Premium
‘MUSIC WHILE YOU WORK’: TEENAGE WOMEN IN THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MARKET, 1947 TO 1992
Author(s) -
Watson Ian
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
australian journal of social issues
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.417
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1839-4655
pISSN - 0157-6321
DOI - 10.1002/j.1839-4655.1994.tb01020.x
Subject(s) - disadvantaged , position (finance) , work (physics) , project commissioning , tertiary sector of the economy , publishing , labour economics , sociology , economics , economic growth , political science , engineering , economy , law , mechanical engineering , finance
Teenage women have been particularly disadvantaged by the collapse of the youth labour market over the last 20 years. This article outlines the dimension of that problem, comparing the position young women held in the teenage labour market in the late 1940s with their position today. While the 1950s and 1960s saw growth in some areas of paid work for teenage women, the 1970s marked a watershed. With the major exception of saleswork in the retail industry and clerical work in banking, teenage women saw their place in the labour market dramatically shrink during that decade. Nearly 30,000 full‐time jobs disappeared during the 1970s, to be replaced by nearly the same number of part‐time jobs. The 1980s has seen these developments reach crisis proportions. In the late 1980s, nearly 40,000 clerical jobs were lost to teenage women, and again the only significant employment growth was in casualised service sector jobs, such as cashiers and sales workers. This article concludes by exploring the structural reasons behind these dramatic long‐term changes.