 I had a Saturday job at a Woolworths store in Leeds. I stacked shelves, filled bags at the checkout and worked in the warehouse. All for the princely sum of thirty shillings (maybe £20 today), for an eight-hour weekend shift. And I paid my own train fare from Normanton. But I learned a lot about the workplace, and getting along with other people. For instance, I was surprised at the, er, frank attitudes of older women. Work makes you grow up fast. And it's more fun than gazing at a computer in the bedroom all day. Scientists believe they've have found signs of life on a planet 120 light years away: molecules of dimethyl sulphide. This sounds very similar to the chemical that smells like rotten eggs, and is present when a person, ahem, breaks wind. Boffins used){kind=link}
They’ve gone out of fashion but a part-time help people grow up, says Paul Routledge
It’s an oldies’ cliché that young people don’t want to go out to work any more.
But in 21st century Britain, it turns out to be true, or at least substantially so. According to a survey, Generation Z â those born since the late 1990s â shun part-time and Saturday jobs, in favour of a “side hustle”. They think they can make more money from setting up in business, buying and selling craft stuff or web design on their computers.
Six out of 10 Gen-Zedders polled by a website company preferred doing their own thing to working in retail or hospitality. Numbers of school-leavers in full or part-time employment have fallen sharply over the last 20 years: In Yorkshire, down from 64,000 to 36,000, in London an even steeper drop from 49,000 to 24,000.
Some may find this a welcome trend, reducing exploitation of young people by unscrupulous employers and encouraging entrepreneurial talent. I’m not so sure. Anything that gets teenagers off their laptops and out of their bedrooms has to be a good thing, and a part-time job is a useful introduction to the world of work.