Making Sense of Exploitation: Teenage Workers’ Experiences of Unpaid Labour in Low-Wage Service Jobs

This article explores the rationales through which teenage students make sense of and legitimise unpaid labour in low-wage service jobs, contributing to theorising how such exploitation becomes normalised as part of their working lives. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with working school students in Sweden, it focuses on experiences of wage theft and coercive extra shifts, understood as employer strategies to extract unpaid labour time. The analysis identifies three key rationales, shaped by various discourses, through which teenagers made sense of these exploitative practices: framing them as secondary to self-investing in employability, downplaying them as an expected aspect of student jobs, and interpreting them in relation to their perceived vulnerability as young workers. These rationales outline a discursive terrain through which exploitative practices became ambivalently accepted as part of working life, with teenage workers often assuming individual responsibility for their conditions.