This August, the teenage unemployment rate — that is, the percentage of teenagers who wanted a job who could not find one — was 25.5 percent, its highest level since the government began keeping track of such statistics in 1948. Likewise, the percentage of teenagers over all who were working was at its lowest level in recorded history.
Recessions
disproportionately hurt America's youngest and most inexperienced
workers, who are often the first to be laid off and the last to be
rehired. Jobs for youth also never recovered after the last recession,
in 2001.
But this August found more than a quarter of the
teenagers in the job market unable to find work, an unemployment rate
nearly three times that of the nonteenage population (9 percent), and
nearly four times that of workers over 55 (6.8 percent, also a record
high for that age group). An estimated 1.64 million people ages 16-19
were unemployed.
Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/economy/05teen.html