But did you listen? Nooooo, no you didn’t, did you?
But whatever your first job may have been, there’s a reasonable chance it combined the thrill of hard cash with several mortifying mistakes and a crash course in handling stroppy customers, taking criticism more or less gracefully and moaning about it only out of earshot. Though teenage starter jobs have been in decline for decades – for reasons varying from academic pressures on sixth-formers to the rise of side hustles on Vinted that don’t show up in official statistics – everyone still has to start somewhere, even if it’s now more likely at 18 than 14. But getting that start is becoming harder than it was.
We really did all say that if you keep raising the minimum wage this is what would happen. Those hardest hit will be the young, untrained and untried. But you still went ahead with it anyway, didn’t you?
Tossers.
The headline and subheading are worth reproducing.
Breathtaking, really.
When the minimum wage comes up for discussion I am always reminded of a Bristow cartoon, where a girl walks into “Tilly’s Temps” looking for a job :
“We have three going at the moment :
Siberian salt mines
Burmese railway or
Chester Perry typing pool .”
“Salt mines, please.”
“Labour” are lucky that the union leaders aren’t really interested in the welfare of workers unless they’re already in a union paying all those lovely dues that enable those leaders to live like royaly…
My first Saturday job at Waitrose paid £0.30 and hour for a 7 hour working day getting me £2.10 a week.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing or even who my boss was, but I worked hard and got on with whatever needed doing till management soon noticed me and put me in a role where I could make a difference to the stores bottom line. I routinely pushed their Saturday profit up by a couple of hundred quid so they did very well out of me for the pittance I was paid. That said I was the real winner as that work experience made subsequent real job interviews almost a formality because I could explain how I added value.
Just after decimalisation then? The point is well made though. Knowing how you contribute to the business and its profits is vital to understanding how to get paid more. National bargaining and being part of a massive union doesn’t help .
Don’t be silly.
What part do you think silly? It’s all absolutely true. The profit was down to me managing the rather large number of meat cabinets in a large store in such a way as to keep everything neat and appealing to sell all the items that would be past date by Monday when the store reopened and minimising what was left for me to discount for quick sale. I found it all so much better if compressed it down to fewer and fewer cabinets as empty space between items is not a good shopping experience. It really gave me a buzz to see the difference I could make even though it made no difference to the 30p an hour I was paid.
The initial payback came when I applied for a job and was one of the two successful candidates out of 600 applicants. And that job meant that the September after I left school I was being paid a good salary to do a 3 year engineering degree.
Immigration has also undermined the employment prospects for British youngsters. That job in Maccy D’;s now done by adult Indians. That job on the farm; now done by Eastern Europeans.
British youngsters have also undermined themselves. I know a few people in the pub & restaurant trade in the UK and they report that it is extremely difficult to find part-time staff.
This isn’t a new thing, but it used to be more prevalent in physically difficult things, where many are called but few are chosen.
Chap I knew years ago ran an industrial shotblasting and painting business from 1982 to about 2012 (when he jacked it in when one of his clients, Texaco, they tried to make him put all of his blokes on a course teaching them to use ladders).
He made a lot of money, because it’s a nasty, physically hard job which few people want to do.
Because of that it paid well – he was offering at least twice the wage you could earn in eg a factory or working on the farm in the mid 80s – but very few blokes would stick at it.
Many’s the time he would take some 20-year-old off the dole, bring him on site for a day or two, and then never see the fucker again.
His best workers were paddies, of course. Happy to live in a caravan on a site and eat boiled bacon and cabbage every night while filing away the fat wage packets.
One of the temp jobs I had as a student was as a refuse collection executive operator (then known as “bin man”). I lasted 1 day.
“This isn’t a new thing, but it used to be more prevalent in physically difficult things”
Yes, my old chimney sweep used to say that he had take on apprentices for years, but by about 2010 none of them came back for the second week.
My chimney sweep turned up a few years ago with his apprentice – his wife.
She stood the course and is now a master chimney sweep and now does our chimney.
I’m impressed, it’s tough work.
My current sweep is an ex Royal Marine; seems they’re the only men tough enough to do the job.
Tough work? My chimney sweep fixes a vacuum cleaner over the flue, then pushes a brush up the chimney, switches on the vacuum cleaner, has a coffee and clears up. £60 for 40 minutes work…
I recall a time many years ago when I was still living at home and the chimney sweep paid his annual visit. He mentioned that he reluctantly had to increase his fee because of the rise in electricity prices. It wasn’t until after he left that my Mum said “Hang on, he’s using our electricity,”
and even more difficult to get them to actually turn up, I’m told.
These here parts, early 2000s, each pub had young part time lasses, usually just one, possibly two for Sunday lunch time or Friday nights, on for Monday, Thursday, Friday evenings, and one or two other sessions. The core was 3, with may be another 3 in the pool as cover. They all sorted the rota out between themselves, as and when. May be did 8 hours a week each.
Somewhere after 2015, it changed, so the roster shrank down to 2 core, 1 cover, and the 2 were usually doing some NVQ course in Leisure and Hospitality or related, and hung around at 20-28 hours per week for about 5 years.
Bit of a change, that.
“it is extremely difficult to find part-time staff.”
Also more expensive to employ them. The starting point for Employers’ NI was dropped from £9,100 to £5,000, meaning the cost of employing a part-timer earning £9,100 increased by £615.
Its even harder to find full time staff, because everyone says ‘I only want 16 hours, otherwise I’ll lose my benefits’. If Reform have the chance they need to start upping the hours required to qualify for UC. I’d say minimum 3 days a week, and after you’ve done that for a year, 4.
Does bob-a-job still exist?
No, not seen one for ages. Used to see them standing at tills a few years ago in the local supermarket offering to pack for you instead, but don’t even see this now.
Bermuda – Kids have to apply to get the chance to pack at the supermarket. In school hours you often get a less fortunate person packing for you. Some are actually pretty good at it, some less so. I tip $2 for a couple of mins work but here that buys an orange.
No one carries cash to pay them.
You can’t get the liability insurance for it any more.
Also it’s now probably illegal under the modern slavery convention.
A lot of stuff gets fucked up by ludicrous insurance requirements nowadays. This is an under-studied area.
The insurance is all down to our legal system having become more litigious. If you don’t have insurance you get sued and the lawyers get their substantial cut. If you do have insurance the insurance company agrees a payout and the lawyers still get their substantial cut but without the risk that the defendant doesn’t have the money to pay.
And to avoid payouts the insurance company makes daft requirements that stop you doing anything, which rather effectively keeps the lawyers out.
well the insurers also pay out the flimsiest of claims even when the person being claimed against wants to dispute there is a claim in the first place. Cheaper for them that way. Which feeds the litigiousness cos you can always get compo.
I saw some recently, cluttering up a supermarket checkout, raising cash for their trip to Switzerland. Felt guilty about not using them, so gave their colleague a £5 note on the way out.
Might be fun if we all told about our first jobs. Mine was selling ice cream in Clacton. Bad ice creasm made from powder and water in a machine. The Mr Whippy kind.
Following year I worked in a mass production bakery making Wonderloaf. I recall also selling ice cream in the aisles of the Hammersmith Apollo (or Odeon?) unpaid but I got to watch the Beach Boys on tour. Then the Army, eight quid a week, some of it taxed at 42.5 %.
Picking potatoes by hand. £2 per ton when I was a nipper, £6 per ton by the time I left school.
October half term was known as potato picking week in the part of Yorkshire I grew up in. I did it a couple of times when I was about 10 then we moved. It was bloody hard work.
I spent the summer before I joined the Army apprentice college selling ice cream in the kiosks at Flamingo Park Zoo as it was called then. If you drew the one next to the monkeys it could be fun because one of them would start to masturbate if you blew it kisses. Highly amusing when there was a school visit.
(By mutual agreement I stopped going to school after Easter, there was no point as I was leaving and loathed the place, hence working during school time)
Pavlovian reaction? Did you find that monkey easy to train?
Someone had already done it when I started.
Mine was easy. Saturdays working in my aunt’s hardware store. Can’t remember what I was paid but it wan’t a lot. Didn’t learn much; I seem to remember spending much of my time sticking price labels on stock. Then, between school and art school, a cleaner in an army camp. Bogs; miles of corridors to mop.
After that I saw myself through art school by playing in top-40 club bands 3-4 nights a week on the Working Men’s Club circuit. Learnt my trade. An excellent apprenticeship. All cash in hand, natch. I didn’t even know you were supposed to declare it.
I upgraded from a paper round to pumping petrol at a garage on the A127 near West Hornden at the weekends. £3 10s per weekend, which was good money. Regular petrol was 4s 6d per gallon at that time. The real perk was the Green Shield stamps. I would always run them off the machine. Some customers didn’t want them so they went in my pocket.
Delivering newspapers, age 14-15, £2.50 a week. Saved up and bought my first computer.
Three summers unpaid work experience, medical engineering, designing and building medical monitoring hardware and software.
During university, summer job teaching IT skills on a holiday camp, £40 a week plus food & board.
Everything since tumbling down the skills ladder. “Software engineer? That’s computers innit. IT. Here’s a job moving furniture, of course it’s IT, they’ve got computers on them.”
Mine was climbing up chimneys with a big brush, then some posh bastard came along and threw me out of work…
Working in the second-hand camera department of a big Jessops. Fiddling about with old cameras all day was heaven, would have done it for free.
Bar Porter at Butlin’s in the summer holiday when I was 17. Butlin’s arranged (and, I think, paid for) bed-and-breakfast accommodation. I wasn’t allowed to drink or serve beer because I was under 18. Quite a lot of heavy lifting but nothing too complicated.
£6 a week for a 40 hour week (3 shillings an hour). I saved most of it.
I used to work for a temp agency, couple of quid an hour. Did all sorts of jobs : messenger boy ( £100,000 cheques ), building site work, clerk on privatisation share offers. Did it also during my college vacations, always started term £300 up.
First proper job was with the MoD ( at 19). I was so horrified at how badly run the place was, that I had no hesitation taking the offer to go to Poly after about 6 months.
Started delivering weekly ads for the local Spar grocer. And bike delivery of stuff for a small local privately owned grocers. Summertime while at school, fruit-picking; needed a long bike ride to get to the job site. At uni, summer jobs were driving a taxi at Didcot (yet another long bike ride; wouldn’t let me drive the creaky old taxi home for the night…). Wot fun. Introduced me to how to fiddle more money, that.
And a couple of summers, working in the local leather factory. Hard work, that, and smelly – carrying slithery pig skins to and from giant spoon driers and loading ’em into giant rotating horizontal vats (I think…). Old technology – factory long shaft with belts driving each vat. Most employees were Indians from Oxford; they commuted on the bus. Got offered a daughter or two…
That reminds me: I spent a month before art school driving a Morris 1000 delivery van around rural Hampshire for a grocer’s, delivering to the posh and sneezing like fuck from the hay fever. Loved it.
First paid work (apart from bob-a-job)? Picking rose hips – paid by the pound collected.
Wouldn’t it be nice if some of our politicians had ever had a starter job? As opposed to having their socks ironed for them from Fettes through Oxbridge to the Inns, and their first opportunity to learn from totally and utterly fucking something up coming only once they are running the country?
I would not be surprised if many of them did have such jobs which, at the age of 14 or 16, drove them to the conclusion that such work was beneath them and that they could do far more for the common weal by taking a useless PPE degree and telling everyone else how to do their jobs.
I made sure my privately educated daughter had a Saturday job as well as holiday jobs. It taught her the discipline of work and showed her what her life would be like without proper qualifications. Now, she’s a City lawyer on £150k pa for a 4-day week.
I think there’s a lot of truth in that. They acquired those ideas above their station from somewhere.
First job? I don’t know whether Saturday working for the family printing business at the age of 14 counts… But although I was too small to do screen-printed A0s I was pretty good at running an A3 offset-litho press and the Itek cameras that made the polymer printing plates. 🙂
During uni, I picked up a fantastic job working for Securicor… Finish uni Friday afternoon, get something to eat, clock-on at the control-centre early Friday evening, then work straight through doing cash and data runs and a couple of “statics” until Sunday lunchtime/early afternoon, catch up on my sleep, and back to uni on Monday morning. I was paid for 40 to 50 hours (some of it classed as ‘overtime’) per weekend. It enabled me to have a much better standard of living than my peers. 🙂
My first ‘proper’ job (i.e. not a paper round). Back in my Uni days, it was still possible to sign on the dole in the summer holidays so I duly signed on at the Unemployment Benefit Office on the first day of the holidays. Then went down the job centre and there was a temporary office admin job going at the Unemployment Benefit Office, so I went back there, had a quick interview and two hours after signing on the dole, I was signed off and was working behind the counter I had just signed on at.
Another memory has surfaced of that job. I started on Monday 3rd of the month and when I got my first month’s pay, it was only 29/31 of the full month’s pay as I had started on the 3rd – despite the obvious impossibility of me having started any earlier. To be fair, the officer manager then altered my personnel details so my record showed I’d started on Saturday 1st and I got my extra 2 days’ pay.
In my village, the general store – run by affable Hindus – cannot find any boys or girls willing to do a paper round…
The solution for government programs gone bad? MORE government programs.
First paid job was as a puttee roller in a textile mill. Mill has long since gone the way of puttees.
First paid job was the usual paper round. Although at one point, I was doing three rounds of a morning Monday to Friday, two Saturday and Sunday morning, plus two evening rounds Monday to Saturday for a bit. The Saturday evening rounds got annoying pretty quickly, saved by the fact that one house had the letterbox at the bottom of the door, and some sort of terrier that did like a tug-of-war. Kept me amused for a bit. There was a four week period where I also started at six in the morning as the shop owner had done his knee in, and had an op to fix it. That was the round that took in a few houses that almost formed a village, and the outlying farms.
The guy drove like an absolute nutter.
Bit of fruit picking, I lasted two weeks I think, shop work in the not local computer store, and a bit of coding (6502 assembler, and I think something else just the once) for a couple of uni stubents who wrote adventure games in the side. There was a work experience placement at college, that ended up paying really quite well, then it was 9-5 after college.
Those hardest hit will be the young MINORITIES, untrained and untried.
Fixed.
Oh I dunno. Most young minorities I know have an uncle Ibrahim who pays cash in hand to any distant relations wanting work. He’ll also lend out the company BMW as well, cuzzins insurance innit bruv.
My first job was on a quarter horse ranch, sort of a hobby ranch owned by a local rich guy. Some of it was fun, especially starting the foals on their early training – walk on a lead, pick up their feet without kicking, etc. But I never, ever want to shift irrigation line by hand again. I can do without unloading hay trucks too. But, it was better than some fast food joint. I mostly look on it with fondness.