Demand for Students Rising, Placement Centers Report : Plenty of Summer Jobs Available

Burke Mucho, a junior at USC, began his summer job search this year on May 15, a late start that in past years might have severely hurt his chances. But this year the temporary-employment service that Mucho used found him a job within a few days.

“It was really no problem at all,” says Mucho, 21, who performs clerical work for a major Los Angeles law firm. He adds that “just about all of my friends found a job with no great difficulty.”

Although precise data on summer jobs is not available, Mucho’s experience is apparently being shared by thousands of others. Finding summer jobs in the Southland and elsewhere in the nation this year has been easier than in the past, thanks in part to continued growth in overall employment and to shifting demographics, some employers and placement services say.

Manpower Inc., the temporary-employment service that placed Mucho, reports a 25% to 30% surge in summer jobs this year over last, both in Southern California and the nation.

More Jobs Than People

“We have more jobs than people,” says Marjorie Bartok, area manager for the company’s operations in Los Angeles and Orange counties. “We’ll take all we can get.”

Placement center officials at some area universities, including USC and UCLA, also report increases in summer job listings. USC, for example, reports 572 listings for summer jobs so far this year, compared to 350 for all of last year, although part of the increase may be due to more aggressive solicitation of employers, says Sharyn Slavin, director of USC’s Career Development Center.

“There’s always a lot of hotels adding employees (as well as) restaurants, amusement parks, lifeguards, retail sales--a lot of shift work,” says labor market analyst Alta Yetter of the state Employment Development Department. She adds that many companies also hire students as replacements for vacationing employees during the summer.

Some employers, such as Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, are still hiring.

“We’ve already hired 3,000 casual seasonal employees and have openings for approximately 350 more,” says Marcia Tucker, Disneyland’s personnel secretary. She says most of the jobs require 16 to 30 hours per week, at $3.75 to $4 per hour.

However, some placement officials say, openings exist not only at restaurants, amusement parks and hotels but also at aerospace firms and banks and other financial institutions.

Improvements in the job picture locally come on top of a hiring surge last year for the Olympic Games and despite concern about the economy’s slower growth. Wage scales have not changed, placement officials say.

Economists also credit demographic factors. The aging of the baby-boom generation means relatively fewer teen-agers, says Adrian Sanchez, an assistant economist at Security Pacific National Bank.

In addition, he says, women are entering the work force at a slower rate and are finding jobs requiring higher skills, Sanchez says.

San Diego’s Regional Youth Employment Program handed out 25,000 application forms last spring hoping to attract youths from low-income families. But only 3,500 forms were received, down from 5,800 last year.

The program’s administrators suggest that the drop might have resulted in part from tightened reporting requirements. But they also suggested that the strong economy and the drop in unemployment might have been factors. “Maybe they’re finding jobs on their own,” a spokesman said.

Fewer Job Listings

However, the job picture is not universally bright. June Hillman, supervisor of career development at Cal State Northridge, says about 1,700 jobs were listed with her office in June, down about 8% from June, 1984. Almost all are low-paying, low-skilled jobs, she says.

Some young people, particularly inner-city minorities, continue to face high rates of unemployment.

Many employers report little or no growth in summer hiring. Hughes Aircraft, Lockheed-California and Rockwell’s research division in Thousand Oaks report hiring the same number of summer workers as last year. Carter Hawley Hale Stores, parent of the Broadway retail chain, also reports no difference.

First Break, a program in Los Angeles that encourages employers to offer jobs to high school students, so far this summer has found about 8,100 jobs, slightly ahead of last year’s pace at this time, says Laura Segall, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, which co-sponsors the program with the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Times staff writers Daniel K. Akst, Jeanne Boyer and Greg Johnson contributed to this story.