‘Music While You Work’: Teenage Women in the Australian Labour Market, 1947 to 1992

Abstract

Teenage women have been particularly disadvantaged by the collapse of the youth labour market over the last 20 years. This article outlines the dimension of that problem, comparing the position young women held in the teenage labour market in the late 1940s with their position today. While the 1950s and 1960s saw growth in some areas of paid work for teenage women, the 1970s marked a watershed. With the major exception of saleswork in the retail industry and clerical work in banking, teenage women saw their place in the labour market dramatically shrink during that decade. Nearly 30,000 full‐time jobs disappeared during the 1970s, to be replaced by nearly the same number of part‐time jobs. The 1980s has seen these developments reach crisis proportions. In the late 1980s, nearly 40,000 clerical jobs were lost to teenage women, and again the only significant employment growth was in casualised service sector jobs, such as cashiers and sales workers. This article concludes by exploring the structural reasons behind these dramatic long‐term changes.

Precarious work and precarious workers: Towards an improved conceptualisation

“…In previous decades, retail offered a large number of full-time entry-level jobs for young workers, but employers have steadily restructured most entry-level retail jobs into casual part-time jobs, occupied by school students and tertiary students, while recruitment into management is increasingly through recruitment at graduate or higher certificate level (AWPA, 2014: 67-68). As a result, young school leavers who desire a full-time retail job often face a particularly difficult school-to-work transition, while seeking to earn a living wage and get a foot on the ladder of full-time work (Watson, 1994).…”

The youth labour market: From education to work before and after the global financial crisis

“…During the late 1980s, 40,000 clerical jobs for teenage women disappeared. The only substantial growth in teenage employment was part-time casualised service sector jobs, such as cashiers and salesworkers (Sweet, 1988; Watson, 1994). In his overview of this period, Russell Ross observed that despite the addition of one million new jobs to the economy in the mid-1980s, full-time employment among teenagers fell in absolute terms (Ross, 1988).…”