Making Sense of Exploitation: Teenage Workers’ Experiences of Unpaid Labour in Low-Wage Service Jobs
基于对瑞典40名打工学生的深度访谈，研究青少年如何合理化低薪服务业中的无偿劳动（如工资盗窃和强制加班），揭示剥削正常化的三种理由。
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.