Part-time Jobs for Teenagers – A Question of Home Background

A specific analysis of the 2018–2020 Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) shows that 41.7 per cent of 17-year-olds had had experience with such jobs in the survey period. However, this mainly applies to adolescents from the higher social classes. If this age-group is divided into two equal groups based on the equivalence-weighted income of their families, 52.1 per cent of 17-year-olds in the upper half, but only 31.5 per cent of those in the lower half, had had paid work in their spare time. The key criterion here is most likely the social resources of the parents. For example, the probability of having a job when young is particularly high among the children of the self-employed. This is striking, since young people whose families can only offer them a low standard of living and who thus need additional income to be able to fulfil specific wishes should have a particularly strong incentive to seek paid employment. Under these circumstances, it is worth considering offering young people from low social strata special assistance in their search for suitable part-time jobs.