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Recipe for a good summer-job market: First, hire a lot of people in May. Second, give workers raises, and third, push down gasoline prices. Mix it all together — and pour out hope for teen workers.

“Having a job makes me feel really excited. I can put my own money in my pocket instead of asking my parents for money all the time,” said José Moncada, a 16-year-old job seeker in New York City.

Moncada and other teens may have caught a break Friday when the economy followed that seasonal employment recipe precisely.

The Labor Department said employers added 280,000 new jobs in May, exceeding economists’ expectations. May brought a burst of hiring in leisure and hospitality, with 57,000 new jobs. Retailers added 31,400 jobs.

Typically, those are the sectors that hire a lot of younger workers. And those are the sectors that benefit when workers have more cash to spend. The May jobs report showed average hourly earnings rose by 0.3 percent — which translates to an annual growth rate of nearly 4 percent, far exceeding inflation.

Here’s another factor that may encourage summer hiring:

On Friday, OPEC announced it will keep oil production unchanged this year, even though supplies are plentiful. That helped lower the U.S. benchmark price to less than $58 a barrel, down from around $106 at this time last year.

AAA, the auto club, is predicting gasoline prices will fall this summer. The average national price of a gallon is $2.75, way down from $3.66 last year at this time. “This could be the year of the summer road trip,” AAA spokeswoman Avery Ash said.

That’s all positive for young workers. “Seasonal hiring is expected to take a nice jump this summer,” according to a report from CareerBuilder, an online jobs site.

Based on a Harris survey of more than 2,000 hiring managers, the company concluded that 36 percent of private-sector employers will be hiring summer workers, up from 30 percent last year and an average of 21 percent from 2008-2011.

“Many summer jobs went away completely during the recession as companies eliminated internship programs and as households cut back on vacation and recreation spending,” CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson said in a statement.

Not only did many summer jobs disappear during the Great Recession, but competition increased for those that remained, according to professor Ruth Milkman, a labor expert at the City University of New York.

“It used to be that minimum-wage jobs were mostly for very young people, either teenagers or people just entering the labor market permanently,” Milkman said. “What’s happened with the deterioration of the wage structure in recent decades is that more and more working adults are in minimum wage jobs.”

All of that competition has discouraged many teens from even looking for work. As recently as 2000, 52 percent of teenagers were in the labor force. Today, it’s down to less than a third.

So here’s where things stand heading into summer: The national unemployment rate is 5.5 percent, but for workers ages 16-19, it’s 17.9 percent. That’s much lower than the 27.2 percent peak most recently hit in 2010, but it’s still painfully high.

And there’s a big unknown in this summer’s labor market. While the demand for workers has been growing, so have wages. At least 29 states and many cities have passed laws raising the minimum wage well above the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. Many private employers, such as Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and Target, have raised their wage floors to well above the federal minimum.

These wage increases will disproportionately affect young workers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says more than half of all minimum-wage workers are 24 or younger.

So teens who do land jobs may make more money, which they could then spend at malls and restaurants and amusement parks. But their higher wages could dampen hiring.

Whether the bigger paychecks for young people will translate into a better economy — or just less hiring — remains to be seen.

For now, Moncada, the job seeker at the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, just wants to get working. Last summer, he cleaned streets at the state minimum of $8.75 an hour. He wants the same gig this summer.

He said his family of six lives on less than $30,000 a year, so he needs money for his school uniform and sneakers. Also, “I go to the store to get food that we need for the house,” he said.

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On Wednesday, in advance of a Friday shareholder meeting, Wal-Mart executives told employees they’d turn up the heat and mix up the music in stores — after complaints that workers were chilly and subjected to endless repetition of Celine Dion and Justin Bieber songs.

“Taking care of our customers begins with taking care of you,” U.S. COO Judith McKenna said in a statement. “It’s that simple. My commitment to you is that we will continue to listen, and, more importantly, act on what we hear.”

Activists say they applaud the company’s efforts to improve working conditions for U.S. employees — policy changes that also include raising their pay to at least $9 per hour.

But a report out Thursday highlights a series of ways that Wal-Mart is neglecting commitments it has made to maintaining labor and environmental standards throughout its supply chain.

The report, published by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, highlights cases in
which suppliers have failed to uphold the company’s compliance standards and Wal-Mart has neglected to enforce its own standards and goals.

Ultimately, the report calls the company’s commitments to improving labor and environmental impacts “mostly a PR stunt.” Wal-Mart did not reply to The Salt’s request for comment.

Over the years, Wal-Mart has made a series of pledges that now fall under the umbrella of a “Responsible Sourcing” code of ethics. It requires suppliers to abide by standards including “labor protections, such as hours of work, pay, and health and safety, as well as environmental policies, such as complying with local and international laws and regulations and reducing pollutants and waste,” the report notes.

Many of these standards are already required by law. But the report finds that the company as a whole, and its suppliers, are falling short in many places.

For example, two investigations cited Wal-Mart as a major buyer of shrimp from farms known to use slavery and forced labor. And two of Wal-Mart’s major packaged lettuce producers, Taylor Farms and Ready Pac, have been repeatedly cited by OSHA for failing to protect laborers from injuries, thus violating Wal-Mart’s labor code of conduct. The same is true for some baked good suppliers.

On the environmental front, Wal-Mart announced in 2010 that it would
cut 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions out of its supply
chain by the end of 2015. As of March 2015, though, Walmart had reached only 38 percent of that goal, the report finds.

But Jose Oliva, co-director of the FCWA, says a perhaps even bigger problem is that the company isn’t transparent about its adherence to its code.

“There is absolutely no way of verifying their claims or of ensuring that the claims are systemic and creating the kinds of conditions, in terms of workplaces and environment, that we need for food to be healthy and procured without suffering,” Oliva tells The Salt.

What the company could do, he says, is hire a third-party verification entity to ensure that the code of ethics is being followed and implemented. “And Wal-Mart would have to abide by the recommendations that independent entity puts out,” he says.

Wal-Mart also set a goal of purchasing $1 billion worth of “local” food from area farmers by 2015. But, the report says, it’s not clear that the commitment is much more than “corporate greenwashing.”

Farmers “receive inconsistent prices for their produce, depending on whom they work with, and in some instances, when the person they work with leaves the company, their replacement is no longer interested in buying from a farmer or a cooperative,” according to the report.

Oliva says the FCWA’s research revealed that Wal-Mart needs to work harder to fulfill its local food goals so that the benefits to farmers are more just.

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