Navigating babysitting as liminal, gendered, and undervalued work

Babysitting is a common early-work experience in the West, yet there is little research on babysitters. From in-depth, qualitative interviews with 16 babysitters, we explore three themes related to liminality and gender inequality in babysitting. First, babysitting is a skilled job; many babysitters undertook formal and informal training and used it at work. Second, babysitters occupy a liminal position between childhood and adulthood, bringing challenges and opportunities at work. Finally, babysitters thoughtfully negotiate pay, but sometimes experience challenges doing so.

Impact of Early Work Experiences on Subsequent Paid Employment for Young Adults With Disabilities

To better understand how early work experience shapes subsequent employment outcomes for young people (ages 18 to 20) with disabilities, we analyzed longitudinal data from the Youth Transition Demonstration (YTD) evaluation to test whether the employment experiences of 1,053 youth during the initial year after entry affected their employment during the third year after entry. To derive causal estimates, we used a dynamic-panel estimation model to account for time-invariant unobserved individual characteristics that may be correlated with youth’s self-selection into both early and later employment. We also controlled for other socioeconomic and health factors that may affect later employment. We found that early work experience increases the probability of being employed 2 years later by 17 percentage points. This estimate is an important advancement over the correlational approaches that characterize the current literature and provides stronger evidence that early work experience is a key determinant of subsequent labor market success.

Introduction

The tourism and hospitality sector counts among the world’s largest in terms of business volume and employment. The United Nations World Tourism Organization suggests one in 11 jobs globally are to be found in tourism (UNWTO, 2013:78). Although precise employment figures in tourism are difficult to establish, as a heavily customer-facing, service-orientated sector it is in many of its operations highly labour intensive. Despite advances in technology, the possibilities of substituting labour by technology in tourism remain limited. For this reason tourism is frequently regarded favourably by policy makers, both in the developed and the developing world, in their attempts to drive down unemployment, particularly youth unemployment which in many countries is at crisis levels. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), for example, young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. Devadason (2007) explains that, as expected, the career ladder causality is most readily identifiable with the professional and managerial high income earners and yet he provides examples of low-income workers who also describe strategic thinking in their transitions. In fact, he makes reference to an individual working in hospitality who, starting from the bottom in what many people would describe as a low-skilled, menial job, had worked his way up to manager of a cappuccino bar and who now seeks to advance further. Square one causality is used by those whose work transitions have not demonstrated any form of progression or which do not feature as part of a larger career plan. This comprises both individuals who have remained in low-skilled work for some time as well as workers who were simply looking to earn some income before going on to further study. The final category of Setback stories relates to those who find themselves in a square one situation for an extended period of time and who then try to explain an absence of progress with reference to ‘lack of encouragement, confidence or the right networks to fulfil their aspirations’ (Devadason, 2007:712). The key point Devadason makes is that for some young adults, transitions into and out of employment, unemployment and education are woven into a narrative that is not necessarily negative. Indeed, it could be argued that we are entering an era where a lengthy period of time with one employer calls for an explanation in a tacit acknowledgement that this is no longer the norm. The extent to which young people will adapt to these labour market changes is yet to be fully understood, although it is likely tourism and hospitality employment will continue to feature in many young people’s early work experience.

Dropping Out of High School among Mexican-Origin Youths: Is Early Work Experience a Factor?

In this article, Anane Olatunji examines the effects of work experience on early high school attrition among Mexican-origin adolescents. He proposes a theoretical model that takes assimilation into account as a potential predictor of the consequences of work for this group. In order to estimate the effects of eighth-grade work experience on dropping out of school in 1990, he analyzed data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988. He begins this article with a brief review of literature on high school dropouts and youth employment. He argues that this topic is particularly salient for Mexican-origin youths because they not only comprise the majority of Hispanics, the nation largest ethnic minority group, but also exhibit an alarmingly low high school completion rate. Overall, the results support conventional models that researchers have used to predict outcomes of teenage employment. Among Mexicanorigin adolescents, however, girls were three and a half times more likely than boys to leave school, after controlling for work and other factors. He concludes the article with implications for future research, especially the role that gender plays in predicting early high school attrition among Mexican-origin youths.