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dolorosa_12) wrote2024-12-06 05:56 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2024-12-06 05:56 pm
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Friday open thread: paid work while you were in secondary school
There 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!
no subject
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.))
no subject
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!
no subject
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!!