer will be gone, and they won`t earn anything when they could be earning at least $4 an hour.
”I didn`t realize kids were so materialistic, even at age 13. It shocked me,” Dobroski said. ”I remember when I was 13 and didn`t care. It`s the way society is. The materialism is starting younger.”
Jason Baratta, 14, jumped at the chance to earn $5 an hour in a Glen Ellyn senior citizens center, though that meant mopping floors and hauling garbage.
”It`s tougher than I thought it would be,” he admitted. ”I thought I would just go out and mow some lawns. I wasn`t expecting it but they offered me the job through the school year, and I accepted right away.”
Baratta is young enough that he does not have to worry about college yet: Half his earnings become savings for a skateboard and half subsidize what might be described as the neighborhood entertainment fund.
”This is nice because it takes only an hour a day, so I can still see my friends. But none of them have jobs; so I get to pay for all our movies,” he said.
Most students are performing the grungy work to pay for schooling, not skateboards. Craig Fuller, 19, couldn`t find a lucrative house-painting job;
so he turned to cleaning houses to earn money to attend Eastern Illinois University.
”I`d like to be painting, but I`m satisfied with this,” Fuller said of his 30-hour-a-week job with the Merry Maids cleaning service in Lisle.
”Cleaning isn`t that hard, really. I don`t do it at home, but here I vacuum, dust and clean bathrooms, and I average about $9 an hour. A lot of yuppie homes are real neat anyway; so it doesn`t take much to clean them.”
Some students avoid the fast-food treadmill for philosophical instead of financial reasons. Kim Welsh, 17, of Wheaton, has worked for two years at the Chess King men`s clothing store in Lombard and wants to make a career in retail clothing.
”I used to work in a bakery, but I didn`t like serving food because people got crabby. They wanted their lunch,” Welsh said. ”Here people want to shop and have fun.”
She said most of her friends are in the telemarketing field, earning $7 an hour, but she wants to stay with her $4.50-an-hour job, even during her upcoming senior year in high school.
”I`ll stay until I graduate. I`d like to work 15 to 20 hours a week during school,” she said. ”I want to go into this as a career; so I`ve learned a lot on this job.”
Students don`t always find their dream job. The search for work is still an important part of the summer job experience.
Ed Kuhs, 19, a Northern Illinois University student, has gotten jobs through Dobroski`s Milton Township job service since high school, but he said this year the jobs were scarce.
”I was open to all options, but they were few. I would answer a help wanted, but as soon as I told them I would only be for the summer, they shut me out,” Kuhs said.
”I thought I would go home and have jobs jumping out at me, but they were few and far between,” he said. ”I thought I would have a good crack at them because my school gets out early, but there wasn`t much available.”
Students rush to government work, because the hours and pay are usually attractive. Kuhs and five other students found work as part of the grounds crew for the Du Page County Complex. Charlie Pajor, a spokesman for the city of Naperville, said the city has hired 40 students out of a pool of 62 applicants this summer.
”We had a lottery to see who would be hired this year,” he said, though he admitted that some municipalities do better than others at attracting students. ”It does get difficult to compete with some places that pay $7, $8 or $9 an hour. Last year we ended up exhausting our pool and we had to go out and try to hire more.”
Floyd Wilson, who just retired as Oak Brook`s public works superintendent, said he never had trouble finding six students, like Ascher, to help repatch city streets. About half want to join the crews for a second year, he said.
”Some come back for three or four years. It baffles me, because we work them pretty good,” Wilson said. ”Most of them are local lads who want to work close to home and earn some money for school.”
Pajor said, ”They provide a resource for us when we need it, in the summer, when the outdoor tasks need to be done. Hiring students allows us to do jobs more cheaply than if we hired adult workers.” First-year workers for Naperville earn $4.75 an hour.
Janella Kaczanko, 19, of Wheaton, works two part-time jobs to earn as much money as possible for Purdue University bills. She still works as a waitress at the Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton, but she wanted an office job to go with her studies in business.
She now types documents for the law firm William J. Wylie and Associates in Wheaton.
”I love my job. I have a lot of responsibility,” she said. ”I didn`t like the night hours of waitressing. I like having my weekends free.”
Some of the students turn down jobs with descriptions that read like fairy tales, for reasons only a youth would understand. Greg Bevan, 20, of Hinsdale, joined the road crews in Oak Brook after working four years in high school at the Whistle Stop video rental store in Hinsdale.
”I basically got paid to sit and watch TV,” Bevan said. ”It was a cake job. But I wanted to get outside and get some exercise. I thought this would be something good to try for one summer. Just one summer.”
