The United States, you may have heard, is in a lifeguard shortage. The city of Houston is offering new lifeguards a $500 bonus. Jackson, Mississippi, is raising lifeguard pay by more than 40 percent. Colorado is “stepping up” with $250,000 for hiring lifeguard reinforcements; in the meantime, senior citizens are filling in. According to the American Lifeguard Association, about half of the nation’s public pools will have to close or reduce their hours this summer because of a lack of staff.
The current shortage can be largely blamed on pandemic-era closures and work restrictions, according to news reports. But if that accounts for this year’s shortage as well as those reported in 2020, 2021, and 2022, it cannot explain the national lifeguard shortages of 2018, 2016, or 2012. Or, for that matter, a reported lifeguard shortage in 1984. Or 1951. Or 1926.
These crises—and the newspaper stories that describe them—are as much a summer tradition as boardwalks and ice cream. Local or national news articles on the subject have appeared in May or June of every single year of the 21st century. Hundreds more specimens of this perennial have been published since the 1930s. Each lays out the same basic claims: The swimming season might be compromised; drownings could increase. But few acknowledge that such claims were also made the year before, and in all the years before that. Indeed, the specter of a long, unguarded summer has haunted us for five generations now, about as long as there have been formally trained lifeguards in America.
The reasons given for the shortages have varied with the times. Now, of course, we have COVID. In the 1980s, authorities blamed Gen X demographics: “It’s happening because there simply aren’t as many 16-year-olds,” one told The New York Times. In the 1950s, they blamed the IRS: “Many lifeguards quit before earning $600 so their fathers can claim them as income tax dependents,” explained the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In the…
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