Summer jobs are hard to find for cash-strapped students looking to pay their way through college, writes Kate Holmquist
Padraig Lalor (19), from Knocklyon in Dublin, has landed "the dream job" this summer: handing out free pints of lager to grateful punters at a wage of €15 per hour. Working for a promotions agency, Lalor also has the ideal schedule. On Monday mornings, he phones the agency to say how many hours he'd like to work. With this summer's weather, his answer is Monday to Friday, nine to five. He spends the week going around supermarkets checking that promotional offers are on the shelves and on display, then on weekends works extra hours in pubs around the greater Dublin area, handing out those pints.
"It's my first time working properly. In college, you realise how expensive things really are and you don't want to keep asking your parents," says Lalor, who has just finished his first year in UCD.
Lalor was surfing a recruitment website for a position as a driver (he has a full driving licence and his own car) when he came across the job. During the college term, Lalor plays rugby for UCD, giving him "no time for a job". But it's not just the money that's welcome. By working in promotions, Lalor has discovered that marketing is the career for him after he graduates. "I love it. I don't like being behind a desk," he says.
Another benefit has been added respect from his family. "My grandad was working from the age of 16, so in my family there's respect for working. And I know what it's like when your friends are working over the summer and you are doing nothing. You feel a bit stupid."
There's no reason to feel stupid for not being able to find a job, but while there are dream jobs out there, even yellow-pack jobs at the minimum wage are more difficult to find this summer than in the past, according to the Union of Students in Ireland (USI). Peadar Hayes, a USI welfare officer, says: "I have spoken to a few officers [ in students' unions] and they have had more contact from students looking for jobs this summer than last year. A few things that I would see affecting this potentially could be: an increase in the workforce in recent years; a slow down in economic growth resulting in fewer jobs; and more young people of school-going age taking jobs that college students would have typically had during the summer."
Secondary school students under the age of 18 earn €6.06 per hour with no experience, rising to €7.79 with two years' experience. This means that secondary schoolers with part-time jobs in Spars and Centras can up their hours in the summer and work for less than over-18s with experience, filling the gap that college students used to rely on.
Donna Boileau (22), from Kildare, has been working since the age of 15 and is an award-winning film-maker (in a competition in the run up to the Jameson International Film Festival, her 60-second commercial for the whiskey won first prize), yet she has spent the past two months job-searching. Earlier this week, she was delighted to be hired as a runner by Screen Scene, a post-production film and TV company in Dublin - a short-term job that has the potential to become a career.
She was surprised that her search took so long, since during the winter she had no difficulty finding part-time temp work in offices. Boileau says: "It's definitely harder this summer. I feel bad saying this because I think Polish people are great and I have friends from Poland, but there are so many in the country now and I know that they get paid a lot less. It's really unfair. If you are an employer and you have people willing to work for less, of course you will pick the lower paid person first." It's illegal to pay a foreign student less than you'd pay an Irish one, but that doesn't mean it's not happening. An 18-year-old with two years' experience, wherever he or she is from, should be earning €8.65 per hour.
NIALL WHITE, A full-time student who has found himself lifeguarding, thanks to the weather, a nearly empty pool in Crumlin this summer, says that many of his friends have been unable to get work because the minimum-wage jobs are filled and any others advertised require experience that students don't have. White got his lifeguard qualification knowing that it would guarantee him summer work above the minimum wage for years to come, but his friends who don't have a qualification or experience haven't been so fortunate.
Students can only give us their impressions. According to Philip O'Connell, of the ESRI, there's no hard research evidence that can tell us what the situation is for work-seeking students this summer. "It's one of those invisible areas," he says.
Irish students have an edge in jobs such as Lalor's that require good language skills, O'Connell suggests. But there's no proof that Irish students are being pushed out of work by cheaper labour from EU accession states, and they may be being "pushed up" due to their language skills - enjoying jobs where language skills and a driving licence make the difference.
O'Connell has also observed the trend that, thanks to the Celtic Tiger, many students don't need to work. Twenty years ago as a student, O'Connell travelled to the UK to work in construction, while many of his friends did fruit-picking in Europe, hitchhiking from place to place. In 2007, his own son (who has just finished his Leaving Cert) is inter-railing across Europe. Many students are now travelling for the sake of it and don't worry about working, he says. "This is only anecdotal, but in the old days it paid to go to the US to work. Now, the cost of living in the US is too high and wages haven't gone up. Kids are travelling to the US for the experience of travelling."
The number of Irish students getting J1 visas is at an all-time high, particularly because final-year university students are now allowed to apply because the successful Irish economy ensures they have jobs to come back to. And while a J1 visa entitles Irish students to work in the traditional jobs in restaurants, sandwich shops and ice-cream parlours, it's not always worth their while, O'Connell says.
DEARBHLA O'BRIEN, of USIT, which organises 90 per cent of the J1 visas, says that Irish students travelling to the US are not filing tax returns, which indicates that they don't seem to be working. She says: "I don't know what impression their parents have about them looking for jobs, but the likelihood is they're surfing in Hawaii." But many students must work in order to fund their education and for them, the difficulty of finding summer employment will be felt in the form of more dig-outs from parents and higher bank loans in the autumn.
Travelling was never an option for Tommy Grant (25), a farmer's son from Tipperary who is living in Waterford, where he studies business management at the Waterford Institute of Technology. Currently writing his master's dissertation, which is due on August 31, Grant has taken out substantial student loans to fund his education and to enable him to write his dissertation this summer, so that he can look for full-time work in September.
Grant thinks that Irish employers need to be more aware of the value of summer employment for Irish students - and not just any old work, but meaningful work. His first job at 15 years of age was sweeping out yards at €2.50 per hour for a large company.
It taught him that he didn't want to spend his life doing that and helped him focus on planning a career.
He says: "Working [ in minimum wage jobs] has been the best thing I've ever done. It's given me a hunger to succeed." There's a synergy between doing summer work for a company and studying business practice at third level, he adds. Classroom theory of how successful companies operate is one thing, but being able to observe and be involved in the reality through summer work definitely gives students an edge, he believes. Grant would like to see more companies investing in summer student employment by giving students more "sink or swim" responsibility in a variety of areas, so that jobs are more than money-making exercises.
Niamh Owens, who has just completed her master's degree and has never been able to afford to travel, agrees: "I did my master's without any funding or grant assistance as I did not qualify for it. So in that regard it was hard. I have worked in the Bank of Ireland for experience which I think is essential, as you can't get a job without experience. It really is a vicious circle which, unfortunately for us students, tends to fall on our shoulders."
There seem to be two trends: students who don't have to work and who are travelling with funds provided by parents; and students who really need to work and either can't get jobs, or can't find meaningful jobs that will enhance a CV and impress an employer.
