Cost of living. Teens with no jobs

[monkeysox]

The whole COL crisis is exacerbated by huge supermarket chains (one example) who are making huge profits. They don't employ as many young people (automation) so the cost of the kid's needs falls on the parents who have huge bills themselves.
I always had a Saturday or evening job.
Businesses aren't hiring nearly as much as 30 years ago.
Aibu?

Yep, my local Tesco seems to have mostly Goan staff, but then my town is home to the largest community of them.
That is in contrast to the small Iceland on my high street who have a large percentage of teenage staff.
Maybe Iceland is just easier to get a job at if you are young with no/little retail experience.

This. Plus employers now have to pay NI contributions when employing a teen for less hours than they used to. Labour think they are helping but all they have done is cause more unemployment. Under 25 unemployment is now up to 12.5 percent under RR.

The cinema in our little town advertised today, closed the vacancy after 4 hours because they had many hundreds of applications!!!

My hours haven't been cut back but instead I'm doing the work of 3 people as when someone leaves they aren't replaced. And lack of jobs means people can't vote with their feet and leave bad employers like they did in the past so they get away with it. Actually my employer isn't a bad employer but a skint one and I'm grateful not to ne made redundant but this is barely better.

@Skinnysaluki Are you not aware that food production costs have increased a lot? Talk to some farmers. The shops have huge increases in costs too - not least taxes on employees. Plus who actually owns the supermarkets? LIDL and Aldi are German I think. Sainsburys is privately owned and M&S is publicly quoted, as is Tesco, and Waitrose is a partnership. I’m glad businesses make profits. Many pension funds invest in shares and we need something successful in this country! Profit isn’t a dirty word. If you want cheaper food, get savvy with bargains and cook more.

Yes it’s falling to parents to continue to support and pay for their children. Many young people whose parents saved ctf for them also won’t be able to claim benefits either. That said I do think YP should claim UC if they can.

Interesting that some posters think that they are the parents responsibility- not after 18 they’re not. Same as those on any/disability benefits, they are adults.

You live in a very very different place to me! This is not a situation I recognise at all.

100% this.

Labour don't think they are helping.
The whole raising of NMW but keeping the tax thresholds static is nothing more than a tax grab.

They've made young people unemployable and the same with their aggressive workers rights bill.

Same. Places like that are closing all the time near me.
If anything pops up, it is a Turkish barber or a vape shop (and I did see a Vape shop advertise for staff and they wanted 3 years retail and vape experience... for NMW).

Only place you might stand a chance is a warehouse but then they don’t want to work around school / college hours your either full time or piss off.

I’ve actually started to see wfh jobs pop up for things that would normally be done in a warehouse I guess because then they don’t pay space, electricity and so on just minimum wage.

How the government do not understand that the minimum wage is costing jobs is beyond me.
2 pubs a week are closing in the uk at the moment. Minimum wage, taxes and business rates are to high.
It would also help if they lowered the retirement age. That would help pensioners and youngsters.

Not exactly the point of the thread but it may help some 16+ teens.YouGov surveys let them register at that age. 100 surveys gets them £50. Better than nothing for a bit of pocket money.

I don't think £10.85 is too much for an 18 year old. DS is 19 and still earning £10.85 despite being in his job almost a year.

It's £8 for under 18.

I think the problems start with progression from minimum wage jobs, so many jobs ask for experience and only pay minimum wage or 10p above.

The lack of part time employment for teens is awful. When I was a teen, in the 90’s, we nearly all had jobs. Paper rounds, local newsagent, waitressing in hotels, Saturday shop work or in salons. We got experience answering phones and interacting with the public. Gave us an opportunity to form friendships with colleagues and build a good work ethic. We then had a reference for our 1st full-time job. I don’t know when this changed but now barely anywhere will employ under 18’s.

I remember when most college students had summer jobs and part time during term . It was a help to parents paying for accommodation, transport ,etc. Meant students had money for extras like tickets , partying , clothes, make up .

The latest trick is to employ someone for only four days to avoid having to fulfill contractual terms like sick pay or pension contributions. And of course with more and more self service tills they do without employees . Even my local garage has no staff whatsoever, just card payments .

Yes but if kids earn their own money it reduced the strain on families.

Even in post education environments there is less appetite for employing young/junior employees. We have the issue that clients don’t want graduates booking to a project cause they don’t feel it’s value for money, despite the fact these graduates have a masters degree. And without experience, how do they step up from graduate…they’ve got to take the first steps in their career! But it does mean that the number of graduates employed each year needs to drop otherwise they end up without billable work.

Minimum wage for under 18s is £8/hour

This 100%

The economy is changing rapidly and I think some of the old certainties are fading away.

I began working at 13 (Saturday job, which seems crazy now!) but now believe that the old model of parents being able to assume that children would progress to financial independence at 18 or 21 no longer holds true.

I would advise any young parent to assume that they will need to be housing and/or providing for their children well into adulthood, so to plan their family size accordingly.

I am currently reading the entire Milburn NEET report but haven’t come to any conclusions yet.

It was all so informal and badly paid. I always think of this when thinking about babysitting - my parents had very ordinary jobs but had a teenage baby sitter for us every Saturday night, went to friends houses for dinner or out to restaurants.

its been £10 an hour for babysitting for the last ten years here. I can’t afford to put £50 on top of a typical night out, so we don’t go out as much, or now we take the kids with us as still cheaper than babysitting (and just go for early dinner rather than ‘date night’) or meet up with other families. So a typical teenage job is gone just like that because rightly or wrongly it’s just priced out of the market.

@Yellowshirt Er no! We cannot afford the pensions payable at a younger age! We don’t have enough coming in to do that and we just keep borrowing! The only solution is growth in the economy and the government talk about it, but are bereft of ideas because they are pushed around by the Left. So we have no chance of achieving anything!

Yes I started at 14 at a garden centre! Moved on to hospitality and retail, had dozens of part time jobs in the decade before graduating my post-grad (which had full time work placements!) Watching some 90s shows with my tween now and all the teenagers have jobs even in a wealthy (fictional) tv town, it was so normal and normalised, a lot of us worked a lot of hours too!

I'm in my fifties so my teen years pre-dated the minimum wage and my Saturday/evening job during my A-levels paid £1.67 per hour. It wouldn't have been enough to live on even then in the late 1980s, but it allowed me to work and to learn the lessons of budgeting and paying for my own social life.