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Gen Z is unhappier at work than any other generation. Here are the two things they want.
(www.businessinsider.com)
From the article:
- Salary
- Career growth
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
441 points (95.1% liked)
Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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Wow, its almost like companies have taken away all the incentives to work!
So that's why no one wants to work anymore!
Nah can't be the company's fault, could only be due to lazy workers now /s
What is a totally reasonable demand. Ask a CEO if he would do his work if he would get paid peanuts.
Assuming the CEO does any real "work"
The career growth is really amazing. I work at a unionized place that is required to fill positions internally before outside hires. When a senior employee retires from a top level position it will be filled by someone at the company. Typically someone in a mid level position. Then there's a chain effect where now that mid level position is open that will go to entry level workers. The only outside hires tend to be for entry level jobs.
It's great because when you talk to the senior staff, almost all of them started at the bottom and worked their way up. This gives them better knowledge of how the whole operation works since they've done the jobs below them, and also a little empathy!
Sounds awesome! Are y'all hiring?
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Compromise: I can do mandatory work outings and a ping pong table.
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Unrelated of course, but Gen Z is also paid less and have fewer opportunities for advancement than other generations.
Corporations are baffled, and will consider having more pizza on layoff days.
will consider having more pizza on layoff days.
And they will only order two pineapple pizzas and you will like it!
Which is funny, because we millennials ALSO had fewer opportunities and we’re getting paid less.
I know, right? It's almost as if an entire generation decided that they would mortgage future generations and the environment in order to have nicer things than their parents and their kids.
Worse: it’s that they leveraged four entire generations (and counting) and the environment in order to have a higher degree of nicer things than their parents had over their parents. Up until our generations (gen X is included), every generation had it better than the previous. But thank ol’ Ronnie Reagan and the culture of deregulation that literally jump started the beginning of the end of late stage capitalism.
Even in the EU, where things are “better,” the culture of deregulation changed the course of history. European citizens do have it better, but when comparing against the US, it’s like, hard to be much worse. Now, of course this is all relative and from a hugely biased ethnocentric perspective, but being the “leaders” of the world, the decision made in the US have a huge ripple effect across the world. We exploited more people, and the resulting explosion of profits led to more power for money in politics, which led to worse exploitation across the world, which led to higher profits, ad Infinitum. We’re only a few decades on from the deregul-eighties and the effects have only grown exponentially as they amass more power via more wealth, and more wealth via more power.
Wait -- is it capitalism is inherently inequal and unsustainable, or ol' Racist Ronnie did this? Is it both and he accelerated us?
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Another dumb-ass op-ed that starts with a stupid premise and gets worse from there. Look how desperately they try to make it seem like workers are different by generation. watch them desperately thrash and twist to avoid the truth, that conditions are their fault.
They sampled 18-25 y/os then skipped straight over the rest of the workforce to workers 65 and older.
No talk about compensation differences between these groups. No talk about 26-64 year olds.... I want to find the author and personally tell them how disappointed i am in their work, but it was probably ai or one of those gig word count jobs and they wouldn't even care
Yeah, I'm a millennial who has hated those same things since probably around the same time gen Z started joining the workforce. I bet the only real difference is that gen Z didn't join the workforce with the illusion that it wasn't so bad because millennials were already talking about it. And gen X cynicism (which is deserved, not trying to open a front in the "generation war" here) likely planted the seed for millennials to notice it.
I'm seeing the same. I'm an older millennial that joined the workforce in a conservative state, so I kept my mouth shut about shitty work conditions so I didn't end up fist fighting some of my coworkers. Gen Z is entering a workplace full of disgruntled millennials like myself and we're together making an environment where it's safer to tell employers we're tired of being taken for granted.
I'm a Xilenial and agree 100% with what you said. Younger Gen X started to notice these problems, but when your 35-ish year old Boomer parents are living the life, they shut you down without mercy. It took until the youngest Millenials/Older Gen Z for people to be able to talk about this openly.
Older gen y, been railing against the bullshit as long as I've been immersed in it. Glad others are taking up the torches and pitchforks.
Gen X here and it has been common knowledge since 2000 that the only way to not fall behind your peers in terms of salary or career advancement is to change jobs every few years.
Existing staff getting paid less than new hires has been a thing for at least 25 years.
"The best way to get a raise is to get a new job"
Hell, I think it was boomers, if not the silent generation, who first learned the hard way that company loyalty can screw you. If that shit started in the 80s, it would have caught the silent generation.
The whole generational conflict is just another attempt to divide people so they are less likely to unite effectively against the ones who put their profit ahead of everything and everyone else.
Younger Silent and older Boomers definitely got the biggest shaft of all. This was the group of people who were promised a pension and regular retirement. Then the idiots who manage the companies ran them into bankruptcy and got business-friendly bankruptcy judges to dissolve the pensions, leaving retired and retiring people with nothing to fall back on. Younger Boomers looked at that and went "sounds good to me!".
I don't know what employers expect to get in return for their behavior. For decades they treated employees like shit, and now they complain that employees don't love them.
Read "Hell's Angels" by Hunter Thompson.
There's a chapter about the economics of being a biker/artist/hippie circa 1970. A biker could work six months as a union stevedore and earn enough to spend two years on the road, and a part time waitress could earn enough to support herself and her musician boyfriend.
- stop hoarding wealth
- 1 but louder
Universal healthcare would be great in the US. It's always terrifying to quit or get fired/laid off, despite COBRA, because you're one accident or diagnosis away from having your nest egg destroyed.
Previously being a good worker at a profitable company meant you were safe, but now that isn't the case, and it is making me anxious every day.
COBRA is, intentionally, pure garbage. "You can continue your insurance, if you pay full-price, which virtually no one eligible can afford."
People always said COBRA is too expensive but I had no clue how bad it could possibly be. Turns out, $1200 a month for the cheapest option for a married couple in my case. And I didn't get that information in spite of repeated asking for months before I left, until I was nearly out the door.
This compared to the marketplace plans starting around $600, similarly decent plans to my work one in the realm of $800 and the APTC covering almost all of that cost if I'm not making too much money self-employed. COBRA is a joke.
I think this generational divide is bullshit. Most people have always known that the system is rigged and keeping your head down and working hard doesn't get most people anywhere.
There is a generational divide. Boomers and older GenXers often bought their homes years ago when they were far cheaper and have no mostly or entirely paid them off. If they need money, they can get a cheap HELOC. Their house is also a nest egg. That saves a lot.
They also likely actually got regular raises. Plenty of boomers make 6 figures and still struggle to open a PDF, while zoomers and millennials are doing most of their work for them for 1/3rd the pay.
Yeah, but there are a ton of boomers and gen x that never got a chance to buy a house. Stack on being a minority, or a woman, and your chances of owning a home back in the good old days were probably worse than now since banks and certain neighborhoods would tell you to get fucked. Things may have been easier for many in different generations, but not for everyone. I'm not discounting that gen z has things worse in a lot of ways, especially work and financial wise. I just don't think fighting amongst generations is going to help. It's class warfare.
Edit: By class warfare I mean basically everyone vs the ultra powerful/wealthy.
I'm not discounting that gen z has things worse in a lot of ways, especially work and financial wise.
But that’s just it, by not acknowledging it, by acting like we’re all in the same boat, it is being discounted.
Uh, stuff was better but nowhere near as nice as you imagine for a poor kid growing up like i was. but they were better. Work sucked, but yeah life was easier. You're missing the point though, lemme rant some.
How many rich old boomers do you personally know vs how many do you hear on tv?
The point of the tv (or in this case the article) using this angle is to point blame away from the culprits who caused this bad situation, the ultra-rich.
My boomboom parents, myself (xennial), and my extended family members have all watched their money get squeezed right out of their pockets their whole lives.
Maybe you assume we got to keep the money we made from way back when times were better?
Nope! All those wealth transfer graphs you've seen where the line goes up had to come from somewhere. That line means i watched it happen is all, watched it get taken from us. I'm poor like you.
Gramp's life savings got eaten up by gram's medical care. Dad lost his house. I will never get to own one. You probably know a lot of people in all different age groups that have a story like mine.
Meanwhile,
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Warren Buffet is a boomer
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Jeff bezos and Elon musk are Gen X.
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Zuckerbergs a millennial.
Though they are in different generations They all have something in common.
Their wealth, and their absolute love of lobbying the government to get even wealthier at the expense of your and me.
Like Carlin said, "they want all of what you got, and they're gonna get it too."
They are the ones to focus on. Maybe the past was great but we live in the present, and there's no reason left to be jealous of boomers/xers. Our ages don't separate us, our (lack of) wealth unites us.
Trust me, we are all in the same boat.
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But that's not their fault. It's the fault of current bosses. Why blame it on a generation that was slightly less screwed than yours, just because they were slightly less screwed?
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Turns out treating employees like dirt, plus an impending climate collapse makes people unhappy. Who knew
It takes a young person being kicked down in a vulnerable moment one time to realize work doesn't care for them and they owe them no loyalty. And since a long time, junior workers are the first to get the axe for circumstances that are no fault of their own.
And when being at a salary that you can barely make it now, staying at that salary as costs shoot up is untenable. So no surprises young workers aren't buying this loyalty bull.
Doubt. I’m a younger Gen X and work has fucking sucked for us and for our parents before us. The middle class has been hollowed out since the 70s, at the latest. It’s now purely transactional, with the final vestiges of loyalty and all that other bullshit long gone. Pay me and leave me the fuck alone. Do those two things to the proper extent and I will provide dispassionate labor in commensurate amount. Otherwise, I will whore out my knowledge and labor elsewhere, with less than zero regard for the collateral damage I may cause.
This is the way.
An employee's work is what you pay for, their loyalty has to be earned
Instead of worrying about company culture or whether the job sounds exciting, the first thing Kaneshina looks for when job searching is the salary. "Right now there's this whole salary-transparency movement. So a lot of the roles I apply to I know about the pay right off the bat," she said. Once satisfied with the pay range, Kaneshina digs into the company — are they doing work she has experience with? Then she checks whether the opening provides room for growth — how long until she could get a promotion? For her to apply, all three factors have to line up.
Tech field Gen-X here. When did the above stop being a normal expectation? It sure as shit was when myself and all my contemporaries were starting out. Compensation package, culture and growth were always part of the pitch when employers made job offers.
This is also a shift from when older generations were young: In a 1995 survey by the consulting firm Wyatt Co., under-30 Gen Xers — the "works sucks, I know" generation — were actually the most satisfied with their jobs than any other age group.
That answers the main question I had after reading the headline: did all generations feel this way at this age, or is this unique to Gen z.
Edit: just read the about the 1995 survey referenced in the article. It's pretty interesting. https://reason.com/1995/05/01/heh-heh-work-is-cool/
Reason is a hyper pro-capitalist libertarian magazine who, in an interview with then-governor Ronald Reagan, implied he was too liberal because he didn’t think fire departments should be privatized.
I wouldn’t trust them with this kind of survey, in other words.
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Increase minimum wage
We deserve shares when we join. Give us a slice of the pie
And yet businesses try to convince you that you're part of the family and we're all in this together. Work your ass off by coming in early and staying late all year? Good job here's a 2% raise. Nevermind that is lower than inflation and the extra work and meager raise actually lowers your hourly equivalent if you're salaried.
If businesses really want everyone to go above and beyond they need to pay people in equity. Why else would anyone give a shit about the long term success of a business? They certainly have no loyalty to their employees.
They do that if you go work in young industries. I think once the pie has been divided up and sold between rich guys 2000 times and there's no more hyper growth, there's no more pie to give out. So you have to move to models like bcorps, like a King Arthur Flour, or be evil.
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clickbait
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