A young woman has stunned ns by revealing how much she earns and how little work she has to do for it.
She initially described her job as a ‘school supervising crossing (guard)’ when she was interviewed on a Brisbane street by jobs app Getahead.
With a smile and a thumbs up, she then used the more common term.
The ‘lollipop lady’ makes ‘$32 an hour’ and works just 90 minutes a day.
‘We only do an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon and only Monday to Friday during school terms,’ she explained.
Those hours work out to $240 a week, or around $1,100 in an average month – and at that level, she wouldn’t have to pay any tax.
The Queenslander has been a school crossing supervisor for about eight years, having got the job into after getting to know a teacher who told her there was a position available.
‘On my days off, I used to go walking and this lady just liked my personality,’ she said.
Her favourite perks about the job are the ‘hours, the mornings, meeting and greeting people and being out in the environment’.
Viewers were astounded to hear how much she earns.
‘I remember when I was year 7, we could sign up to do the school crossings with the lollipop signs,’ one said.
While the Brisbane local loves her job, NSW is finding it hard to fill school crossing supervisor roles, with 311 vacancies up for grabs in recent months.
Of these, 86 roles were filled by casuals or job applicants going through pre-employment checks.
That means that 225 schools were left without dedicated supervisors.
Though the school crossing supervisor doesn’t earn a great deal, she gets great satisfaction from it, helping students to safely get to class.
That is in stark contrast to a tradesman who recently told Getahead that he is struggling financially despite earning $160,000-a-year after tax.
The concrete patcher said he earned between $2,500 and $3,000 a week after pulling 10-and-a-half-hour days, five days a week and often works on Saturdays too, to bump up his pay.
But still, he said he is ‘working to survive at the moment’.
‘I wish I could win the lotto or something. This is alright for the time being.’
The tradie said working as a concrete patcher can be very physically demanding at times, but also ‘one of the easiest jobs in construction’.
He recommended school leavers try such jobs rather than chase white-collar work which is often far less lucrative.