Young and eager, Harry Rosado never had trouble finding a job.
Fresh out of high school, he was hired as a sales associate in Midtown Manhattan at Journeys and then at Zumiez, two fashion stores popular with young shoppers. He moved on to Uncle Jack’s Meat House in Queens, where he earned up to $300 a week as a busboy.
Then Mr. Rosado, 23, was laid off in March when the steakhouse shut down because of the pandemic. He was called back after the steakhouse reopened, but business was slow. In August, he was out of work again.
New York City has been hit harder by the economic crisis set off by the pandemic than most other major American cities.
But no age group has had it worse than young workers. By September, 19 percent of adults under 25 in the city had lost jobs compared with 14 percent of all workers, according to James Parrott, the director of economic and fiscal policy at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School.
While workers under 25 made up just 10 percent of the city’s total work force of 4.8 million before the pandemic, they held 15 percent of the jobs in the hardest-hit service industries https://t.co/PraMg08Onx
— NYT Metro (@NYTMetro) December 22, 2020