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’.