Jose Serrano, 17, left, talks with Zack Crane, 17, while helping customers at Red Carpet Car Wash on Tuesday evening in Bend. (Joe Kline/Bulletin photo)

Walking in from the cold, Clinton Weishaupt carried the whiff of gasoline and the assurance of a job well done. He had spent the day making nearly 10 laps in the surrounding parking lot with a self-propelled snowplow at his job at Red Carpet Car Wash and Detail Center.

“They call me a master snowplower,” Weishaupt said with a hint of pride.

Even though Weishaupt, 21, lives in Portland and attends Clackamas Community College, the car wash and detail center, on SE Third Street, fits him into the work schedule when he visits family in Bend. He was hired at 18 and worked his way from car-scrubbing to the detail department.. The job made him realize he likes working with cars and has inspired him to study automotive collision repair in community college on his way to a career as a refinishing technician.

“I thought, ‘What can I do next? How can I build on (these skills)?’” he said. “I make decent money here, but as much as I like twisting wrenches, I much more enjoy spraying cars than taking them apart.”

Weishaupt took his first job when he was 14, the youngest a minor can work in Oregon. He passed soundly through the teen unemployment minefield that are the years between 16 and 19, which recorded an unemployment rate of 22.2 percent — the highest unemployment rate in Oregon in 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Weishaupt and his teenage co-workers, who crack jokes with each other and tap on their phones between serving customers and making sure the service center is pristinely clean, are both ambitious and lucky teens in that they sought a job and found one.

That luck, or determination, will serve them well in the future, both socially and as they seek new jobs.

Soft skills

Katie Condit, the executive director of Better Together Central Oregon, a Redmond nonprofit that connects high school and college students to work experience at businesses and nonprofits, said teens like the ones working at Red Carpet are gaining skills that teens who don’t work through high school and college don’t learn.

While employers are happy to offer hands-on technical training to new workers, soft skills the employers expect from potential employees include knowing how to take constructive criticism, how to initiate independent problem-solving and how to interact with clientele. Teens and youths — ages 16 to 24 — who don’t work don’t pick up these soft skills, Condit said. When they don’t develop these soft skills, they have a tougher time getting hired when they eventually enter the workforce.

“Employers are seeing even college graduates coming into interviews without these soft skills or work-readiness skills,” she said.

The teenage labor force participation hovered at 59 percent from 1987 to 2000, according to the Oregon Employment Department. The number of working teens began declining in 2001 and did not recover from the Great Recession the way it had after previous recessions, said an OED report. In 2015, teen employment lingered at 37.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; Oregon’s teen employment rate is slightly higher, at 38.8 percent. Deschutes County is at 49.9 percent, markedly higher.

Teens stay out of the workforce for a variety of reasons, including an increased emphasis on school testing and the college-for-all notion that prompts teens to pick extracurriculars over work experience, Condit said.

Kids incorporated

Between its two locations, Red Carpet employs around 90 people, 60 percent of whom are teenagers. To accommodate their schooling, the weekly schedule features shifts as short as 3 hours — ideal for many students who work an after-school job instead of taking part in athletics — or normal 8-hour ones that also begin at 2 or 3 p.m. That the majority of Red Carpet workers are teenagers, mostly in high school and living with parents or guardians, makes work a place to assume adult-responsibilities.

“If I was working in an office with older people, I might be like, ‘Maybe I don’t belong here.’ But I definitely feel welcome by people of the same age,” Weishaupt said. “It makes it easier to relate to co-workers.”

A fellow worker handed Weishaupt a smart phone that played the surveillance footage of him biffing it that evening while shoveling snow.

“Oh, man. That’s so good,” Weishaupt said, laughing. “It’s like when (a co-worker) fell off the ladder of a camper!”

Meet in the middle

Condit said providing work experience to teens is about meeting at the middle. She said millennial workers — now 18 to 35 in age — are looking for different, innovative work experiences. There are things in the workplace an employer shouldn’t budge on, but there are other things, other tweaks and concessions that are worth a conversation.

“It really is about performance and thriving,” Condit said. “A shift in the culture of the work environment can provide that. And that’s to the benefit of the employer, as well. Some employers are learning what the millennial workforce needs to thrive,” she said.

Franz Miller, 44, has been a manager at Red Carpet since he was 22, four years after he was first hired to wash cars and vacuum ash trays when he was 18. Miller said the laid-back environment is the result of relieving the stress between extremely busy and slow periods.

“We try to keep it as low stress as possible. When it’s busy, we could always use more people, because car washing is so intensive,” Miller said. “When it’s slow, you have a lot of people standing around.”

In communicating with his mostly teenage workforce, it’s important to stay positive, he said. Leading by hard-working example is key, too. Money motivates, particularly the tips the workers make on top of their $9.75 to $11 hourly wage. Miller said Red Carpet makes a conscious effort to invest in Central Oregon’s youth. After all, he wants teens to enjoy coming to work when other jobs — in landscaping, for example — offer higher pay.

“We care very much about youth in this community,” he said.

Sweet down time

Caitlyn Ewart, 16, working the counter of the Red Carpet deli, patiently dealt with a customer who thought she short-changed him. Her manager came over as she explained the math and counted his money back to him. The customer nodded and left.

“His change was $95.02. I know for a fact I was right,” said Ewart, who has worked at Red Carpet’s deli for four days. She had previously worked at a shoe store, which she said was “a terrible experience.” As for where she learned patience, she said she’s always been a people-person. She sought a job at Red Carpet because a close friend also works there; she would swing by during her shifts and liked the vibe. Ewart, who lives with her parents, now works 15 hours each week to cover expenses like the $125 insurance on the Jeep her grandparents passed down to her. Her co-worker, José Serrano, 17, works 40 hours each week despite shouldering a full day of classes at Mountain View High School. He has been here for nearly four years; he took a position washing cars when he was 14 — his first job ever.

Of his full-time workload on top of school, Serrano didn’t blink.

“I’d rather work a lot now when I have energy than have to work as much when I’m older,” he said.

After high school, Serrano intends to enroll at Central Oregon Community College in pursuit of a career in law enforcement. He anticipates keeping his Red Carpet job through his schooling.

“They trust me here, and they let me learn how to do a little bit of everything: pump gas, clean a car inside and out,” he said. “You got to start somewhere. You start small and work your way up.”

Condit said it’s important to consider local teen workers a precious commodity.

“Central Oregon’s workforce pipeline is running dry,” Condit said. “Investing in our local young people is a way to keep that pipeline fresh and keep that homegrown talent here in Central Oregon. I’d encourage employers to really think strongly about younger folks, whether they’re offering an internship or a job.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7816, pmadsen@bendbulletin.com