The USA, you’ll have heard, is in a lifeguard scarcity. Town of Houston is providing new lifeguards a $500 bonus. Jackson, Mississippi, is elevating lifeguard pay by greater than 40 p.c. Colorado is “stepping up” with $250,000 for hiring lifeguard reinforcements; within the meantime, senior citizens are filling in. In response to the American Lifeguard Affiliation, about half of the nation’s public swimming pools should close or reduce their hours this summer time due to a scarcity of workers.
The present scarcity will be largely blamed on pandemic-era closures and work restrictions, based on information stories. But when that accounts for this yr’s scarcity in addition to these reported in 2020, 2021, and 2022, it can’t clarify the nationwide lifeguard shortages of 2018, 2016, or 2012. Or, for that matter, a reported lifeguard scarcity in 1984. Or 1951. Or 1926.
These crises—and the newspaper tales that describe them—are as a lot a summer time custom as boardwalks and ice cream. Native or nationwide information articles on the topic have appeared in Could or June of each single yr of the twenty first century. A whole bunch extra specimens of this perennial have been revealed for the reason that Nineteen Thirties. Every lays out the identical primary claims: The swimming season may be compromised; drownings may enhance. However few acknowledge that such claims have been additionally made the yr earlier than, and in all of the years earlier than that. Certainly, the specter of an extended, unguarded summer time has haunted us for 5 generations now, about so long as there have been formally trained lifeguards in America.
The explanations given for the shortages have different with the instances. Now, in fact, we’ve got COVID. Within the Eighties, authorities blamed Gen X demographics: “It’s occurring as a result of there merely aren’t as many 16-year-olds,” one instructed The New York Times. Within the Fifties, they blamed the IRS: “Many lifeguards stop earlier than incomes $600 so their fathers can declare them as revenue tax dependents,” defined the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Within the Nineteen Forties, specialists mentioned that the draft had roped in so most of the nation’s younger males that, per The Baltimore Sun, some seashores and swimming pools have been “significantly contemplating using girls.” And within the Nineteen Thirties, the scarcity was attributed to the absorption of potential lifeguards into the Works Progress Administration.
However total, the purported causes of shortages are remarkably repetitive and, in lots of circumstances, remarkably ahistoric.
The stringent necessities of lifeguarding—taking and paying for a multiday course to move a troublesome bodily examination—are a recurring scapegoat. So is low pay. In 1941, pool managers complained that younger males who hadn’t been drafted may make way more working in protection industries than as a lifeguard. In 2007, a New Jersey lifeguard captain lamented to the Instances that “iPods and cellphones are costly … If youngsters are in search of the highest-paying job, it isn’t prone to be lifeguarding.” In that very same article, a Connecticut parks official blamed the rising emphasis on career-building (and the concurrent rise of internships). The YMCA’s water-safety specialist additionally cited internships, in 2021. Any time unemployment is low, somebody accuses it of contributing to the lifeguard scarcity.
By far probably the most constant explanations over time can greatest be described as “youngsters nowadays.” See 1987: “The children round right here have an excessive amount of cash.” And 2015: “There’s one other huge turnoff: having a telephone on the lifeguard stand is a firing offense.” And 2019: “Some [teens] are even afraid of the lifesaving accountability the job carries.” And 2022: “Individuals simply don’t wish to do this sort of job.” And 2023: “Since COVID, individuals don’t wish to work.” Wyatt Werneth, the nationwide spokesperson for the American Lifeguard Affiliation, instructed me this week that, after the pandemic arrived, individuals who would possibly in any other case be lifeguard candidates started choosing jobs that may very well be completed at house, equivalent to “the influencing and social media and stuff like that.”
After which, in fact, there’s the most important downside of all: Nobody appears as much as lifeguards anymore. From The New York Instances in 1984: “Lifeguards have been as soon as authority figures, similar to lecturers as soon as have been. However the glory of the authoritarian age is gone.” In 1985, the Instances wistfully recalled the lifeguard-loving cinema of the ’50s and ’60s (Seaside Blanket Bingo and its ilk) and the reverence it as soon as impressed. Robert A. Kerwin, the water-safety coordinator of the New Jersey State Division of Parks and Forestry, instructed the paper, “The day of the macho lifeguard sitting within the chair flexing his muscle tissue is completed. For one factor, 25 p.c of our guards are women.” (For what it’s value, Newspapers.com lists loads of articles about lifeguard shortages from the ’50s and the ’60s too.)
The Instances as soon as declared, “The lifeguard is an endangered species.” However its inhabitants recovered briefly within the Nineteen Nineties, due to David Hasselhoff. “After I grew to become a lifeguard,” Werneth mentioned, “we had Baywatch, and everyone needed to be a lifeguard. They needed that way of life the place you had helicopters and also you had quick boats and delightful individuals, and also you’re saving lives.” However Baywatch: Hawaii ceased manufacturing in 2001, and after that, Werneth instructed me, “issues began declining.” Lifeguard employment took a dip after which a swan dive beginning in 2020. “I can virtually name it a floor zero,” Bernard Fisher, the director of the American Lifeguard Affiliation, said of the scarcity in a 2022 Fox Information article.
Regardless of the tenor of that analogy (Fisher additionally in contrast the dearth of lifeguards to the dearth of child components), drowning rates haven’t actually spiked. Actually, they’re now a 3rd of what they have been in 1970, and have been dropping steadily for a century or extra. (There was a really slight uptick in 2020 and 2021, the newest years for which information can be found.) In different phrases, the various lifeguard crises of the previous—or maybe the only, endless one—haven’t correlated with any widespread drowning crises in America. That doesn’t imply that lifeguard shortages are faux, however arduous information on their scope stay obscure. Werneth instructed me that the American Lifeguard Affiliation receives “very sporadic” stories from swimming pools, parks, and seashores, and has only a tough sense of the extent of want in several areas.
But when the lifeguard is as soon as once more an endangered species, it’s nonetheless beloved: extra like a large panda than a Gerlach’s cockroach. As a tradition, we do nonetheless consider lifeguards as attractive, heroic, and important (if not authoritarian). Baywatch could also be off the air, nevertheless it’s always coming back.
