Last week, the jobs report was kinda bad. Only 162,000 jobs were created and the estimates for the other months before that were revised. You know, because there were less jobs “created” than estimated.

Stuff gets really grim when you look at  young adult and teen employment. Because stuff sucks.

Gallup recently showed that LESS THAN HALF – 43% – of young adults age 18 – 34 are in a full-time employment position. Which also means that they probably don’t have benefits.

Meanwhile, a PBS report dramatically forecasts a potential “Arab Spring” because so many teenagers, age 16-19, are unemployed. Almost HALF of the jobs available to teenagers in the 1990s are gone.

You know all those summer jobs you may once have seen in a movie? Before Grandpa was working as a cashier, before the grocery store replaced all the cashiers with robots?

Well, teens can’t get those jobs. So they don’t work. Who’s the culprit? It begins with “tech” and ends with “nology.”

He said what everyone has thought at one point

I was in CVS the other day and a guy wandered in, demanding to have “a human” check out his various, crazy-guy items, not “a robot.” That’s right. He said what everyone at the store was thinking – man, it’s kind of weird that there are just automated cashiers now.

This might not be happening everywhere, but it’s happening at this CVS. There are about eight of those little kiosk stations, okay? That could be eight people. Or four people and a slightly longer line. There are some teen jobs gone, right there. The same thing happens in grocery stores.

But these wouldn’t be teen jobs, anyway

Even if service jobs weren’t getting robot-ed left and right, PBS harps on a very important trend: college kids are taking the service jobs that used to be reserved for high school kids because college kids can’t find full-time positions. Oh, and old people aren’t retiring, because they don’t have any money, either.

People point at the recession, but everyone has to be secretly whispering to each other that technology has something to do with it. Yes, there are jobs in the tech sector, but we aren’t training kids in the right things to get a “job” today. That’s the bottom line. A total skill mismatch.

And the automation of the workplace continues. We made a little jam called “Morning at the Factory” and kind of went Daily Show Style with some news clips to dive deeper into the robot issue.

Here’s the video: