Abstract
This article explores the rationales through which teenage students make sense of and legitimise unpaid labour in low-wage service jobs, contributing to theorising how such exploitation becomes normalised as part of their working lives. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with working school students in Sweden, it focuses on experiences of wage theft and coercive extra shifts, understood as employer strategies to extract unpaid labour time. The analysis identifies three key rationales, shaped by various discourses, through which teenagers made sense of these exploitative practices: framing them as secondary to self-investing in employability, downplaying them as an expected aspect of student jobs, and interpreting them in relation to their perceived vulnerability as young workers. These rationales outline a discursive terrain through which exploitative practices became ambivalently accepted as part of working life, with teenage workers often assuming individual responsibility for their conditions.
Introduction
This article explores how teenage students make sense of and legitimise exploitation in low-wage service jobs. As a key source of flexible labour in sectors such as hospitality and retail (Howieson et al., 2012; Huddleston, 2011), teenage workers are attractive to employers as ‘cheap, surplus, temporary, easy-to-discipline labour’ that remains largely disconnected from unions (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015: 37). Owing to their age and inexperience, these young workers face heightened risks of exploitation (Grant-Smith and McDonald, 2015; Hobbs et al., 2016, 2017). Yet studies suggests that they frequently normalise and accept poor working conditions, even when these violate legal standards (Besen-Cassino, 2018; Cohen, 2013; Raby et al., 2018). Despite this, existing research has rarely examined the meaning-making processes underlying such acceptance, making it a puzzle that warrants further attention.
This puzzle emerges within a context of growing evidence that the extraction of unpaid labour is widespread in sectors where teenage workers are concentrated, especially hospitality and retail. Such exploitation spans formal mechanisms, such as zero-hour contracts that secure unpaid labour during standard working hours, to unlawful practices like wage theft (Bernhardt et al., 2013; Campbell et al., 2016; Cole et al., 2024; Farrugia et al., 2020; Maury, 2020; Milkman et al., 2012). Given the systemic nature of unpaid labour in these industries, it is crucial to examine how workers come to accept and legitimise such conditions. Recent studies have examined why migrant workers and international students tolerate underpayment, offering explanations that include multiple frames of reference – such as comparisons with pay and conditions in their home country, the host country, and among peers – as well as fear of employer reprisals and a vulnerable position in the labour market (Campbell et al., 2019; Clibborn, 2021). However, how the youngest and least experienced group – teenage workers – make sense of underpayments has attracted little attention and theoretical engagement.
The article addresses this gap, focusing specifically on teenage workers’ experiences of wage theft and the coercive scheduling of extra shifts, understood as strategies to increase the extraction of unpaid labour time (Cole et al., 2024). Aiming to understand how these practices become perceived as legitimate, it asks: How do teenage workers make sense of these experiences? To address this question, the article adopts a subject-oriented approach (Armano et al., 2022; Murgia and Pulignano, 2021), centring teenage workers’ subjective experiences and meaning-making processes while examining how these are shaped by and relate to dominant discourses and social imaginaries surrounding teenage employment.
The article draws on 40 in-depth interviews with upper secondary school students (15 to 20 years old) in Sweden who work alongside their full-time education. The analysis identifies three meaning-making rationales through which teenagers legitimise wage theft and coercive extra shifts: framing them as secondary to self-investing in employability, downplaying them as an expected feature of student jobs, and interpreting them in relation to their perceived vulnerability as young workers. Together, the rationales outline a discursive terrain in which exploitative practices became ambivalently accepted aspects of entering working life. This extends existing analyses of young workers’ subjectivities, which have largely centred on older youth in creative or highly skilled sectors – where precarity is often seen as a trade-off for meaningful work (e.g. Armano and Murgia, 2013; Morgan et al., 2013; Trappmann et al., 2024). By contrast, the teenagers in this study accepted exploitative conditions by seeing themselves and their jobs as somehow separate from ‘real’ workers and work – a view further reinforced by employer strategies. Thereby, the analysis advances theorisation of unpaid labour as part of a broader system of capital accumulation in low-wage, labour-intensive sectors (Cole et al., 2024; Maury, 2020), by showing how such work is legitimised, normalised, and frequently rendered invisible.
The article is structured as follows. First, it contextualises recent developments in teenage employment in low-wage, labour-intensive services within broader discussions on how exploitation operates in these sectors. This is followed by a theoretical discussion on the formation of worker subjectivities. The proceeding methodological section introduces the study context, data collection, and material. The empirical section first describes teenagers’ experiences of wage theft and coercive extra shifts, followed by an analysis of the three rationales through which they make sense of and legitimise exploitation. Finally, the findings are synthesised in a concluding discussion.
Teenage employment in low-wage, labour-intensive services
Although part-time employment during school years has been recognised as a quintessentially American phenomenon (Besen-Cassino, 2018), many Global North countries have witnessed a significant rise in teenage student employment in recent decades (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015). Price et al. (2011) describe this trend as a ‘normalisation’ of such work, connecting it to the expansion of a low-wage, non-standard service economy. Teenagers are an attractive labour source for hospitality and retail jobs for several reasons. First, these roles exist within industries that operate on round-the-clock schedules, with employers actively seeking teenagers for part-time evening and weekend shifts (Howieson et al., 2012; Huddleston, 2011). Second, the jobs are interactive, requiring significant engagement with customers and clients, where teenagers’ youthfulness, appearance, and soft skills are increasingly valorised (Besen-Cassino, 2018; Farrugia, 2018; McDowell, 2009). Finally, wage differentials between teenagers and adults have led many employers to rely on young workers as a low-cost labour source (Campbell and Price, 2016; Howieson et al., 2012). The transient nature of student employment further reinforces this, as constant turnover helps in keeping wages down (Williams and Connell, 2010).
The social category of age plays a crucial role in justifying lower pay for this group. Price and Grant-Smith (2018), for example, discuss ‘deficit discourses’ that portray young workers as undisciplined and lacking a strong work ethic. Similarly, Tannock (2001) highlights how employers characterise teenagers as unserious, stop-gap workers who are less affected by precarity due to parental support. Many low-end service sector employers actively reinforce this image by branding their jobs explicitly for young people, presenting them as ‘hobby jobs’ rather than real work (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015). This framing creates a context in which ‘student’ or ‘youth’ jobs are deemed undeserving of fair pay simply because young people hold them (Yates, 2017: 466). Teenage students are thus constructed as a distinct category within the labour market, separate from ‘real workers’ (Price and Grant-Smith, 2018), naturalising these distinctions and making them profitable.
The construction of teenage students as a supply of cheap, flexible labour needs to be understood within the context of capital accumulation and valorisation in labour-intensive service sectors. Exploitation, as defined by Marx (1990), refers to the ratio of paid to unpaid labour time inherent in the wage relation, through which the capitalist extracts surplus value. In labour-intensive service industries, this temporal dimension of value creation is particularly pronounced, as the commodity being sold is the labour itself, limiting the potential for technological substitution (Cole, 2024). As a result, profit maximisation often relies on adjusting labour use and wages. Recent research has highlighted the widespread violation of wage and hour regulations in these sectors (Bernhardt et al., 2013; Campbell et al., 2016; Farrugia et al., 2020). As Cole et al. (2024: 106) argue, such violations ‘should not, therefore, be seen as simply the result of the moral or ethical failings of individual capitalists, but an inherent part of the system itself.’ Exploitative practices such as wage theft are further facilitated by limited union representation and workers’ tolerance of underpayment (Campbell et al., 2019; Clibborn, 2021).
This article focuses on teenage workers’ legitimisation of exploitation. Despite their significant presence in sectors such as hospitality and retail, several scholars have noted that this group is relatively overlooked in labour market research (Doogan, 2009; Howieson et al., 2012). Research on teenage employment is largely embedded within the broader field of youth transitions, where work is typically examined in relation to its impact on educational attainment or career trajectories (for an overview, see Neyt et al., 2019). Far less attention has been devoted to how these young employees perceive and legitimise their working conditions, with a few notable exceptions. Cohen (2013) and Raby et al. (2018) demonstrate that school-aged workers often underestimate and normalise workplace risks, even in cases where legal standards are violated. Besen-Cassino (2018: 100) highlights how teenage student-workers frequently distance themselves from their work experiences by saying, ‘It’s not my real job’. However, these studies have not directly examined the process of legitimation or situated the findings within a theoretical framework. Nonetheless, they reveal noteworthy parallels with other groups of service workers. For example, Campbell et al. (2019) show that migrant workers in food services downplay underpayment by framing their jobs as temporary, while Williams and Connell (2010) find that upscale retail employees accept precarious conditions because they do not see themselves as workers. Similarly, Farrugia et al. (2018) demonstrate that young adults employed in hospitality, despite spending over a decade in the industry and relying on it as their primary source of income, continue to claim they do not have ‘real jobs’.
The ways in which young people experience and accept their working conditions have been examined more broadly within the field of precarious work. In studies exploring the meanings young people attribute to their insecure work situations, the results have been ambivalent (Karolak and Mrozowicki, 2017; Nielsen et al., 2019). However, consistent with research on teenage workers, several empirical studies suggest that young people often accept and normalise their employment conditions (e.g. Morgan et al., 2013; Mrozowicki and Trappmann, 2021). In a recent study, Trappmann et al. (2024) identify four distinct frames through which precarious work is legitimised among youth aged 18 to 35, highlighting their variation across institutional contexts: as a driver of entrepreneurialism, as an inevitable feature of working life, as a temporary stage within the life course and as a trade-off for pursuing meaningful work. A key conclusion is that youth often frame precarious work as a necessary trade-off to avoid alienation and seek fulfilment – particularly among those with prior experiences of stifling ‘secure’ jobs. These findings reflect an older cohort engaged in a diverse range of occupations, many of which are highly skilled. In contrast, teenage workers are newcomers to the labour market, predominantly employed in low-end service jobs often characterised as boring and routine (Hobbs et al., 2007). Furthermore, existing research has paid limited attention to the role of employer strategies and discursive influences in shaping young workers’ subjectivities and their perceptions of working conditions. Addressing these gaps, this article provides empirical evidence and advances theorisation of how the youngest workers come to legitimise exploitative labour conditions within low-status service jobs.
Legitimising exploitation and the production of worker subjectivities
The article explores legitimisation through a subject-oriented approach, analysing how teenage workers’ subjectivities – ways of perceiving, understanding, and relating to oneself and work – are shaped in relation to experiences of exploitation. It focuses on the interplay between individual meaning-making processes, shared discourses and social imaginaries surrounding teenage employment, and institutional context (Armano et al., 2022; Murgia and Pulignano, 2021). Specifically, it analyses how teenagers make sense of experiences of exploitation by invoking various rationales – broader sets of ideas embedded in larger discourses that shape how participants relate to themselves and their work. Legitimisation, in this sense, refers to the meaning-making processes by which exploitative practices come to be seen as inevitable, unchallengeable (Trappmann et al., 2024) or even as something other than exploitation entirely.
This approach draws on Foucauldian analyses of neoliberal subjectivation (e.g. Foucault, 2008; Read, 2009) and Marxian perspectives on the relationship between subject formation and capitalist valorisation (e.g. Lazzarato, 2009; Weeks, 2011). These traditions focus on the practices through which people come to understand themselves in relation to discursive and material relations of power, particularly through the internalisation and negotiation of dominant discourses. Central to this literature is the role of entrepreneurial discourse (Bröckling, 2016), whereby workers ‘are endowed with the freedom and responsibility of creating and recreating their own value within the marketplace’ (Vallas and Christin, 2018: 9). In the context of labour market insecurity, there has been particular interest in how subjectivities are shaped both through concrete experiences of precarity – where becoming a flexible, marketable and adaptable worker becomes a necessary strategy for managing risk – and through discourses that give meaning to such experiences by imposing certain responsibilities, subject positions and self-understandings (Armano et al., 2022; Leonardi and Chertkovskaya, 2017). To capture this complexity, Armano et al. (2022: 30) describe the formation of enterprising subjectivities as emerging from a ‘hybrid set of situations’ that compel individuals to constantly self-activate resources and assume responsibility for their choices and social protection – while also acknowledging the potential for resistance and contestation.
Young people are at the forefront of the imperative to cultivate an enterprising self in response to an increasingly precarious labour market (Farrugia, 2021), reinforced by education and labour market policies that place the responsibility for employability on the individual (Carbajo and Kelly, 2023; Gerrard, 2014). In theorising how this relates to the justification of exploitation, a substantial body of literature focuses on young employees in the creative industries, where unpaid internships and under-compensated work are common (McRobbie, 2016; Morgan et al., 2013; Shade and Jacobson, 2015). A strong sense of passion for and identification with one’s job often legitimises precarious working conditions, resulting in what scholars refer to as self-exploitation (Armano and Murgia, 2013). Kuehn and Corrigan (2013) introduce the concept of ‘hope labour’ to describe how unpaid work performed for exposure and experience is rationalised as a necessary investment in future employment opportunities. It functions largely because it is not perceived or experienced as exploitation but rather as a voluntary investment in one’s career, reflecting a wider internalisation of enterprising discourses and ideals. What distinguishes it from other forms of non-waged labour is its temporal dynamic, linking present experience to future aspirations. Exploitation is thus facilitated through a ‘political economy of promise,’ wherein future employability is construed as the functional equivalent of a wage (Leonardi and Chertkovskaya, 2017).
This article contributes by clarifying how subjectivities are shaped among the youngest segment of the workforce, highlighting the ambivalent and contradictory discursive terrain through which teenagers relate to experiences of unpaid labour and understand themselves as workers. It shows how enterprising discourses shape a key rationale invoked by teenage students to legitimise such experiences – framing part-time work during school as a self-investment in employability, which enables them to distance themselves from exploitation. However, this was neither the only meaning-making rationale participants drew on, nor did it have uniform effects. Acknowledging this, the article explores the different cultural and discursive resources teenagers use to make sense of exploitation, allowing for an open exploration of how their subjectivities as workers are formed. The findings underscore the role of employer discourses and normative imaginaries surrounding teenage labour by providing linguistic frameworks and vocabularies that informed other rationales for understanding underpayment. Together, these rationales legitimise exploitation by positioning teenage labour as something other than ‘real’ work – either as a personal investment, a temporary student activity, or as work associated with a presumed vulnerability tied to being young.
Study context and methods
The article is based on a research project on the labour market participation and working conditions among teenage students in Sweden. While teenage employment has been common in countries such as the US, UK, and Australia for a long time (Price et al., 2011), it represents a relatively recent development in Sweden. Over the past decade, participation rates have surged, primarily driven by jobs in hospitality and retail (Kallos, 2024). Currently, 65 per cent of upper-secondary students are employed, with 25 per cent working every week throughout the year (Statistics Sweden, 2021). Working while in school has thus become a common experience for Swedish teenagers, encompassing a diverse group in terms of academic achievements, educational enrolments, family backgrounds, and geographical locations (Statistics Sweden, 2021). Despite this, their work has received limited attention, apart from some research indicating positive associations between part-time work during school and future labour market outcomes (Hensvik et al., 2023).
The working conditions of teenage employees differ from those typically associated with the Nordic labour market regime. Like its Nordic neighbours, Sweden is known for its universal welfare state and centralised collective bargaining system, which regulate wages and working conditions to protect workers from vulnerability. However, the rise of non-standard employment, particularly the expansion of fixed-term contracts, has challenged these institutions (Rasmussen et al., 2019). Since the economic crisis of the 1990s, successive legislative changes have promoted labour market flexibility (Davidsson, 2018), allowing employers to issue unlimited fixed-term contracts without justification (Berglund et al., 2017). As a result, researchers describe an increasing dualisation of the Swedish labour market where temporary workers experience heightened insecurity and greater exposure to exploitation (Davidsson, 2018; Rasmussen et al., 2019). These contracts are particularly prevalent in retail and hospitality, sectors where union membership has declined sharply (Carlén and de los Reyes, 2024; Kjellberg, 2024). Young people aged 15 to 17 and students are especially at risk (Berglund et al., 2021).
The study draws on 40 interviews conducted in 2020 with upper-secondary students, 15 to 20 years old, 1 who had experience of paid work while in full-time education. Participants were recruited from seven schools with distinct student populations to obtain a varied sample in terms of class, gender and migration background (Table 1). The schools were situated in one metropolitan area and two cities in Sweden. While some students commuted from nearby villages, none of the participants resided in rural regions, which constitutes a limitation of the study. The project was presented to approximately 20 school classes. This included the distribution of written information about the research and the circulation of a contact form that the students could sign if they were interested in participating.
Sample characteristics.
Based on parents’ educational attainment and occupation.
The participants were employed in various sectors, and several had already held multiple jobs during their relatively short careers. Experiences from the private services, such as restaurants, cafes and retail, were most common. Other jobs included cleaning, babysitting, factory work, construction, car repair, healthcare, sports coaching and platform work. However, all participants had acquired experience from the service industries, despite this not being an initial selection criterion. Weekly working hours ranged from three to 50, with 17 of the participants working for 15 hours or more each week. Among this group of intensive part-time workers, it was not uncommon to simultaneously work what amounted to a full-time job alongside full-time studies. The sample thus exhibits a variety in terms of the teenagers’ backgrounds and work patterns.
The interviews were semi-structured, guided by a set of open-ended questions covering various themes, such as work experiences, employment conditions, and economic situations. As the study involved the collection of sensitive personal data – for example, information about trade union membership – it received approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority. 2 All conversations were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and pseudonymised. The material was coded with a dual focus: first, on the nature of participants’ work experiences, and second, on how they described and made sense of them. In relation to the former, two prominent themes emerged – unpaid labour and pressure to take on additional shifts. These themes were then used to identify different ways participants spoke about and justified their experiences. The initial codes were typically short phrases derived directly from the data, such as, ‘I’m doing it for the experience, not the money’. In a second stage, these phrases were compared and grouped into three overarching themes that captured distinct rationales participants used to explain their experiences.
Initially, two points should be noted. First, the article does not explicitly examine gendered, classed, or racialised divisions among teenagers, although such differences are present in the material. For instance, in line with previous research on the gendered dimensions of adolescent work (Besen-Cassino, 2018; Cohen, 2013), some of the young girls interviewed described experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace. However, these aspects are not the focus of the present analysis, which centres on experiences of unpaid labour. It is also worth noting that the rationales used to legitimise exploitation were widespread across the sample, with teenagers from diverse backgrounds and differing work experiences drawing on similar narratives. Second, the article does not examine the reasons or motivations for taking on part-time work at a young age, even though these, at times, echoed the expressions used to legitimise violations of hours and pay. This distinction is important, as some participants justified undertaking unpaid work by emphasising the need for gaining experience, despite also relying on the income. Therefore, it is crucial not to conflate these rationales with motivations, as they could overlap but also stand in sharp contrast.
Findings
This section begins by describing the experiences of wage theft and coercive extra shifts among teenage workers in low-wage service jobs. The following sub-sections analyse the different rationales participants used to make sense of these practices: portraying them as secondary to self-investing in employability, downplaying them as an aspect of student jobs, and interpreting them in relation to their perceived vulnerability as young workers.
Experiencing wage theft and coercive staffing strategies
Most of the teenagers in this study worked on a casual basis and were often unsure whether they had formal employment contracts. While their narratives frequently portrayed work as sociable and fun, the interviews also revealed insecurities related to irregular hours and pay violations. Unlawful employer practices – such as underpayment, wage theft, and coercive scheduling of extra shifts – were widespread in participants’ descriptions of their working conditions.
Under- and unpaid labour was especially common among participants working in the hospitality industry. For some, it involved a denial of entitlements specified in collective agreements, such as additional compensation for unsocial working hours or overtime. For others, it meant providing non-waged labour time: working probationary periods or extra hours without remuneration or doing work-related activities without payment. A few had experienced being asked to leave their scheduled shifts abruptly without compensation if customer demand was insufficient. There were several examples of teenagers getting tricked into working for free. One of them was Alma, who worked nights every weekend at a bar for several months. Her employer did not pay her a monthly salary and in the end, she only received a small one-off amount as payment that did not correspond to the hours she had worked. She described the experience in the following way: No, because this was my first job after an internship, so I said, ‘I’ve had a lot of fun and if you need any extra help, you can always call me’. So, I get all these hours, but since it was my first job, I never actually dared to step up and ask, ‘What’s my salary?’ or something, so I just got it later. I didn’t dare to say anything about it because it was my first job and I was only 16–17. I didn’t even know what they would pay me until afterwards.
Alma’s account is one of many illustrating instances of wage theft. As Cole et al. (2024: 104) observe in their study of wage theft in the hospitality industry, this ranged from ‘formal violations of the law and more subtle, informal mechanisms’. Moreover, Alma’s story demonstrates how these practices occurred in a context where participants had limited knowledge of what to expect from their jobs and where union presence was notably absent.
The coercive scheduling of extra shifts followed a similar pattern, spanning from discreet forms of pressure to unlawful means. Most participants did not have fixed schedules; instead, they were informed of their hours one or two weeks in advance, or sometimes through last-minute text messages or phone calls on the same day. This created a situation in which they sometimes reluctantly accepted additional short notice shifts, either out of fear of job loss if they declined or due to a lack of awareness of their rights to refuse. Some experienced being pressured to take on more hours. One research participant, Julia, recounted her manager’s attempts to fill shifts at a supermarket through messages in a group chat.
It was one time when he was like: ‘Well, can anyone work from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.?’ But then it was like a Tuesday. I thought, ‘We’re all in school, you know that, right?’ But then he just wrote: ‘It’s completely unbelievable how none of you replies. Don’t be mad if I hire other people, because you’re all worthless’. So that’s what he sent to the group chat.
Overt threats were rare but not unique in the material. Managers often employed subtler tactics, such as repeatedly questioning the participants’ reasons for declining additional shifts. Many participants claimed that they could decline last-minute requests for additional shifts if they needed to, for example, study or rest. Yet, in practice, most tended to satisfy their managers’ demands. Often, the right to decline extra shifts appeared as a theoretical possibility rather than a practical one.
These employer practices increased teenagers’ availability as labour by effectively restricting their ability to turn down extra shifts. De los Reyes and Holmlund (2023) describe such staffing strategies as invasive, as they extend beyond the workplace to colonise everyday life. The practices resulted in some of the participants taking on more hours than they had initially intended, thereby contributing to a detrimental spiral. The consequences were particularly severe for those who depended on their earnings to support themselves or their families. Mustafa was one such participant, using the wage from his part-time job to support his unemployed mother and five younger siblings. Frequently called in for extra shifts, he sometimes worked the equivalent of a full-time job while simultaneously managing full-time studies. He acknowledged the challenges of balancing school and work, often studying on his smartphone during shifts and completing homework late at night, which reduced his time to sleep: Yeah, so I study even when I’m at work. I have my phone with me, and sometimes I bring my laptop. I often work on my assignments after my shift. I usually stay in the office for about 40 minutes after work to sit and get things done. [. . .] I start at 11 p.m. [with the school assignment] and I finish at midnight, for example. I sometimes sleep at 1 a.m., you know what I mean?
While Mustafa represents an extreme case in terms of the number of hours worked, it is important to recognise that many participants experienced negative impacts on their well-being due to employers’ coercive demands for extra shifts.
This section has outlined the prevalence of unpaid labour and coercive staffing practices among teenage workers while briefly addressing some risks these posed to the participants. Yet, few raised concerns about their working conditions with their employers or even described them as problematic in the interviews. Most tended to normalise and legitimise their work situations, including those, like Mustafa, who experienced significant strain from their jobs. The remainder of the article explores this puzzle, analysing the rationales through which teenagers made sense of these experiences.
Exploitation as an investment in employability
The most common way the teenagers legitimised exploitative practices at work was by framing them as secondary to the goal of ‘gaining experience’. The participants argued that early work experience provided a competitive advantage, enabling them to stay ahead of their peers and strengthen their CVs. Having a job during school became a way of self-optimising according to the logic of the market: part-time work became an investment in the self as human capital (Lazzarato, 2009). In keeping with prior studies highlighting the prevalence and influence of enterprising discourses in shaping young people’s relationship with work (e.g. Carbajo and Kelly, 2023; Farrugia, 2021), this rationale was frequently used by the teenagers to justify their working conditions. For example, Mohammed worked daily shifts at a call centre for several months, only to receive a significantly lower salary than initially promised. When asked how he felt about this, he reasoned, ‘I had put down so many hours. It was a bit frustrating. But I thought that the experience I got was worth more than the money’. For Mohammed, gaining experience for the future was perceived as more valuable than wages, which justified his underpayment. Despite needing his earnings to support his single mother’s income, he nonetheless emphasised how wages were secondary to other aspects, such as personal development: Like, the primary thing is personal development, because I think that I develop a lot from the jobs and have become better at time management, where I can plan my studies alongside work, and so on. It’s a lot, but I’ve learned to handle stressful situations, manage deadlines and balance my life.
The personal growth that Mohammed referred to primarily involved improving his ability to manage stress and balance the demands of school and work. From this perspective, poor working conditions could even appear desirable because the experience could be presented as character-building in future cover letters. For example, 18-year-old Hedda described feeling anxious about how comparatively little she had worked and noted, ‘Everyone seems to get jobs at fast-food chains and such, which gives you merits because of all the stress and everything’. The difficulties of low-waged service work became almost glorified, but only when considering the future exchange value in the labour market. It was against the backdrop of such perceptions that the participant Linus happily declared: ‘I sacrifice my leisure time because my future self will thank me later. It’s a long-term picture’. Forced extra shifts and unpaid work were thus legitimised through an overarching logic of increasing employability (Leonardi and Chertkovskaya, 2017).
Theories of hope labour and self-exploitation suggest that creative and highly skilled young workers are partially entrapped by their passions, accepting unpaid work for exposure and experience in exchange for future opportunities in fields they identify with (Armano and Murgia, 2013; Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013). While many participants in this study expressed a similar logic, they did not share these feelings about their current part-time jobs; none engaged in hope labour due to a sense of self-identification with their work. Instead, many described accepting unfulfilling jobs solely to enhance their CVs, aiming to display desired appearances and character traits in the future. The participant Aron captured this idea succinctly: ‘I want to have different jobs just to gain work experience, not because I think it’s the world’s most fun thing at that moment’. Through this rationale, work was constructed as valuable in a future, abstract sense, serving as proof of early ambition. This perspective, in turn, legitimised violations of hours and pay in the present. Framing their jobs as a self-investment allowed participants to distance themselves from the content and conditions of their work; a bad job was not a bad job if it added value to their CVs.
These notions were closely interlinked with the idea of self-responsibility (Armano et al., 2022; Bröckling, 2016). Saif, a 17-year-old who worked around 20 hours per week at a pizzeria alongside his full-time studies, stated that he worked to ‘invest in his future’. Despite frequently being called in for extra hours and receiving less pay than stipulated in his contract, he did not criticise his manager or the job. Instead, he was considering finding another job, explaining, ‘If I want, for example, a higher salary or more working hours, I can’t just expect this, but I have to change jobs’. Here, Saif argued that good hours and pay were not something to count on but had to be actively achieved by the employee.
Although several participants relied on a similar individualised and meritocratic rhetoric to make sense of their working conditions, it was shaped by different emotions and often involved contradictions. Some embraced their work situation as a challenge or even depicted it as a positive thing. Saif, for instance, saw his zero-hour schedule as fostering personal growth and planning skills, and was even structuring his study time around the possibility to receive last-minute shifts. Yet, as the interview revealed, he also struggled with stress-related symptoms, including insomnia. Others expressed similar notions much more resignedly. Hedda, for example, worked as a dance teacher for a large sports company, earning so little that her commuting costs exceeded her pay. She was also expected to perform numerous unpaid tasks, such as preparing lessons, organising performances, and attending training days. Despite losing both time and money, she stayed for over a year, explaining, ‘I haven’t succeeded in getting any [other] jobs at all, because they want you to have experience, and I haven’t been successful. They don’t want to hire me. This is the only job that I’ve ever got’. Hedda attributed her acceptance of unpaid work to her difficulty securing better employment and her perceived lack of success. While Saif embraced individual responsibility, Hedda’s fears and insecurities led her to legitimise exploitative conditions in a similar way.
In summary, this rationale framed part-time work during school as a way of increasing future value in the labour market, highlighting the importance of demonstrating early work experience. By presenting work as a means of enhancing employability, the participants invoked enterprising discourses that framed it as both self-investment and an individual responsibility. In relation to exploitation, this primarily functioned as a distancing narrative: understanding work as valuable only in an abstract, future-oriented sense enabled participants to dissociate from – and thereby justify – their experiences of wage theft and poor working conditions in the present.
Exploitation as an aspect of teenage jobs
While some participants legitimised exploitation by describing their jobs as a crucial investment in employability, others instead downplayed their significance or even dismissed them as irrelevant. For example, 17-year-old Elisabeth worked as a server at a fast-food restaurant three times a week together with other teenagers and students, all of whom earned less than what was stipulated in their collective agreement. Neither she nor her co-workers dared to raise these issues with the managers since they were afraid of losing their jobs. Elisabeth admitted she did not feel great about this but added: ‘I want to find another job, anyway. This is not a job that I want to work with forever, so I think about it like that’. Thus, while Elisabeth did not find her situation unproblematic, she ambivalently accepted it due to its temporary nature.
This rationale resembles one of the legitimisation frames identified by Trappmann et al. (2024), where precarious work is justified among young people as a finite phase in the life course (see also Campbell et al., 2019). This reflects a transitional relationship between the young person and the job – something undertaken while searching for another job or probing for a permanent position (Trappmann et al., 2024). However, for many participants in the present study, these notions extended beyond the temporary nature of their employment to the perceived characteristics of the jobs themselves: exploitative practices were legitimised as inherent features of teenage jobs. Saif, who was paid less than his contract specified, argued that expectations for these jobs should be low, as employment contracts in the hospitality industry were ‘not as strict’ for young people compared with other sectors. Similarly, Aron saw unions as irrelevant to him and other temporarily employed teenagers, asserting that employment protections and rights were meant for full-time, long-term workers. Lending evidence to Besen-Cassino’s (2018) findings, this reasoning reinforced a distinction between teenage employment and ‘real jobs’, with only the latter requiring fair wages and working conditions. Moreover, as demonstrated by Saif and Aron, these rationales are conceptually distinct but often overlapped in practice, with teenagers shifting between different ways of legitimising exploitation.
The notion that teenagers’ jobs were something other than ‘real’ work emerged alongside employer practices that both exploited their labour in specific ways and addressed them differently from older, permanent staff. For example, Julia, who worked at a large supermarket, described a steady inflow of teenagers hired on a casual basis to cover shifts at short notice. Her managers made it clear that they belonged to a separate category of workers: ‘They call us “the extras”, and the ones who work full-time are called “the oldies”’. Moreover, while ‘the oldies’ had fixed schedules, ‘the extras’ received their shifts via a group chat – where the teenagers had to respond quickly to secure hours, and where, as mentioned, managers could use threatening language if no one replied fast enough.
Previous research has highlighted how employers have promoted images of young workers and youth jobs as something other than real work, in order to justify lower wages for this group (Price and Grant-Smith, 2018; Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015; Yates, 2017). As Williams and Connell (2010: 365) argue, such discourses and strategies shape how individuals perceive their occupational roles, leading some to ‘not consider themselves workers’. This idea repeatedly surfaced in the interviews, with student jobs and teenage employees depicted as distinct from ‘real’ work and workers. Paradoxically, this was also expressed by participants who relied on their employment financially. Ahmed was one such teenager, working 30 hours per week at a restaurant. He used part of the salary to support his unemployed parents, who were newly arrived refugees. Despite being promised additional compensation for working late nights and weekends, Ahmed never received such money and never confronted the manager about it either. Instead, he dismissed his missing salary, stating: Like, this is just an extra job, so it’s not the most important. [. . .] When it comes to students, for example, [working conditions] aren’t the most important thing. It’s not as important as when I’m employed – when I’ve finished school and become employed. Then it’s something else.
Here, Ahmed distinguished between having an extra job and being employed, thus framing the many hours he worked at the restaurant each week as something other than employment. Even when material circumstances necessitated work, as in Ahmed’s case, participants frequently described it as ‘just an extra job’. Understanding their jobs as something other than real work enabled participants to dissociate from the concrete realities of their labour, ultimately serving as a powerful mechanism for legitimising exploitation.
This section has highlighted a rationale that primarily drew on employers’ discourses and normative imaginaries, which framed teenage jobs as temporary stopgap activities. It legitimised underpayment by downplaying its significance, portraying it not as a violation but as a routine and expected feature of student jobs. These ideas shaped a distinct worker subjectivity, with teenage employees perceiving themselves as something other than ‘real’ workers. This, in turn, played a crucial role in normalising exploitative practices as an accepted part of their jobs.
Exploitation as an expression of youth vulnerability
There were a handful of examples of participants, mainly girls, who were explicitly critical of their working conditions and characterised their experiences as exploitation. Alma, who ended up working for almost no pay, described her experience in the following way.
It’s mostly while you’re still in school, you’re still so young that many people will use your labour because you’re young and they know that they can mess with you, because you don’t have the knowledge. You won’t get paid much.
Sara, similarly, was tricked by her manager at a food truck into working longer shifts than she had signed up for. She sometimes worked as many as 15 hours a day without getting any extra money. Describing her manager as a ‘crazy woman’, she concluded, ‘she was using me because I was younger’. The participants described feeling ‘messed with’ or ‘used’, identifying their employers as the driving force behind their experiences. Furthermore, they expressed a collective understanding of their exploitation as young workers, noting their vulnerability in a double sense. Firstly, as employers could pay them less than adult workers for the same job, they were used as cheap labour. Secondly, since they were newcomers in the labour market, they were easier to deceive. In this regard, their working conditions were not justified but portrayed as deeply unfair. Their vulnerability as young workers served as a point of recognition, enabling them to articulate a shared understanding of their experiences. Notably, it was their age – rather than the nature of their jobs – that functioned as the primary reference point in shaping this collective perspective.
Although none of the participants had tried to collectively influence their working conditions, some asserted that their experiences had raised awareness of the problems. For example, Alma claimed her experiences with wage theft were a good thing, as they could spur her to act in the future: ‘Now I know that I won’t be treated, like get such a bad salary and get those work hours again. I’ll be able to speak up and say no, because I know what it’s been like’. Thus, developing a shared understanding of their experiences had the potential to spark contestation.
However, instigating a critical discourse based on the collective social category of age created tensions in the interviews, as age could also be framed as an individual attribute or deficiency. Indeed, all participants who engaged in such discourse also expressed a degree of personal guilt. For example, Lisa initially intended to work one or two shifts per week at a large fast-food chain but soon found herself working nearly every day due to last-minute requests. Despite mounting exhaustion and stress, she felt unable to refuse when her manager persistently pressured her to take extra shifts and questioned her reasons for wanting to decline. During an interview, she repeatedly voiced strong criticism of her treatment as a teenage worker, yet she also described it as follows: Like, it was my first job and I had absolutely not learned to say no to people in professional life. Back then, I just felt: ‘Okay, I’ll say yes to everything then. At least I get money out of it in the end’.
In this account, Lisa criticised her own behaviour, blaming herself for being unable to say no. Like Lisa, the participants frequently attributed their acceptance of exploitation to a lack of knowledge or courage, often linking this to their age and inexperience. As Sara lamented: ‘I should have realised that it was a warning sign’. Since the problems were partially framed as self-critique, they could be overcome and learned from. Seventeen-year-old Milla elaborated on this: When you work at a very young age, you get into situations that you’re not mature enough for. But that’s a positive thing, I think. You learn a lot from these situations and you learn about social interactions and how to deal with stuff.
Overcoming past difficulties could be almost therapeutic, fostering personal growth and empowerment (see also Scharff, 2016). This gave rise to recurring tensions in the narratives: participants expressed a collective recognition of youth exploitation, alongside individual self-blame for being deceived; a sharp critique of their working conditions was often accompanied by a tendency to reframe these experiences as learning opportunities.
These tensions lie at the heart of this rationale, which centres on the notion of young workers as exploitable. By identifying themselves as young and vulnerable, participants positioned their experiences in relation to those of other teenage workers, thus providing a basis for a structural and collective understanding of exploitation. However, being exploitable was also perceived as an individual shortcoming; most participants described exploitation as something they had allowed to happen due to their own personal deficiencies. Despite a critique of their working conditions, exploitation also became an experience for which they held themselves responsible.
Concluding discussion
While extensive research highlights the frequent extraction of unpaid labour time in low-wage, labour-intensive services, it is crucial to understand why workers accept such practices. This article specifically examines teenage workers’ legitimisation of wage theft and coercive extra shifts and identifies three key meaning-making rationales employed by these young workers. The first framed part-time work as a means of enhancing employability, embedded in enterprising discourses of self-investment in human capital. Work functioned as hope labour, justifying present exploitation for future rewards. However, unlike the traditional definition of hope labour, these were not jobs participants identified with or aspired to. Instead, they emphasised the abstract value of ‘gaining experience’, allowing them to dissociate from the concrete realities of their jobs. The second rationale positioned student jobs as a distinct category of employment with low expectations, reflecting normative images of teenage work as a temporary stopgap. This framing, also shaped and sustained through employer strategies, downplayed the significance of such work by distinguishing it from ‘real’ employment. The third rationale highlighted teenage workers’ vulnerability, fostering a collective, structural understanding of their position in the labour market and enabling critiques of their experiences as exploitation. However, this perspective was ambivalent, intertwined with self-blame for being inexperienced and naïve – shaping an understanding of the self as both exploited and exploitable.
The participants did not uncritically or uniformly adopt subjugating discourses. The analysis reveals the complex ways in which they engaged with these rationales, underpinned by various emotions and desires. The rationales often overlapped in practice, with teenagers shifting between different ways of framing exploitation, and were sometimes employed in seemingly contradictory ways. For example, participants facing significant financial strain could still dismiss underpayment as an inconsequential aspect of student jobs. In this sense, the rationales constitute a discursive terrain that was both pervasive and influential in shaping understandings of work and the working self. This terrain helps explaining the meaning-making processes that framed exploitative practices as ambivalently accepted aspects of working life, with teenage students frequently assuming individual responsibility for their conditions. By identifying these rationales, the article contributes to scholarship on the legitimisation of unpaid labour among youth, extending understanding beyond contexts where such labour is driven by a passion for the job (cf. Armano and Murgia, 2013; Shade and Jacobson, 2015).
It is important to situate the meaning-making processes in context: the participants were newcomers in a segment of the labour market where unions and regulatory mechanisms are largely absent, and where the casual nature of their jobs created a constant risk of losing them. Indeed, many interviews reflected feelings of insecurity, fear, and powerlessness, aligning with previous research on youth and precarious work (Trappmann et al., 2024). A recurring theme was teenagers’ tendency to assume individual responsibility for their exploitation. This may not merely reflect dominant discourses but a tangible reality of their working lives, as they entered the labour market at a young age and were left to navigate it independently. This was particularly evident among those who framed their experiences as youth exploitation but still expressed self-blame, saying, ‘I didn’t dare’, ‘I should have realised’ and ‘I hadn’t learned to say no’. Feelings of insecurity and powerlessness, combined with the absence of collective institutions and weak regulatory enforcement, can thus be understood through what Armano et al. (2022) define as a hybrid set of situations that push workers to assume self-responsibility.
The article makes a theoretical contribution by detailing the shaping of subjectivities in the youngest group of workers, providing insights into the age-related normalisation of unpaid labour in low-wage, labour-intensive service sectors. The analysis reveals how teenagers legitimised exploitation by perceiving their jobs as something other than ‘real’ employment – either as an investment in future employability or a temporary student activity – and themselves as something other than ‘real’ workers. Even participants who described their experiences as exploitative primarily did so through the collective category of age. This raises questions about the lack of narratives through which teenagers can collectively recognise themselves as workers (Murgia and Pulignano, 2021). Exploitation was rarely recognised as such but instead appeared natural and normal, rendering it invisible. This advances our understanding of how the extraction of unpaid labour can spread and become systemic in these sectors (Cole et al., 2024) while also shedding light on why such forms of exploitation can be difficult to detect in everyday life (Maury, 2020).
While these rationales are specific to teenagers, similar lines of reasoning have been found in other groups of employees in comparable service jobs, inter alia legitimising underpayment by downplaying the significance of their work or not viewing themselves as ‘real’ workers (Campbell et al., 2019; Farrugia et al., 2018; Williams and Connell, 2010). Building on this literature, the article demonstrates how such self-understandings are also shaped by employer strategies and discourses. A valuable direction for future scholarship would be to explore this dynamic in greater depth, with particular attention to how employers frame these jobs and their employees in everyday workplace interactions. In addition, it may be important to consider the long-term impact of early labour market experiences. For instance, in their study on young creative workers, Morgan et al. (2013) considered whether participants’ acceptance of precarity stemmed from earlier experiences of insecurity in retail and hospitality jobs as teenagers, which had habituated them to the conditions prevalent in creative industries. Considering this article’s findings, another avenue for future research is to examine the long-term effects of teenage employment – not only in terms of educational attainment and career trajectories but particularly in shaping expectations of work and normalising exploitative conditions.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Åsa Lundqvist, Anna Ilsøe, Daniel Karlsson and Colm Flaherty for their generous and insightful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and to editor Knut Laaser for their constructive, detailed and stimulating comments during the review process.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethics statement
The Swedish Ethical Review Authority has approved this project, Dnr: 2020-00666.
