Saturday Jobs: Sixth-formers in the Labour Market and the Family

Abstract

Anyone who uses a supermarket or a fast food store in any of Britain’s major cities on a Saturday will have the opportunity to observe one interesting feature of the youth labour market of the late 1980s: a high proportion of staff are young people, still in full-time education, working part-time. Yet, in the literature and relevant policy statements over the past ten years, these young students-workers have been largely invisible. Their invisibility rests, in part, on the fact that they enter national statistics under their predominant activity, which is ‘student’.

The authors would like to thank the ESRC for funding this research (Grant Number R000231510) and Holly Hutson for her contribution in entering the data.