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dolorosa_12There aren't many Fridays left in the year, and I feel as if 2024 is rushing even faster at this point in December. There's still time for some open thread prompts, however, and this is what I came up with today:
When you were growing up, was it common for teenagers in secondary/high school to have part-time paid jobs? If you had a job at this age, what was it?
In the context in which I was a teenager (a state secondary school in Canberra in Australia, where most people came from middle class families, in the 1990s/early 2000s), having an after-school/weekend job was incredibly common, to the point that I'd almost say it was expected. It was legal to work from the age of 14-and-nine-months (I'm not sure how this specific age was arrived at; it might have been a holdover from earlier times when people often left school for full-time skilled work around that age, like my grandfather, who left school at 14 and became a civil engineer), and because hourly minimum wage went up by age in increments until a worker turned 21, teenagers were desirable as employees because they didn't have to be paid as much (the hourly rate was something like $5.50 for a fifteen-year-old if I recall correctly).
Certainly most people at my school had jobs either right from the earliest age they were allowed, or at least by the time they turned 15 or 16. It was seen as very childish not to work, even though most of us came from families where there was no real need — essentially the pay we got from working replaced pocket money (and it was a lot more — I went from being given $10 a week by my mum to earning $55 a week at my job, which at the time seemed like a massive sum). Most people I know worked at restaurants or cafes, supermarket checkouts, or for fast food outlets, although a couple of my friends worked as tutors, piano teachers, gymnastics coaches and horse-riding instructors, and there was one girl I knew who earned a living doing freelance anime-style art commissions for people online, which was seen as very left-field in the late 1990s/early-2000s dial-up internet days.
I had my first high school job in the winter when I was fifteen, but it was just two weeks filling in for another girl at my school who had gone to Europe with her family for a holiday. I worked full-time for the weekdays of those two weeks at a health food store (the sort of place run as a collective by a bunch of hippies, selling dried fruit, nuts, grains and pulses by weight from jars, plus a lot of vegan skincare, hair/body care and cleaning products). It generally went fine, although to this day I can remember a woman who shouted at me and made me cry due to a misunderstanding about pearl barley!
My main high school job, however, was something I started doing in the lead-up to Christmas when I was fifteen (every day for three weeks), and then carried on doing every Saturday plus the Christmas and Easter lead-up for the following two years. This was working as a sales assistant at a bakery/hand-made chocolate truffle shop, run by an absolutely awful Swiss guy who had a public persona as a hardworking, good family man and upstanding member of the local community. In spite of his odiousness, I really enjoyed this job, because: a) as well as owning the business, this guy was the baker, and if you know anything about bakers, they bake overnight and leave for home early in the morning (so we sales assistants usually only had to deal with him for a couple of hours in the morning, after which point we — a changing cast of teenage girls and one teenage boy — had the place to ourselves until closing time), b) I really got on well with the aforementioned fellow teenage sales assistants, so work just became another arm of my social life, c) we were allowed to eat whatever we wanted in the shop whenever we wanted, without paying, and got to take leftovers home at the end of the day, d) after about 12 noon, everything calmed down and we barely had to serve any customers, and e) the newsagent next door used to dump unsold magazines in the lane behind our two shops, and we'd just spend the whole afternoon reading the old magazines, eating handmade truffles, and chatting.
The Christmas and Easter lead-ups were always hellishly busy (I can still hear my boss's voice in my head yelling at me to 'push the half-eggs,' which were giant half Easter eggs, filled with truffles, which we had to load up in a production line behind the shop at breakneck speed, for two weeks non-stop; I can also still visualise coming into the bakery on Good Friday and having to walk across a carpet of pre-ordered hot cross buns, because so many people ordered them that we ran out of storage space and had to load them in stacks all over the floor — they remain the best hot cross buns I've ever eaten), but every other part of the job (apart from dealing with the boss) was so enjoyable that I didn't consider looking anywhere else.
The owner was awful for two reasons — he had a short temper and yelled at everyone, and he was a sexual harasser. Mostly, this involved his choice of decoration for the chocolate-making and bakery (i.e. the workshop areas which the public couldn't see), which were plastered with posters of semi-naked women torn out from Playboy and similar types of magazine, which I didn't realise was a form of sexual harassment (and wouldn't have done anything about even if I had; the early 2000s was ... let's just say it was very different to now). I remember just thinking how pathetic these posters made this guy seem, and remember another girl I worked with telling me that at one point a little toddler became enthused about becoming a baker when she grew up, and her mother asked the owner if the toddler could see the baking equipment, and the owner made all his workers take all the posters down — and then put them all back up again once the little kid had gone. (This, again, just seemed pathetic to me at the time.) He sexually harassed some of my co-workers in other ways, but never did anything (beyond subjecting me to the posters) to me, which I always suspected at the time was because he knew my parents were journalists and was afraid of them telling colleagues in the press about his behaviour. We all complained to each other behind his back about all this, but I cannot emphasise enough how different the world was at the time, and this atmosphere just felt like part of the fabric of the universe — unpleasant, but expected, just part of the daily experience of being a teenage girl. It also, weirdly, just felt like such a small part of the job, whereas the part we liked — the food, the freedom, being left on our own to run the shop and gossip — felt like the main part of the job.
I don't regret doing this job, or having a job aged 15-18 while still a full-time student — at all. My confidence, my mental arithmetic (since there were always four of us in the shop and only one cash register, we mostly just added up prices in our heads), and my ability to deal with unpleasant people in a customer service environment massively improved, and although I would never recommend teenage girls work for a sexual harasser (or remain working for one after he reveals himself as such), I do think in general that paid work is a good thing to do as a teenager, and that customer service work is a good thing for everyone to have to experience at some point in their lives!
When you were growing up, was it common for teenagers in secondary/high school to have part-time paid jobs? If you had a job at this age, what was it?
In the context in which I was a teenager (a state secondary school in Canberra in Australia, where most people came from middle class families, in the 1990s/early 2000s), having an after-school/weekend job was incredibly common, to the point that I'd almost say it was expected. It was legal to work from the age of 14-and-nine-months (I'm not sure how this specific age was arrived at; it might have been a holdover from earlier times when people often left school for full-time skilled work around that age, like my grandfather, who left school at 14 and became a civil engineer), and because hourly minimum wage went up by age in increments until a worker turned 21, teenagers were desirable as employees because they didn't have to be paid as much (the hourly rate was something like $5.50 for a fifteen-year-old if I recall correctly).
Certainly most people at my school had jobs either right from the earliest age they were allowed, or at least by the time they turned 15 or 16. It was seen as very childish not to work, even though most of us came from families where there was no real need — essentially the pay we got from working replaced pocket money (and it was a lot more — I went from being given $10 a week by my mum to earning $55 a week at my job, which at the time seemed like a massive sum). Most people I know worked at restaurants or cafes, supermarket checkouts, or for fast food outlets, although a couple of my friends worked as tutors, piano teachers, gymnastics coaches and horse-riding instructors, and there was one girl I knew who earned a living doing freelance anime-style art commissions for people online, which was seen as very left-field in the late 1990s/early-2000s dial-up internet days.
I had my first high school job in the winter when I was fifteen, but it was just two weeks filling in for another girl at my school who had gone to Europe with her family for a holiday. I worked full-time for the weekdays of those two weeks at a health food store (the sort of place run as a collective by a bunch of hippies, selling dried fruit, nuts, grains and pulses by weight from jars, plus a lot of vegan skincare, hair/body care and cleaning products). It generally went fine, although to this day I can remember a woman who shouted at me and made me cry due to a misunderstanding about pearl barley!
My main high school job, however, was something I started doing in the lead-up to Christmas when I was fifteen (every day for three weeks), and then carried on doing every Saturday plus the Christmas and Easter lead-up for the following two years. This was working as a sales assistant at a bakery/hand-made chocolate truffle shop, run by an absolutely awful Swiss guy who had a public persona as a hardworking, good family man and upstanding member of the local community. In spite of his odiousness, I really enjoyed this job, because: a) as well as owning the business, this guy was the baker, and if you know anything about bakers, they bake overnight and leave for home early in the morning (so we sales assistants usually only had to deal with him for a couple of hours in the morning, after which point we — a changing cast of teenage girls and one teenage boy — had the place to ourselves until closing time), b) I really got on well with the aforementioned fellow teenage sales assistants, so work just became another arm of my social life, c) we were allowed to eat whatever we wanted in the shop whenever we wanted, without paying, and got to take leftovers home at the end of the day, d) after about 12 noon, everything calmed down and we barely had to serve any customers, and e) the newsagent next door used to dump unsold magazines in the lane behind our two shops, and we'd just spend the whole afternoon reading the old magazines, eating handmade truffles, and chatting.
The Christmas and Easter lead-ups were always hellishly busy (I can still hear my boss's voice in my head yelling at me to 'push the half-eggs,' which were giant half Easter eggs, filled with truffles, which we had to load up in a production line behind the shop at breakneck speed, for two weeks non-stop; I can also still visualise coming into the bakery on Good Friday and having to walk across a carpet of pre-ordered hot cross buns, because so many people ordered them that we ran out of storage space and had to load them in stacks all over the floor — they remain the best hot cross buns I've ever eaten), but every other part of the job (apart from dealing with the boss) was so enjoyable that I didn't consider looking anywhere else.
The owner was awful for two reasons — he had a short temper and yelled at everyone, and he was a sexual harasser. Mostly, this involved his choice of decoration for the chocolate-making and bakery (i.e. the workshop areas which the public couldn't see), which were plastered with posters of semi-naked women torn out from Playboy and similar types of magazine, which I didn't realise was a form of sexual harassment (and wouldn't have done anything about even if I had; the early 2000s was ... let's just say it was very different to now). I remember just thinking how pathetic these posters made this guy seem, and remember another girl I worked with telling me that at one point a little toddler became enthused about becoming a baker when she grew up, and her mother asked the owner if the toddler could see the baking equipment, and the owner made all his workers take all the posters down — and then put them all back up again once the little kid had gone. (This, again, just seemed pathetic to me at the time.) He sexually harassed some of my co-workers in other ways, but never did anything (beyond subjecting me to the posters) to me, which I always suspected at the time was because he knew my parents were journalists and was afraid of them telling colleagues in the press about his behaviour. We all complained to each other behind his back about all this, but I cannot emphasise enough how different the world was at the time, and this atmosphere just felt like part of the fabric of the universe — unpleasant, but expected, just part of the daily experience of being a teenage girl. It also, weirdly, just felt like such a small part of the job, whereas the part we liked — the food, the freedom, being left on our own to run the shop and gossip — felt like the main part of the job.
I don't regret doing this job, or having a job aged 15-18 while still a full-time student — at all. My confidence, my mental arithmetic (since there were always four of us in the shop and only one cash register, we mostly just added up prices in our heads), and my ability to deal with unpleasant people in a customer service environment massively improved, and although I would never recommend teenage girls work for a sexual harasser (or remain working for one after he reveals himself as such), I do think in general that paid work is a good thing to do as a teenager, and that customer service work is a good thing for everyone to have to experience at some point in their lives!
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Date: 2024-12-06 07:14 pm (UTC)I had ... two jobs during my high school years, part time each one. And one was seasonal only. Those are the on the books jobs. And actually, I think I only had one recurring off the books job those three years.
The first, the seasonal, was my first tax-paying job. Spencer's Gifts, a novelty store, thought hiring a sixteen year old to do loss prevention in the holiday weeks around Christmas was a brilliant idea. I think I intimidated one set of pre-teens into slipping the merchandise back on to the shelf during the weeks I was there.
The other was cold-calling newspaper sales to residential people. The only good thing about it was working with my best-friend/romantic partner.
And the off-the-books job was working with her at the local comic book shop, "paid" in store credit which let me stay on top of my comic book habit.
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Date: 2024-12-07 01:19 pm (UTC)The comic book one sounds like a mutually beneficial arrangement, as long as you were happy not to be paid in money.
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Date: 2024-12-06 07:44 pm (UTC)My first paid job as a teenager was when I was sixteen, the summer after I completed my GCSEs. I managed to get a holiday job as a production line assistant at a pie factory just down the road from where I lived - it was only a small business, family-run. My job, together with one other member of staff, was to hand-assemble the pies: we dealt with the small, one-portion, savoury ones with meat fillings. You'd put a layer of pastry on the base of a dish, then a machine would insert the filling, and you'd put another circle of pastry on top and press the sides together.
It was quite monotonous work to do for eight hours a day, entirely standing up, but I'm grateful for the experience as it meant I got to interact with a range of people from more diverse socioeconomic backgrounds than I'd known at my (selective, very middle class) secondary school. I remember I was talking to my co-worker about summer holidays once: I mentioned that I'd never been outside of Europe (which - among my very well-travelled classmates - I always felt very ashamed about) and she answered that she'd never been on holiday at all. It definitely made me much more aware of my privilege in that regard, and I've never forgotten that exchange.
I was recovering from quite a serious illness at the time, which - among other things - affected my balance and ability to stand for long periods of time, so I didn't last very long at the job, only two weeks; but the memory has always stayed with me. The following year, I started volunteering at a social care centre, where I eventually got hired as a worker, but that's a whole other story...
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Date: 2024-12-07 01:30 pm (UTC)Similar to a job that I had at a supermarket checkout for about six months when I was 18 (where I was trained on the job by a middle-aged woman who did that work full-time while also raising four children), I also think it's good for middle-class youth to understand — if they hadn't understood already — that while they might eventually get tertiary education and move on to careers where the work involves a lot of variety, there are people for whom this kind of monotonous, daily, repetitive work will remain the entirety of their working life. It's a sobering thing to know, and I think helps give a sense of perspective.
I'm sorry about the awful sexual harasser boss - I'm glad you were able to mostly survive him without incident.
Honestly, I always say that the whole thing was fine (and that's really how I felt at the time — a kind of pitying contempt for the guy, rather than any sense of danger), but it really was unacceptable for him to have behaved that way, and if it had been any of my four younger sisters (one of whom is currently the age I was when I worked in that bakery) who had been exposed to it, I would have been appalled and horrified.
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Date: 2024-12-06 08:06 pm (UTC)By secondary school, when I could get legal jobs, I worked 3 jobs from age 16 averaging abut 30 hours of work a week. The first one was at an iced cream shop where they refused even to let us taste the iced cream and got the wait staff at the restaurant next to us to spy on us to make sure we didn't. They also shorted our pay by keeping us "in training" for up to a year. I quit that as soon as I could and trained as a peer educator for Planned Parenthood instead, so I could do counseling and sex ed in the weekday evenings; this was a great experience and I think I did some real good there. On weekday afternoons, I worked as a biology lab assistant, and that has given me some of the most enduring horror stories of my life. I also was a dishwasher on the weekends.
I think it was overall a good thing to get such a broad base of experience early on. I learned a lot about many different worlds. I also learned to manage my time really well, which served me through my college and grad school years when I had to balance full time academics with up to 60 hours of work a week. I do think that I lost whatever benefits there may have been to learning to relax and be a kid, though. I never really did that. So much of my life has been swallowed up by the grind of struggling to make a living. It builds endurance, but sometimes maybe too much endurance.
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Date: 2024-12-07 01:39 pm (UTC)Those under-the-counter jobs you did as a pre-teen, in particular, sound really awful, even if the conditions were better than they could have been.
So much of my life has been swallowed up by the grind of struggling to make a living. It builds endurance, but sometimes maybe too much endurance.
Yes, I can certainly see that. There are benefits, but there are also benefits to that period of being able to relax and be a kid — there's something about the sense of safety and security that comes with that that never leaves you, and I feel gives some tangible positive effects in adulthood.
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Date: 2024-12-06 09:02 pm (UTC)Once people were old enough (16 or 17 depending on the job), there were a lot of summer jobs often related to younger kids (lifeguard, summer camp counsellor, summer jobs wherever the family traditionally spent the summer).
In my case, my father was seriously ill from the time I was 13, and died just after I turned 15 (and working before turning 16 would have been more legally complicated), and then when I was 16-18, I was in boarding school during the school year, and working wasn't an option. But none of my friends in that period routinely had steady part-time jobs (I think all of us did some amount of babysitting, a few did tutoring, etc.)
Interestingly, my boarding school had a requirement that everyone do a couple of hours at some sort of part time job equivalent, in order to make sure we felt some responsibility for our spaces and understood that the custodians and other staff were also humans.
My first year, it was helping the custodian in the English building with tasks that didn't require specialised tools - cleaning blackboards, dusting and polishing wood, cleaning windows, sweeping before he did stuff with the larger floor cleaner. My senior year, it was being a dorm proctor in my dorm, which took way more time. We also all had to do a week a couple of times a year on dish duty (which convinced me that a) I wanted to be very nice to anyone else ever having to do dish duty, and b) I would go a long way to avoid needing to take a job that involved that routinely. I had a much worse grasp on the way that smells and my migraines play badly together sometimes then.)
Other jobs involved things like shelving in the library (or being the evening clerk on duty for very responsible people), etc.
All of which meant I didn't work before I got to college outside of that. And at college, jobs on campus gave priority to work study students (which I wasn't), and jobs outside of that tended to be difficult to coordinate with coursework (especially since one of my majors was music, which had a fair number of evening rehearsals or 'go listen to this concert' requirements.) And anything other than the town the college was in (a 10-20 minute walk, depending where you started on campus) involved probably a car or negotiating a sometimes tricky college bus schedule and parking was severely limited on campus. (Also, I didn't get my license until my senior year in college, but that's a separate problem.)
So my friends who worked generally had work study (library, food service, IT), but it was on campus, and usually in the 10 hours a week sort of range.
I got my first job between junior and senior years in college (doing tech projects for staff on campus), that then turned into my first paid job the next summer (because one of the people hiring for that remembered me. She was an absolute delight, and part of the reason I went to library school. She was also the government docs librarian as well as being the college webmistress. You can tell it was the 90s because 'College Webmistress' was only about half of her job, there was me, and I think there was someoen doing web stuff for administration, and other than that, part of what I did was train department admins how to update syllabi.)
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Date: 2024-12-07 01:44 pm (UTC)I like that your boarding school encouraged that sense of responsibility for surroundings (even if the jobs involved were tedious or unpleasant). Far too many children don't seem to get that either at home or school, and arrive at university accommodation (either dorms/halls, or private shared rental places) completely incapable of taking even basic care of the place. (I say this with the bitter experience of being the one who always washed up everyone else's dishes, and witnessed multiple male friends bringing their dirty laundry home on weekends for their parents to wash.)
Your first university job sounds lovely, and was obviously very formative!
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Date: 2024-12-06 09:11 pm (UTC)My first proper job was working at Franklins (I don't know if you remember them!) and I feel like I was 14ish. I was on checkouts, and I lasted one day. I left because someone said my register till's float wasn't accurate (and I think I found the environment stressful—the store wasn't overly busy, and I was the only person on register that day, which was my first day. I think one lady was frustrated at me.). The training wasn't good. When I compare it to Woolworths, where I worked on checkouts from age 18 for 5 years, I don't remember Franklins assigning anyone with me in the checkout area watching and helping me, so I was left to fend for myself. From memory, Woolworths tended to have you paired with someone for at least a couple of shifts or have you in a booth with someone on the register behind you so you could ask them for help. Franklins didn't. It was too stressful for me, so I quit that day.
I personally think everyone should work at least one customer-facing retail job in their lives because working at Woolies taught me skills (the hard way—I love being yelled at by customers and being lowkey sexually harassed!) that corporate desk jobs wouldn't have many opportunities to teach me. I use some of those skills even now.
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Date: 2024-12-06 10:08 pm (UTC)I KNOW. We all thought this at the time, but because we were a bunch of 15-18-year-old girls, all we did was roll our eyes and talk behind his back about what a pathetic person he was.
I do remember Franklins, and that is messed up that they put you on the checkout on your own on your first day. I also worked at Woolies aged 18 (although only for six months, in between a job in an Italian bakery/restaurant where the owners and chefs were dealing drugs out of the kitchen, and a job in a patisserie/chocolate shop that I ended up doing for the next four years, and loved so much that I worked there over two Christmases when I came back to visit my family in Sydney after moving to the UK ... there is a big bakery theme in my work history!), and your experience chimes with my own. I was put on the register with an experienced, long-term, full-time employee for the first month or so that I worked there, and they did a lot to make sure we were competent enough to be left alone. It was really sobering for me to work with this woman — she was an immigrant from the Philippines and worked full-time doing tedious work on a Woolworths checkout while also raising four kids, and there were a lot of other colleagues from similar backgrounds. I didn't much enjoy working at Woolworths — customers regularly shouted at checkout staff if they felt the prices were too high, which, given the wealthy part of Sydney in which this supermarket was located, was absolutely ludicrous, and it was just really tedious work — but it was fairly harmless as far as part-time work goes.
I personally think everyone should work at least one customer-facing retail job in their lives because working at Woolies taught me skills (the hard way—I love being yelled at by customers and being lowkey sexually harassed!) that corporate desk jobs wouldn't have many opportunities to teach me. I use some of those skills even now.
I totally agree. It's not that I think it's great that people just have to politely tolerate customers being awful to them, but there are a lot of situations where it comes in handy, and retail is good training for it.
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Date: 2024-12-07 12:06 am (UTC)Retail is such a thankless job, and I hate how people look down on it. I know people who are more than pleased working in checkouts (just as I assume you know people who are more than happy to work in bakeries!). Many people find it very rewarding; I was not one of those people, but I know others won't find my corporate job as rewarding as I do.
I make it a point to be very nice to retail workers (at Woolies, bakeries, etc.), especially at this time of year. It's not their fault if prices are high or something scans wrong. The abuse I copped from customers (and even from my manager) really changed me as a person and my approach when it came to moving into the corporate world. Retail may not require a degree, but it is one of the hardest jobs out there imo.
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Date: 2024-12-07 01:47 pm (UTC)I make it a point to be very nice to retail workers (at Woolies, bakeries, etc.), especially at this time of year. It's not their fault if prices are high or something scans wrong. The abuse I copped from customers (and even from my manager) really changed me as a person and my approach when it came to moving into the corporate world. Retail may not require a degree, but it is one of the hardest jobs out there imo.
I agree with all of this.
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Date: 2024-12-06 09:24 pm (UTC)I had my first job at 10 delivering newspapers in the morning before going to school. By the time I was 13, I was working in a sweet shop. After that came working in a supermarket, spending a summer working with elephants, working at a library and at the local museum. The library and museum were great but my best paying job by far was working as a forecourt attendant at the petrol station in my village. That's my job experience 10-18.
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Date: 2024-12-07 01:53 pm (UTC)The class divide in expectations around work you describe is really interesting, and helps put something into context for me that I always found strange when I was a postgraduate student at Cambridge: the fact that a lot of the British students I met had never had a job, and were essentially preparing to move from a life of full-time education into a 'white collar' graduate job after finishing undergrad or master's degrees. In Australia, most people from a similar background would have had part-time jobs since secondary school, and almost certainly would have worked while they were university students, usually from somewhere between 10-20 hours per week in the latter case.
I still see kids delivering newspapers on bikes around here, although they look to be more in the 14-16-year-old age range, rather than being ten years old! You certainly worked in a lot of places.
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Date: 2024-12-06 10:35 pm (UTC)in Denmark children can start working at 13, with restrictions. usually the kind of jobs available to kids at that age are things like newspaper deliveries on weekends, or 'bottle boy' jobs at supermarkets - being a 'bottle boy' means you look after the recycled bottles and don't have any contact with customers. simple, easy jobs that only take up a few hours and pay a little pocket money. I can't remember at what age other jobs are possible but I suspect it's 14 - historically 14 was when you were confirmed and could leave school and start working full time, so there is a kind of rite of passage associated with this age and particularly the confirmation, which is also typically when kids get to taste alcohol for the first time.
having a job as a teenager in Denmark is considered character building. it's not about the pocket money. (kids from poor families will tell you otherwise though. in my family it wasn't about character building; we were poor.) so if a teenager doesn't have a job it can be a bit like, oh so your child is lazy? your child doesn't want to work? your child is setting themselves up for failure, it'll be so much harder for them to get a part time job once they're of age if they don't get one now! so there's a lot of social pressure on kids to have a job. personally I think this is a two-edged sword; sure kids acquire skills having jobs that are useful later in life, like navigating employment and colleagues and managers and work schedules and all that, but on the other hand it eats into their free time a lot and between school, work, and potential other activities (sports, music, etc.) kids often wind up not having any downtime at all which I don't think is very healthy.
high school in Denmark is 15-18 and this is the period when most teenagers have jobs so they can earn money to buy their own clothes or go to parties and/or buy alcohol or whatever they want money for. at 18 many teenagers quit their jobs because at this point they can receive (free) student grant from the government if they are in secondary or tertiary education. I had a supermarket job for a summer at 15 (my first job) where I restocked shelves and stuff like that (I refused to work the tills because I didn't want responsibility for money) but didn't have another job again until I was 18 and was in high school - I'm a bit of an outlier because I went to boarding school for two years between finishing my 9 years of mandatory education and starting high school, so I was a lot older than my peers and also couldn't work while in boarding school - and wanted to supplement my student grant income. so I worked in a small family owned bakery for my last 2 years in high school. it worked out great for me financially because as over 18 I got paid like an adult instead of a child for what was meant to be a teenage (under 18) job, but my employer didn't actually mind because I was very good at my job, punctual, and almost always willing to cover extra shifts (I only turned down a shift once) so he thought it was worth it.
common jobs in my area at the time, which was very rural, was summer jobs in holiday resorts/hotels - Lalandia employed a lot of kids as dishwashers and servers and cashiers - and in farming, especially strawberry picking, which does require a human touch (potatoes and sugar beets were the other big crops in the area, but those are machine harvested). the twins, who were the only ones of my siblings old enough to work when we lived there, had jobs doing all of those things. my sister worked at a local hotel year round on weekends, my brother was a dishwasher for a restaurant in Lalandia year round on weekends, and both took extra jobs during the summer as strawberry pickers or in Lalandia or on the ferry to Germany. (I considered taking a job on the ferry but I didn't want to do the disaster course on top of the first aid course + I could easily pick up more shifts at the bakery as there was one other student working there alternative weekends who often wanted to offload shifts so she could party/go on vacation + the full time adult staff took summer holidays I could then cover. (I didn't go to many parties myself, lol.))
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Date: 2024-12-07 02:05 pm (UTC)I really like the sound of that Icelandic initiative. As long as it's not exploitative, and there are safeguards in place, it's a good idea, and it obviously worked. In my experience, teenagers will behave in a responsible way if they are treated reasonably and given responsibilities, but this has to start early on.
so if a teenager doesn't have a job it can be a bit like, oh so your child is lazy? your child doesn't want to work? your child is setting themselves up for failure, it'll be so much harder for them to get a part time job once they're of age if they don't get one now! so there's a lot of social pressure on kids to have a job.
This was exactly the same thing in Australia — all the same reasons, although a lot of the social pressure came from other kids, where it was like, 'you're so childish, I can't believe you want to keep getting pocket money from your parents rather than earning it yourself by working.'
I hear you on the lack of downtime, though. By the time I left secondary school, I was going to two piano lessons a week, twelve hours a week gymnastics training, volunteering at Amnesty International, working all day Saturday at my job, practicing piano for an hour every morning before school, and going on overnight hikes three or four times a year for the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme, plus of course school and a whole lot of homework. My social life was basically ... doing all these things with various overlapping groups of my fellow teenagers, and although I was so busy and driven and focused on all this stuff that the usual kinds of teenage angst and social/psychological misery completely passed me by, once I got to university and this packed schedule evaporated, I was completely incapable of forming social connections and building a social life without a similar kind of structured, timetabled existence!
I love that you worked in a bakery as well, although it sounds like it was run by much nicer people than the one I worked in. (I went on to work for about three months in an Italian bakery where the owners and chefs were dealing drugs out of the kitchen, and then — after six months on a big supermarket checkout — got a job in a small, family-owned chocolate shop/patisserie, where I stayed for five years; bakeries are a bit of a theme in my early working life.)
It was really interesting to learn about all the typical jobs in your area — very different to what was possible in the big cities where I lived!
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Date: 2024-12-30 03:37 pm (UTC)the bakery I worked for was, hm, I don't know that it was necessarily nicer than the one you worked for. my boss, the owner, forbade us to use our personal phones at work, so if there was a lull in customers we weren't allowed to hang out in the back room chilling, we had to be behind the till just twiddling thumbs. he could be a bit strict. now this was the best bakery in a huge radius so there was almost never a lull in customers, it was super busy! plenty of regulars too. I still remember many of them.
I can't say I've ever worked anywhere where drugs were being dealt out of the kitchen, though!!
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Date: 2024-12-07 05:30 pm (UTC)At some point, I worked in a bakery putting jam in donuts and rolling cream horns.
I then got a job in a tobacconist, for an Austrian chap, selling cigarettes, lighter, tobacco, and tourist stuff like postcards and small gifts. That was £2 per day. The guy later ended up writing two books about his world travels - quite hair-raising - before dying of cancer.
Then I went to a cafe and washed up for just 5 hours each Saturday, which was £2.50.
One summer, my mum's creepy boyfriend got me a job writing out invoices at a garage for this Cypriot guy, 4 hours per day, when there was only about an hour's work, and he paid me £4 per day, and the time I wasn't working, all there was to do was read the porno mags in his drawer. Finally, he tried to get me drunk and I spilled Parfait Amour on my jeans. I don't think I went back after that.
Finally I got a job in British Home Stores, which was fortunate, because they paid my Social Security before 1975, which meant I got to retire at 60. There was always stuff to buy cheap at the end of the day. I loved cutting cheese with the wire.
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Date: 2024-12-07 06:06 pm (UTC)The British Home Stores job sounds good, though — especially the effect it ultimately had on your retirement age.
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Date: 2024-12-07 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-08 07:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-08 11:50 am (UTC)The label job sounds like it would have been reasonably enjoyable, as long as you were able to listen to music or something while doing it!
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Date: 2024-12-08 09:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-08 12:34 pm (UTC)Part of the area I grew up in is pretty rural and some parts of it are pretty poor. I know there were some kids who worked agricultural jobs a lot younger than I started regular part-time work.
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Date: 2024-12-08 01:37 pm (UTC)And yes, there is a big difference between working as a teenager for pocket money to pay for hobbies and 'luxury' items (I used to use what I earned at the bakery to pay for books, cheap earrings, new clothes, and hanging out in the mall food court with my friends), and needing to work to contribute to your family's living expenses — leading to situations like you describe with the younger kids taking up agricultural work.