Whenever I've had occasion to offer career advice to a young person entering the workforce, I have always pointed out that success in the workplace isn't hard; you just have to do three things: 1) Show up before the other guy, 2) Work a little harder than the other guy, and 3) Never pass up the chance to learn something new. I learned those lessons, primarily, at Woolco, my first real corporate job, and those lessons stuck with me.

All work is worth doing, and if anyone ever harbors any doubt about whether the work they are doing is worth doing, I would ask one thing: Is someone paying you to do it? If so, then you are producing value, therefore, the work is worth doing. There are no lousy jobs, my father used to say, only lousy people. A part-time job for a teenager instills all these lessons early, which means when one settles on a career, those values, those habits, those skills are already in place.

There are a couple of things that are likely causing the dropoff in teen employment. One of them is a matter of policy: Minimum wage laws. //

There are no good reasons why teenagers shouldn't have part-time jobs, and many reasons why they should. This will require some reforms: Changing minimum wage laws, perhaps (if it will make it happen), to implement a reduced minimum wage for those part-time workers under 20 to avoid pricing young people out of the entry-level workforce. I'd rather see minimum wage laws done away with completely, but politics is the art of the possible, and in this case, a tiered system may be the good that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of.