School students and part-time work
Workplace problems and challenges
The literature has identified some potential problems and challenges associated with teenage part-time workers and the nature of the workplaces that employ them.
However a large national project on student-working found few problems in the two companies researched because these companies had policies in place that addressed the potential problems. Some suggestions are made about how problems and challenges could be avoided in a wider range of adolescent workplaces.

by Erica Smith
& Wendy Patton

working is now recognised as an established fact rather than an aberrant phenomenon, as has tended to be the case until fairly recently. Many employers, particularly in the retail and fast food industries, rely on students to run their businesses. Some school students need to work to help support their families and most want to work for discretionary spending, and school systems

and meaningless could be seen as disrespectful to young people and the work that they do; perhaps even more importantly it serves to prevent proper examination of any serious problems that do exist, because
This paper therefore sets out to examine the actual problems and challenges in school studentworking. This is approached by identifying the characteristics of young part-time workers, and

Youth Studies Australia

VOLUME 28 NUMBER 3 2009

21

the workplaces in which they work, that are challenges, and then drawing on data to illustrate the actual incidence of such problems and challenges. The paper uses data from an

Exploitation can be associated with a lack of understanding of rights at work and with safety risks. on student-working careers to answer these questions. The data used in the paper were

Background and literature review of young people who work while still at