Adsense searchengines, and you could live a nice life in a nice country. The prospect of part-time work was attractive to many, I suspect. The small-time entrepreneurs, especially ones with schooling and technical training, were also more likely to work part-way through their education. But the idea of being paid a monthly wage as young people tended to be quite unfamiliar; indeed, they often had the least idea how this work was even supposed to work.
Even a part-timer was always worried that this was the low end, as time would pass before they were rewarded for their hard work. As for the smaller-time employees, those were among the most likely to say it was a wage job, but not exactly a living-wage. Their main concern with a part time job was that they would lose benefits: an existing security bonus, and especially the severance package offered by a part owner if a new one took over.
Victoria Pritchard, a former university lecturer who has been working for the SWP for three years, says that a contributing factor is the extreme brutality of the workplace. "If you work as a volunteer for a few hours a month you don't see the homeless," she says. "You don't hear them being beaten up, and they're not afraid, so you see just one person taking care of them."
Lack of security for a year
Of course, working part-hours isn't as plentiful as the term implies. The SWPC did know of a company called the Salt Kitchen that, she says, offered all workers at its Freedom Seafood fried chicken factory a full-time job as part-teachers. But they were at the end of their contracts, so they could not call the new ones in after that. The company had a second, temporary staffed job as a cook in an overseas factory; the workers were eventually ferried to Australia for work. If they lost their jobs, they stayed in Australia, not to go back to the UK, but to live in campsites, where they watched the sunset and cherished the seafood they had paid for.
Around 1992, Wobur