Beyond the Narratives of Experience and Money: The Formation of Teenage Students as Labor in Sweden

Abstract

This article examines the formation of teenage students as workers through their participation in low-status service jobs, building on Weeks’ theorization of the contemporary work ethic. Based on 40 interviews with working teenagers in Sweden, the analysis explores how they use narratives of working to ‘gain experience’ and ‘earn extra money’ in response to the cultural imperative of constructing a self that holds value for employers. It highlights how these shared narratives, while enabling teenagers to make sense of their work experiences, also reflect embodied inequalities, with classed, racialized, and neighborhood-based social differences shaping their understanding of the working self. The article contributes to theorizing the ideological and practical role of paid work in shaping youth subjectivities and expands our understanding of how differently situated teenagers become part of the low-wage service labor force.

Keywords

labor subjectivity sociology teenage workers work ethic youth

Introduction

Teenage employment has become widespread in low-wage, non-standard service sectors over recent decades (Howieson et al., 2012a; Huddleston, 2011; Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015), where these workers’ youthfulness, appearance, and soft skills are increasingly valued in interactive industries like hospitality and retail (Besen-Cassino, 2014; Farrugia, 2018). This shift has led to new intersections of class, gender, race, and youth within the contemporary service economy. As Farrugia (2021a: 380) notes, middle-class youth, often students, ‘have become ideal workers for what are essentially working-class jobs’. However, much of the existing research frames teenage employment primarily as transitional, emphasizing its potential impact on future educational or career trajectories (Neyt et al., 2019). This future-oriented focus tends to overlook how paid work shapes teenagers’ sense of self and everyday life in the present. Given that employment has become a prevalent experience for teenagers in many countries (Price et al., 2011), it is crucial to explore its diverse meanings and its role in forming youth subjectivities.

Drawing on 40 interviews with teenage students in Sweden (ages 15 to 20) who work part-time while attending school, this article departs from Weeks’ (2011) theorization of the contemporary work ethic to examine the formation of teenagers as workers. Weeks argues that contemporary capitalist societies are defined by a work ethic that promises personal fulfillment through labor, with ‘becoming a worker’ positioned as a prerequisite for individual self-realization. I use the concept to explore the subjectivation function of work: how subjectivities are shaped by the demands for productivity and valorization, thereby structuring our engagements with work. Recent literature highlights the concept’s relevance in understanding how young people construct a self in line with the disciplinary requirements of work (Farrugia, 2019, 2021b; Lamberg, 2022). Expanding this research, I explore how differently situated teenagers negotiate and articulate the work ethic through their participation in low-status service jobs.

The analysis begins with the empirical observation that nearly all interviewed teenagers described taking part-time jobs ‘to gain experience’ and ‘earn some extra money’, regardless of workload or financial need. These phrases reflect dominant narratives through which participants oriented themselves and ascribed meaning to their experiences in low-status service jobs. I ask, ‘what do the narratives of experience and extra money reveal about the formation of teenage students as workers?’ To answer this, I advance three key arguments. First, for these youngest workers, the work ethic is abstract and future-oriented, focusing less on specific jobs and more on the perceived value of early employment as ‘experience’ that enables them to construct a self-image as active and entrepreneurial. This emphasis positions earnings as secondary, ‘something extra’. Second, I examine how embodied inequalities shape different expressions of this ethic. While class differences among youth have been noted (Farrugia, 2019), I take an intersectional approach to show how racialization, migrancy, and neighborhood context further shape understandings of the working self. I demonstrate how the narratives of working for ‘experience’ and ‘extra money’ are also mobilized to distance oneself from stigmatized discourses of poverty, unemployment, and criminality. Third, while teenage work can be seen as a response to societal pressures to cultivate an employable self, the analysis highlights unequal access to the resources needed to embody this ideal – inequalities often worsened by exploitative practices in low-wage service jobs. However, framing work as a way to gain ‘experience’ and ‘extra money’ tends to obscure these disparities, leaving them unquestioned. By advancing these arguments, the article contributes to theorizing the ideological and practical role of paid work in shaping youth subjectivities while expanding our understanding of how differently situated teenagers become an available low-wage service labor force (Yates, 2017).

The study context is Sweden, where approximately 65 percent of upper-secondary students have experience with paid work, and around 25 percent are employed year-round (Statistics Sweden, 2021). In recent years, employment has become a common experience among teenagers from diverse educational, gender, class, and geographic backgrounds (Kallos, 2024; Statistics Sweden, 2021). As in many other countries, this pattern can be contextualized by the growing emphasis on entrepreneurialism and individual employability in education and labor market policy (Åstrom Rudberg, 2023; Fejes, 2010). Moreover, it reflects broader developments in the labor market, including the expansion of low-wage service industries and the rise of non-standard employment. In Sweden, temporary jobs are prevalent in sectors like retail and hospitality, especially among students and workers aged 15 to 17 (Berglund et al., 2021). Despite this, teenagers’ participation in the labor force has received limited attention, aside from studies linking part-time work during school to future employment outcomes (Hensvik et al., 2023).

In the following three sections, I review literature on teenage employment, outline the theoretical perspectives underpinning the analysis, and discuss my methodology. The empirical section is divided into two parts. First, I examine the notion of working to ‘gain experience’, interpreting it as a response to the imperative of producing an active, passionate, and enterprising self while highlighting classed, racialized, and neighborhood-based differences. Second, I analyze the narrative of ‘earning some extra money’, showing how it is used to produce this subjectivity. I demonstrate how teenagers mobilize this narrative to distance themselves from stigmatized and racialized images of criminality, unemployment, and poverty. Finally, I bring these findings together in a concluding discussion.

From Transitions to the Formation of the Teenage Labor Force

Researchers have observed that the systemic reliance on teenage employment in sectors such as hospitality and retail have been largely overlooked in labor market research (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015; see also Doogan, 2009), despite it becoming increasingly normalized and playing a larger role in shaping young people’s everyday lives (Hobbs et al., 2007; Price et al., 2011; Woodman, 2012). This is partly due to the prevailing perception of such jobs as temporary stopgaps rather than ‘real work’ (Tannock, 2001; Yates, 2017). As Sukarieh and Tannock (2015: 46) observe, this stereotype has often been used by employers to justify lower wages:

The idea that working youth are temporary workers, just passing through, who do not have any ‘real’ financial needs and are using their incomes primarily to support personal consumption practice serves to justify the lack of job security, poor working conditions and low wages.

A similar logic underpins the rise of unpaid internships in higher education (Grant-Smith and McDonald, 2018). Framed as aspirational labor, such unpaid work is positioned as a strategy for enhancing employability, demonstrating self-investment and passion – where the willingness to work without pay signals a ‘love of the job’ (Allen et al., 2013: 443; see also Duffy, 2017). This discourse obscures the exploitation of interns as a cheap or non-waged workforce, often without legal protections (Perlin, 2011). As with teenage employment in low-wage industries, unpaid internships are justified by narratives that downplay their exploitative aspects, reinforcing the idea that young workers are merely ‘passing through’ rather than engaging in labor that warrants fair compensation.

The view of youth labor as transitional has shaped dominant research on the relationship between teenage students and work (Farrugia, 2021a; Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015). Most existing studies focus on the educational and career outcomes of combining part-time work with full-time education, often weighing its benefits and drawbacks (see Neyt et al., 2019 for an overview). Some research highlights benefits such as skill development and improved job prospects (Hensvik et al., 2023; McKechnie et al., 2014; Simpson et al., 2018), while others link student employment to lower academic achievement and higher dropout risks, especially among youth working long hours (Neyt et al., 2019). Within this literature, teenage labor is often framed instrumentally, assessed mainly in terms of its impact on individual transitions into further education or the workforce. Similarly, heterogeneity within the teenage workforce is typically explored through how social inequalities shape individual trajectories, with debates focusing on whether employment itself or pre-existing disadvantages contribute to negative academic outcomes. Work patterns vary by class, sex, ethnicity, and academic performance (Bachman et al., 2013; Howieson et al., 2012b; Staff et al., 2020), with disadvantaged youth working longer hours (Staff and Mortimer, 2007). However, these differences are generally treated as independent variables, rather than as embodied inequalities (re)produced through paid labor.

Farrugia (2021a: 372) argues that the dominance of the transitions paradigm marginalizes analyses of how young people are shaped as workers in contemporary service economies – as ‘subjects that are produced, valorized, and devalorized’ through capitalist labor force formation (see also Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015; Yates, 2017). This critique underscores key gaps in research on teenage labor. This article builds on a small but growing body of critical scholarship that examines teenage employment, including how young workers experience their jobs and the meanings they attribute to them (e.g. Besen-Cassino, 2014, 2018; Sheppard et al., 2019; Tannock, 2001). Besen-Cassino (2014) demonstrates that many young students enter private service jobs for socialization, enjoyment, and the cultivation of a branded self-image, while Sheppard et al. (2019) illustrate how early work experiences are shaped by intersecting and often contradictory gendered discourses. To this literature, the present article contributes by theorizing the ideological and practical role of paid work in shaping subjectivities within a highly heterogeneous teenage labor force.

Theoretical Perspectives

This article draws on Weeks’ (2011) theorization of the contemporary work ethic to examine the formation of teenagers as labor. Capitalism, as Weeks (2011: 7) argues, is a ‘work society’ in which the social role of waged labor has been so deeply naturalized that it appears necessary and inevitable. To challenge and deconstruct such assumptions, it is crucial to approach work not only as an economic necessity but also, as Weeks (2011: 11) emphasizes, ‘as an individual moral practice and collective ethical obligation’. The work ethic serves as an analytical tool to explore the subjectivation function of work: the promises and demands within a society that shape the production of available labor forces, reflecting the social organization of employment and regimes of value creation in a given historical context. Weeks traces the evolution of the work ethic through several historical shifts, departing from Weber’s (2005) classic account of the Protestant work ethic and its link to salvation. The contemporary work ethic, which Weeks (2011) describes as ‘post-Fordist’, is defined by promises of emotional fulfillment, self-expression, enjoyment, and meaning. Thus, the reward of work lies in individual self-realization, transforming work into a domain for cultivating the self.

The work ethic functions as a cultural imperative, compelling individuals to cultivate a self that holds value in the labor market. Young people have been positioned at the forefront of this demand, expected to develop a reflexive, entrepreneurial self in response to the flexible and precarious conditions of contemporary capitalism (Farrugia, 2021b). These dynamics are closely linked to entrepreneurial discourses (e.g. Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007; Bröckling, 2016; Rose, 1999), which urge workers to become ‘flexible, sellable, and adaptable to any changes in the labor market’ (Leonardi and Chertkovskaya, 2017: 5). Research has shown how such discourses shape educational and labor market policies (Fejes, 2010; Gerrard, 2014) and constitute a pervasive grammar through which young people make sense of work (Carbajo and Kelly, 2023).

The concept of the work ethic has been employed to examine the nexus between youth, education, and employment (Farrugia, 2019; Gerrard, 2014; Lamberg, 2022). Exploring the formation of young people as workers in Australia, Farrugia (2019) identifies two ideal-typical modes of subjectivation: passion and achievement. Subjects of passion represent the middle-class iteration of the ethical imperative, and ‘understand the working self in terms of passionate investments that lead to personal development and personal growth without reference to specific material outcomes’ (Farrugia, 2019: 1087). In contrast, subjects of achievement are associated with working-class backgrounds, focusing on the acquisition of skills and competencies aimed at achieving success and pursuing aspirations for social mobility. These two ideal types highlight a class-based distinction in how the work ethic manifests among contemporary youth. Building on this perspective, Lamberg (2022) explores how the work ethic is negotiated by young women in care and media studies in Finland. By examining how these women navigate the emotional demands and contradictions of contemporary work, Lamberg demonstrates that the work ethic operates through a set of ‘feeling rules’. These scholars demonstrate the empirical significance of the work ethic in understanding how young people are shaped into workers while also revealing how these processes are classed, gendered, and mediated through emotional dimensions.

This article contributes to this body of research by using the work ethic as an interpretative lens to explore how the very youngest workers – those still in school – engage with and navigate the imperatives of the work society through their concrete experiences in low-wage service jobs. I argue that the narratives of working ‘to gain experience’ and ‘for some extra money’ are ways in which the work ethic is articulated and negotiated, with jobs primarily framed as investments in employability and earnings positioned as secondary. However, teenagers are not a homogeneous group of workers, and embodied inequalities shape both the material and symbolic significance of paid work within a broader context of the stigmatization and racialization of poverty and unemployment (Tyler, 2015; Weeks, 2011). Adopting an intersectional lens, I emphasize how classed, racialized, and neighborhood-based social differences shape understandings of the working self. Drawing on theories that conceptualize the production of classed and racialized subjectivities as struggles against the effects of classification (Krivonos, 2018; Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013; Tyler, 2015), I analyze how the narratives of working for ‘experience’ and ‘extra money’ also function as efforts to avoid being labeled as unemployed, criminal, or poor.

I furthermore ground the discussion of how teenagers shape their subjectivities as workers within the context of low-wage service jobs, where employers frequently use flexible staffing strategies, such as zero-hour contracts, to minimize labor costs (Alfonsson, 2020; Huddleston, 2011). I emphasize how classed and racialized inequalities create varying degrees of dependency among teenagers on their part-time jobs, making some more susceptible to exploitation as flexible labor. While working during school can be understood as a response to cultural demands to become a subject of value to the labor force, the analysis underscores the unequal distribution of resources required to embody this ideal. As de los Reyes (2017: 16) suggests, intersectional perspectives ‘shed light on the mechanisms that create markers of inequality and explore the contexts that make the existence of difference natural, unquestioned, and desirable’. I argue that framing work as a means ‘to gain experience and some extra money’ is one such context, providing narratives that obscures social differences, rendering inequalities unquestioned and often unspeakable.

Data and Methods

The article draws on in-depth interviews with upper-secondary school students balancing part-time work while in full-time education in Sweden.¹ Participants were recruited from seven different schools located in one metropolitan area and two cities, meaning the perspectives of rural youth are absent from this study. I introduced my research project to multiple classes within each school, inviting students with firsthand experience of paid employment during the semester to participate. In total, 40 interviews were conducted with students aged 15 to 20² (14 boys and 26 girls), with a relatively balanced representation of middle-class and working-class backgrounds.³

The role of waged labor among teenagers in Sweden must be understood in relation to significant disparities in children’s upbringing conditions. Income inequality and residential segregation have increased over recent decades, driven by the deregulation and recommodification of the welfare system. These shifts have contributed to the socio-economic marginalization and impoverishment of certain suburbs and neighborhoods (Sjöberg and Kings, 2022). Living in these areas has shaped shared experiences of racialization and stigmatization among contemporary youth (Sixtensson and Hagström, 2024). Among the participants, 14 teenagers were racialized as non-white, including nine who lived in socio-economically marginalized areas. Importantly, when referring to participants as ‘white’ or ‘non-white’, I do so with the understanding that these positions are produced through and derive meaning from processes of racialization. The term ‘non-white’ is used to reflect the specific context in which whiteness serves as a key marker of normative ‘Swedishness’ (Sixtensson and Hagström, 2024).

The interviews lasted an average of 60 minutes and followed a semi-structured guide covering themes such as motivations for work, job experiences, and employment conditions.⁴ In addition, I asked questions about participants’ backgrounds, economic circumstances, schooling, and leisure time. While participants worked in various sectors, nearly all had some experience in the service industry. Their jobs were notably similar, typically involving low-wage, fixed-term contracts in restaurants, cafés, or retail. Several reported that employers pressured them to take extra shifts on short notice and, in some cases, required them to work without pay. These challenges were often discussed in a casual, lighthearted manner, with phrases like ‘it’s just an extra job’ used to downplay their involvement (see also Besen-Cassino, 2018).

The similarities extended to how the participants explained their reasons for working, with most citing the desire to gain experience and earn extra money as primary motivations. However, despite this shared framing of their labor market experiences, the sample revealed significant differences. Participants worked between 3 and 50 hours per week, with 17 of them working more than 15 hours weekly. Several of the latter effectively juggled full-time employment alongside their studies. While this small-scale study does not aim to make generalizations, it is notable that most of the students working these extensive hours came from working-class backgrounds (N = 12), and several had a migrant background (N = 9).

When analyzing the material, I identified a common and normative rhetoric surrounding the reasons for working during an initial round of inductive coding. To understand the meaning of these narratives within the context of everyday practices and social relations, I revisited the transcripts and conducted a second round of qualitative thematic analysis, focusing on the themes of ‘gaining experience’ and ‘earning extra money’ (Braun and Clarke, 2006). In addition, I created summaries of each interview, capturing the students’ life circumstances and the role of work within them. Comparing these summaries with the codes helped reveal broader patterns across the sample related to social inequalities, which was particularly useful given that many participants were hesitant to discuss these issues directly.

The themes presented in the analysis reveal various logics underpinning the narratives of gaining experience and earning extra money, reflecting differences related to class, racialization, migrancy, and neighborhood context. The purpose of this presentation is not to reify these differences but to emphasize the differentiated formation of teenage students’ as labor.

The Two Reasons to Work While in School

Engaging with working teenagers, I quickly became aware of the recurring themes of working part-time to ‘gain experience’ and ‘earn some extra money’. These concepts surfaced in nearly every interview, with the rhetoric strikingly similar across otherwise different conversations. Consider the following three examples. Maria, a waitress at a café, explained: ‘I wanted to make some money, of course. Plus, my friends and other people my age were starting to apply for jobs, so I felt like I should too. That was pretty much it – it was mostly about the experience’. Farah, who provided homework assistance through a platform company, said: ‘Well, the biggest reason why I keep on working with this is because of the experience, and yeah, the extra money that you get so you can manage and pay for certain things, maybe buy a new sweater’. Rashid, who worked full-time at a fast-food restaurant while attending school, remarked cheerfully: ‘Why not? You know, I like to get extra money. Everyone wants extra money!’

In the following analysis, I identify these as dominant narratives that teenagers use to articulate their work orientations, offering insight into how the contemporary work ethic is expressed among the youngest workers. I begin by exploring how framing low-wage service work as ‘experience’ responds to the imperative of cultivating an active, passionate, and entrepreneurial self while highlighting its classed and racialized dimensions. The analysis then examines the framing of money as ‘something extra’, understanding it as a narrative that both constructs an ideal subjectivity and obscures the unequal distribution of resources required to embody this ideal.

Gaining Experience

Getting Ahead

At first glance, the idea of gaining experience through low-status service jobs while attending school may seem peculiar. Few participants envisioned themselves pursuing future careers in similar occupations, and their work experience would not be meritorious for higher education. Nevertheless, most emphasized that gaining experience was a stronger incentive than earning money for working part-time. For example, Linus, a white teenager from a middle-class family, discussed the importance of pursuing various work experiences throughout his school years in the following way:

Overall, school is a merit, admittedly a big merit, but it’s just one merit on your résumé for the future. . . . If I do something that other people don’t, then I have a head start. That’s what’s so important, because I have merits from working at a bar, a brewery, and a supermarket now. I have it all the way back from, when I write in my cover letter, I can say that I’ve always been passionate about having that little extra. When I was younger, I went out and sold cookies because I wanted to make my own money. It’s like, that’s always been a part of my life, wanting to do something on the side to not just stand still but to be in motion all the time.

In this excerpt, Linus highlighted how his various jobs contributed to building credentials for future success. This reasoning is shaped by a distinctly classed logic, as similar expressions appear throughout interviews with middle-class youth in my sample. For Linus and many others, work experience was primarily framed as an essential investment in employability. These perspectives align with Carbajo and Kelly’s (2023) argument that the grammar of enterprise functions as a pervasive discursive repertoire, shaping how young people construct understandings of work and the self. Early work experience was portrayed as a means of gaining a competitive edge in the labor market and getting ahead of one’s peers – a perspective that necessitates comparison. Many participants explicitly distanced themselves from non-working students, whom they saw as ‘wasting their time’, as Linus put it. In contrast, he argued that a CV without gaps signals a person who is ‘in motion’ and ‘taking initiative’. As Farrugia (2019) observes, for middle-class youth, work has become a central arena for cultivating a vibrant, passionate identity.

It is important to emphasize that for these teenagers, the identity of being a worker was detached from the actual jobs they held; none sought self-realization through the concrete tasks of their school-time employment (cf. Farrugia, 2019). Instead, they accepted unfulfilling jobs to enhance their résumés, aiming to produce a dynamic and ambitious self-image. The communicative and performative function of early work experience was central to this process. Klara, a non-white participant from a middle-class family, illustrated this when she stressed the importance of gaining diverse job experiences during school.

I thought that it could also be a good thing to have on the CV, that you’ve worked, but also that it looks good to have volunteered. I think about that a lot too, when you apply for jobs and such, that it should lead to something. I’ve had many jobs but haven’t had them for so long, only for a few months. Like now, before I’ve only worked at restaurants, but now I’ve started this job in retail, and I think that it’s good to have something different, when I’m studying at university and need an extra job, to have some experience here and there, because then you can apply for more jobs.

For Klara, work should ‘lead to something’ in terms of future employability. A varied job history was desirable, as a CV should signal activity and dedication. Thus, her work motivation was not driven by material gain, nor did she volunteer for intrinsic reasons. Rather, she accumulated diverse experiences to craft an image of herself that ‘looks good’. The nature of the jobs mattered less than their ability to reinforce an active and entrepreneurial subjectivity. This detachment from the actual conditions of their work helps explain how high-achieving, middle-class youth become available as labor in some of the most precarious sectors of the labor market.

Becoming a worker during school was thus a way of responding to the imperative of constructing a forward-moving, value-accruing subjectivity (Skeggs, 2005). Successfully adopting this position required maintaining a careful balance. As Klara explained, ‘school definitely carries the most weight’, and she would never let work interfere with her studies. Most middle-class participants prioritized keeping their work hours manageable to avoid compromising academic performance, sometimes at the expense of socializing and attending parties. However, embodying this subjectivity involved engaging in low-status service labor, where employers frequently sought to increase workers’ availability by demanding extra shifts on short notice, sometimes through coercive tactics. While this occasionally led to work encroaching on study time, such situations were typically temporary. Since these participants were not financially reliant on their jobs, they had the option to quit if the burden became overwhelming. In addition, some noted that their parents set limits when work began to interfere with their education. Thus, both personal resources and social support systems played a key role in preventing work from becoming too demanding.

Building on previous research suggesting that ‘becoming a worker’ is now an ethical condition for self-realization (Weeks, 2011), this section has shown how middle-class teenagers take on low-status service jobs to cultivate a passionate and entrepreneurial subjectivity. However, for these youngest workers, this subject formation remained entirely detached from the jobs themselves. Employment held value only in an abstract, future-oriented sense – as proof of initiative and activity from an early age, framing these qualities as intrinsic. Successfully maintaining this position required balance and resources, as work could not come at the expense of academic success.

Getting Away

Although the narrative of gaining work experience for future employability appeared in nearly every interview, its articulations differed along classed and racialized lines, reflecting the varied meanings participants attributed to their jobs. Take Tala, a non-white, working-class student living in a socio-economically marginalized urban neighborhood. She used a similar language when discussing her reasons for working while in school, emphasizing the importance of experience because she wanted ‘as much as possible on my CV’. Again, this was important not just for strengthening her references but for establishing herself as a worker. Tala frequently invoked this subject position to distinguish herself from other teenagers who had not pursued employment:

Tala:

In my opinion, work makes young people mature. If you gain experience at an early age, you’re more likely to want to work after you graduate. Otherwise, you end up lazy, like all the other young people in [the neighborhood].

Author:

Do you think a lot of people are lazy in [the neighborhood]?

Tala:

Yeah, and they choose to sell drugs instead. They choose the easy way.

Like Linus, Tala positioned herself as diligent by comparing herself to non-workers, who were characterized by their laziness. However, key differences included the emphasis on local context – contrasting herself with young people in her neighborhood – and the fact that this group overlapped with criminal youth. This conflation of unemployed and criminal youth was a recurring theme in interviews with teenagers racialized as non-white in marginalized neighborhoods, resonating with dominant discourses surrounding these areas and their residents (de los Reyes, 2016). Non-workers were frequently portrayed as the immature ones involved in selling drugs, being ‘obsessed with money and clothes’, and causing ‘shootings and stuff’. For Tala, criminal youth was not just a symbolic category of reference. Among them were her own brothers – one of whom had been shot, while the other was currently incarcerated for another gang-related shooting. Tala brought up this story while discussing the benefits of early work experience, as it had motivated her to find employment.

Tala:

[Through work] I can contribute something good to society. It’s better for young people to work because they make better friends at the workplace. There are more mature people there compared to those they usually hang out with on the streets.

In this account, Tala illustrated how gaining work experience extended beyond simply accumulating future exchange value in the labor market, as it was also understood to foster connections with ‘better friends’ and contribute to society. Similarly, many participants in marginalized neighborhoods highlighted the importance of work experience to contribute to, or even become integrated into, society. In this sense, work became a means of forming themselves as ‘good, employable citizens’, in contrast to unemployed youth, who were depicted as stagnant, immature, and criminal, often reinforcing racialized stereotypes (Dahlstedt and Vesterberg, 2017). Krivonos (2018) analyzes young migrants’ claims of racializing others as efforts to resist imposed classifications and thereby generate alternative values of respectability and worth. My findings suggest that gaining work experience during school, and thereby distancing oneself from criminal and unemployed others, can be seen as part of a similar declassificatory struggle.

Gaining work experience thus not only served as a means to get ahead – by investing in employability – but also to get away, symbolically and literally, from those often referred to as the ‘bad crowd’. Saif, another non-white, working-class participant living in a marginalized urban neighborhood, exemplified this duality. On one hand, he described pursuing employment as part of a long-term plan to ‘invest in my future’ and ‘gain personal development’, identifying himself as someone ‘always in motion’. On the other hand, he acknowledged that this mind-set emerged at age 13 when he realized he needed to ‘stop hanging out and causing trouble’. When I asked him to elaborate, he explained:

Where I live, there are a lot of problems. It’s about, well, everyone wants money, but some are too lazy to get it legally. It becomes a disaster. Many people do stupid things. I thought that I couldn’t hang out here. People hang out in the streets when they are 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. So they are older, but they still hang out there. I thought that I shouldn’t, when I’m 18, I don’t want to stay. I don’t want to look like them, you know? Even if they’re my friends, I don’t want the same fate as them.

Once again, the distancing narrative that framed unemployed youth as ‘lazy’ and engaging in ‘stupid things’ surfaced in this account. But Saif also expressed a desire to avoid spending time in his neighborhood due to a fear of following the same path. He worked approximately 20 hours a week at a fast-food restaurant and frequently took on extra shifts at his employer’s request, maintaining a busy schedule that he claimed helped him develop effective planning skills. However, his wish to avoid ‘hanging out’ was another reason for accepting last-minute shifts:

I’ll never say ‘I need to relax’ because I don’t think that way. I always feel like I need to work more. I also see things from a different perspective: if I don’t work now, what will I do instead? Maybe I’ll just go out. My time is completely useless. If I’m not doing anything and just start hanging out instead, I’d much rather work.

While Klara limited her work hours to prioritize her education, Saif saw his free time as ‘useless’ without work. Although he emphasized enjoying an active lifestyle, he admitted to occasionally feeling exhausted and struggling with sleep. His account highlights how embodied inequalities shaped participants’ availability as labor, as using paid work as a means of ‘getting away’ led to a greater reliance on employment.

In summary, these findings demonstrate how teenagers from socio-economically marginalized urban neighborhoods framed part-time jobs as investments in employability and personal development. While reflecting elements of how middle-class teenagers negotiated the work ethic, their accounts also emphasized using work as a means to symbolically and literally ‘get away’ from their local neighborhoods. This aligns with Farrugia’s (2019) analysis of the classed dimensions of the work ethic, where working-class youth seek self-actualization through work as part of their aspirations for social mobility. My findings further highlight how racialized and neighborhood-based inequalities shaped this articulation among teenagers, where identifying as workers became crucial for gaining respectability and dissociating from racialized stereotypes of unemployed or criminal youth. In this context, becoming a worker also served as a means of countering territorial stigmatization, enabling participants to disassociate from the broader negative imaginaries attached to their neighborhoods.

Earning Extra Money

While most participants mainly emphasized the value of gaining experience, they also described working to ‘earn some extra money’, often stating that they used their earnings for dining out, shopping, or saving for future goals. In adopting this narrative, they evoked an image similar to what Tannock (2001: 2) describes as the stereotype of the affluent teenage worker: ‘Teenage minimum-wage earners, so the argument goes, are most often the children of middle-class parents and work purely for discretionary income . . . . In other words, teenagers don’t really ‘need’ the money they earn’.

While many participants did spend their money on discretionary activities, there are reasons to challenge the class-based foundations of this rhetoric. Take Lisa, for example: a white, working-class participant who worked at a fast-food restaurant for experience and extra money, which she spent on outings with friends and saved for graduation. The need for this income arose when her family moved to a new city, and she enrolled in an esteemed upper-secondary school. She was surprised by the spending habits of her peers: frequenting cafés and restaurants, engaging in expensive nightlife and shopping. Coming from a family experiencing financial difficulties, she felt excluded from social activities at her school, a situation her classmates struggled to understand:

I felt very much like, oh god, I don’t fit in. A lot of people have parents who are doing pretty well money-wise, and they might not be spoiled, but their parents are always there to back them up. That’s what I’m trying to explain to my classmates sometimes: . . . if something happens once you’re out of school and everything, your parents would have money to back you up. My parents don’t have that. That’s why I need to earn money – I need it for later and I need it for now. If I want to do everything you guys do, I need money too. That’s what they don’t really get.

Lisa’s account challenges the narrative of discretionary income, highlighting that the consumption it allowed was perceived as essential for social inclusion at school. Moreover, she questioned the taken-for-granted financial support from parents and emphasized what it felt like to be without it. In fact, Lisa mentioned that one of her main reasons for earning extra money was to alleviate her mother’s financial stress: ‘I was like: okay, if I work now, my mother will have to support me less. There will be less weight on mum’s shoulders’. This relational dimension of extra money – often expressed as a concern for younger siblings or struggling mothers – was a significant way class differences emerged in the interviews.

However, Lisa stood out among the participants as she explicitly acknowledged the need for money and linked it to her family’s financial situation. Many participants were hesitant or unwilling to discuss such matters, instead stressing that their earnings were merely ‘something extra’. This was the case for Fariba, a non-white, working-class participant. With her mother on sick leave, her father in a temporary job, and three younger siblings at home, she worked part-time almost every night after school, averaging 25–30 hours per week. Although Fariba had a fixed schedule, she was often called in for additional shifts and nearly always accepted. This workload took a toll on her, resulting in increased stress and declining academic performance. She admitted to skipping class to catch up on sleep, feeling fatigued and weak, and spending less time with friends (Woodman, 2012). Yet, Fariba consistently described her salary as ‘extra money’, despite her family’s precarious financial situation. Initially, she explained that she spent her earnings on make-up, cigarettes, shopping, and saving for a driver’s license. However, it later became evident that she also contributed to her family’s household expenses, including food and groceries. She emphasized doing this out of habit, not obligation: ‘My parents don’t even want me to work and get so tired. . . . They tell me: even if our economy isn’t the best, you shouldn’t be too tired from work’.

Like Fariba, many students experiencing financial strain at home were initially reluctant to discuss their circumstances, instead framing their earnings as ‘extra money’ and emphasizing work as a means of gaining experience. How they actually used their earnings became apparent later in the interviews, and many stressed that providing money for their families did not reflect material need or hardship. This resembles Shildrick and MacDonald’s (2013) research on the stigma management of individuals caught in ‘the low-pay, no-pay cycle’, where participants strongly denied being poor, instead emphasizing how they were ‘managing’. In my research, the narrative of extra money served a similar purpose, explaining the paradoxical use of language that frames essential income as purely discretionary.

I argue that framing wages as extra money has both a normative and performative dimension. As most teenagers emphasized employment as a means of cultivating an employable self, they downplayed financial motives, presenting money as secondary to gaining experience. This was particularly evident among participants from socio-economically marginalized neighborhoods, many of whom contrasted themselves with criminal youth, described as ‘obsessed with money’. Successfully becoming an employable subject – where job experience signaled motivation and initiative – partly required distancing oneself from the material rewards of work (Allen et al., 2013). This dynamic aligns with the ethics of the work society, in which individuals are expected not only to work but to ‘become workers’, while unemployment and poverty are stigmatized as personal failures (Tyler, 2015; Weeks, 2011). For teenagers, framing money as secondary and ‘extra’ can thus be understood as a response to this ethical imperative.

The narrative of earning extra money was mobilized to describe work motivations even when the participants’ circumstances necessitated earning substantial sums. For example, Rashid, a non-white student from a working-class background, arrived in Sweden as an unaccompanied minor and worked full-time at a fast-food restaurant while attending school. He expressed that he worked for experience and because he liked ‘to get some extra money’, and when I asked what he spent it on, he responded with the following:

On friends. I went out with friends and such. I treated my friends, some trips here and there. I also had friends come visiting during the summer, for three months or so. . . . I learned how to ski and ice skate, so I used to go long-distance ice skating. You know, there’s snow here and such.

At first glance, Rashid’s account appears similar to those of other teenagers in my study who spent their earnings on leisure and social activities. However, as our conversation unfolded, he revealed that he had saved a significant amount of money to finance the migration of his mother and five siblings to Sweden, a year after his own arrival. He downplayed this effort, insisting it ‘wasn’t a big deal’ and that he ‘didn’t care about money, anyway’. Yet, his casual tone contrasted sharply with the weight of his responsibility. As he explained, ‘Well, I had to [earn the money], because I love my mother and siblings. I have all my younger siblings. I’m like a father to them’. Like Rashid, several participants with the greatest responsibility for supporting their families were working-class students with migrant backgrounds. Frequently, the parents struggled to enter the Swedish labor market due to unemployment, discrimination, being on sick leave, or lacking language qualifications. This context helps to explain how framing wages as ‘extra money’ was not only a way to distance oneself from the stigma of their parents as ‘undeserving poor’ (Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013) but also from racialized stereotypes of ‘unemployed immigrants’ (Dahlstedt and Vesterberg, 2017; Krivonos, 2018).

It is crucial to understand how the shared rhetoric of extra money serves as a distancing narrative, as it otherwise reinforces the perception of teenagers not needing their earnings. This image obscures that some teenagers provide their families with essential income through their part-time jobs, a situation reflecting differences marked by class, racialization, and migrancy. In my sample, students reported contributing to household expenses such as rent and food, and some, like Rashid, enabled their families’ migration to Sweden. These commitments often led to intensive work patterns and a strong reliance on their jobs. Consider Ahmed, another non-white, working-class participant who arrived in Sweden as an unaccompanied minor and later brought his parents to the country, where the family faced severe financial hardships. Ahmed worked 9-hour shifts at a fast-food restaurant several times a week for a low wage and without the benefits stated in the collective agreement. He justified this by calling it ‘just an extra job’, and that the money was ‘not the most important thing’. Nevertheless, the combination of school and long shifts resulted in challenging days, limiting his ability to keep up with schoolwork and socialize with friends. To cope, Ahmed opted to cut back on sleep:

So right now, I don’t have much free time. Everything’s with work. I don’t have much free time to be able to go out with friends and so on. . . . I’ve gotten used to sleeping only 6 hours. . . . I used to sleep more, 10 hours sometimes. I only sleep 6 hours now, it’s okay.

As mentioned, the teenagers in this study primarily understood work as future-oriented and aspirational. Ahmed’s account highlights the unequal distribution of resources required to achieve these aspirations, as his intensive work patterns put both his health and academic success at risk. However, the connection between financial strain and intensive work was obscured by his insistence that the money he earned was ‘not the most important thing’. In this way, the narrative of ‘extra money’ not only produces an ideal but also conceals the inequalities that may make this ideal unattainable.

Taken together, the findings underscore the narrative of ‘earning some extra money’ as both normative and performative, reflecting the ethical imperatives of the work society. It is performative in that it constructs an active and employable subject by framing money as secondary to gaining experience. Simultaneously, it is normative in that it upholds an idealized view of teenagers as not reliant on their earnings. I have shown how participants employed this narrative to distance themselves from stigmatized and racialized associations with unemployment and poverty. However, in doing so, they also obscured the financial inequalities that shaped their relationship with work.

Conclusion

In this article, I have shown how teenage students become workers through their participation in low-status service jobs, drawing on Weeks’ (2011) theorization of the contemporary work ethic. Employment during school allowed the participants to construct an enterprising, active, and passionate self, in contrast to non-workers, who were portrayed as lazy and unambitious. The narratives of working for ‘experience’ and ‘some extra money’ served as key resources in producing this subjectivity, framing employment as driven by an inherent desire to ‘be in motion’ rather than material necessity. In this sense, teenagers’ understandings of work mirrored the aspirational labor of unpaid interns (Allen et al., 2013; see also Duffy, 2017). However, while the ideal intern works without pay for the love of the job (Allen et al., 2013: 434), the participants in this study expressed no such attachment to their low-status service jobs. Instead, for these young workers, the work ethic was abstract and future-oriented, focused not on specific jobs but on the general value of early employment as ‘experience’. This age-based articulation of the work ethic shaped and demanded a particular relationship to their jobs – one of detachment, where work was seen primarily as an instrument for future rewards, and not to come at the expense of academic achievement.

While teenagers share a common articulation of the work ethic, its expressions still reflect embodied inequalities. In this article, I have argued for an intersectional perspective, stressing the importance of considering how social differences – rooted in class, racialization, migrancy, and neighborhood context – shape understandings of the working self. I have shown how participants from socio-economically marginalized neighborhoods viewed ‘gaining experience’ as a way to escape their environment, while the narrative also served to counter territorial stigmatization. This adds complexity to Farrugia’s (2019) analysis of the classed dimensions of the work ethic, where working-class aspirations for self-actualization through work reflect desires for social mobility, by emphasizing how racialized and neighborhood-based inequalities further influence the pressures on teenagers to adopt the role of workers. Identifying as a worker becomes a means of attaining respectability and distancing oneself from racialized stereotypes of unemployed or criminal youth. This often involved downplaying the material necessity of their labor by framing earnings as ‘just some extra money’, a strategy to manage the stigma of financial strain at home. Once again, the symbolic and abstract qualities of labor provide recognition and identity, with holding a student job to gain experience representing the normative ideal – sharply contrasting with bearing financial responsibility at a young age.

Becoming a worker during school can be seen as a response to societal imperatives to develop a subjectivity of value. However, the analysis highlights the uneven distribution of resources required to embody this ideal. Differences rooted in class, racialization, and migrancy shaped varying levels of dependence on their part-time jobs, with both symbolic and material motivations driving some students to adopt intensive work patterns. This dynamic was further exacerbated by exploitative practices, as employers frequently demanded that young workers take on extra shifts at short notice. While teenagers’ labor was often framed as aspirational and future-oriented, the balance needed to achieve these goals was, in many cases, undermined. A key finding is that the language participants used to describe their work motivations effectively obscured these inequalities, rendering them unspeakable. This is especially significant because the prevailing perception of teenagers as merely seeking experience or pocket money has been used by employers in hospitality and retail to justify poor working conditions and low wages for this group (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015; Tannock, 2001; Yates, 2017). In this framing, social differences were obscured and made profitable in service of capital (de los Reyes, 2017).

In conclusion, this article shifts the focus from viewing teenage labor as transitional to examining the ideological and practical role of paid work in shaping youth subjectivities. A central result is its function in becoming workers, but it is crucial to note that this requires participation in low-status service jobs in the present – essentially, being workers. This raises questions about how such practices affect and structure teenagers’ everyday lives. Although not the focus of this article, the findings suggest that work encroaches upon daily life in several ways, particularly by reducing time for sleep, socializing, and family, often along classed and racialized lines (Woodman, 2012). Further exploration of these issues is a vital avenue for future research.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Åsa Lundqvist, Sara Eldén, Colm Flaherty, Daniel Karlsson, Tobias Olofsson, and Sarah Philipson Isaac for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments, which have greatly improved this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical approval

The project has been approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Dnr 2020-00666).

ORCID iD

Anna Kallos

Notes

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