When Keir Starmer was 14 years old, he got a part-time job clearing stones from a local farmer’s field. At 16, Kemi Badenoch was flipping burgers and cleaning toilets in McDonald’s. Me, I waitressed at weekends from the age of 15 in an Essex pub owned by an ex-paratrooper with two formidable rottweilers roaming behind the bar, which was a life lesson all of its own.
But whatever your first job may have been, there’s a reasonable chance it combined the thrill of hard cash with several mortifying mistakes and a crash course in handling stroppy customers, taking criticism more or less gracefully and moaning about it only out of earshot. Though teenage starter jobs have been in decline for decades – for reasons varying from academic pressures on sixth-formers to the rise of side hustles on Vinted that don’t show up in official statistics – everyone still has to start somewhere, even if it’s now more likely at 18 than 14. But getting that start is becoming harder than it was.
