Perplexing? The opening of this article gives a pretty straightforward answer: people in that demographic aren't buying the narrative that a minimum-wage job will necessarily come with growth opportunities. So instead of getting pigeon-holed, they are trying to jump into a career with better growth opportunities. Sometimes that requires leaving immediate money on the table.
I agree with you. These jobs might have one day been filled with promotions and raises - but have now been turned into efficiency centers. Automation has drastically increased, required skills and training significantly reduced. There is no path up the chain from these types of jobs. In the absolutely best case, they can't be automated even further out of a job.
"Do well in school or you'll end up in a minimum-wage job!"
"Oh, you're too good for a minimum-wage job, are ya? Lazy, entitled Millennial."
See? Perplexing for everyone who said both of those things.
More seriously, it might be perplexing if you assume the "shame" of living with one's parents past the age of eighteen is greater than the negative impact of getting looped into the minimum-wage cycle with no clear way to escape. This further assumes that multi-generational households are... bad... in some indefinable way which doesn't apply to a lot of the rest of the world.
Service industry is thankless and harsh, and to top it off low-paying. It's dehumanizing.
I'm a member of this group.
I was told growing up by first-generation college graduates that any degree was better than no degree. I had persistent doubts, but was told by those same parents year after year before and during college that "You may not want it now, but you won't regret having it in the future."
So not knowing better and not being told any better by the university I attended, I got a history degree and tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. When I graduated in 2012, I was reluctant to leave the town that I grew up in (where there were no jobs, being essentially only a university town) and could only find service sector work. The same baby boomers that told me to put myself in debt to secure a degree now told me that any job was better than no job at all.
I eventually was able to get a job at a call center after being a temp (twice) at the same corporation. Yet within a year, I hit a hard income cap. In this job that I had worked so hard to secure, I could only pay off my debt over more than a decade throwing all my disposible income at it. And the job was soul-crushing. All my coworkers were warm-bodies that life had shat upon; my bosses were all sociopathic and incompetent PMPs that could barely open Outlook and constantly took the credit for any and all off-paper work that I did. For some reason, I started drinking heavily.
I was fortunate enough to be able to support my wife while she learned how to code and through fate, diligence, and diversity metrics, she was able to secure an IT job. She convinced me to quit soon afterwards and try to follow in her footsteps, but with apparently less favorable odds. Who wants to hire an unemployed self-taught 30-year-old white male with an unstable work history in an entry-level role?
And now, if looking down the barrel of economic obsolescence wasn't enough, I have to deal with baby-boomers, who by their own admission waltzed with ease into careers, constantly looking down on me for not gladly and immediately selling what remains of my youth to pernicious corporations whose five-year plans inevitably include either automating my position or shuttering because of the brick & mortar apocalypse.
Yes, it's a very perplexing hole, this lack of participation.
Our pipedream at this point is for me to be a stay-at-home dad and develop FOSS software when I'm not caregiving or doing home economy, with the eventual goal of buying a farm somewhere where we can both be doing what we really want (i.e. living as ethically as we possibly can in a dystopian hellscape far, far away from the gods of the Marketplace). I don't think this feeling is in the minority.
"Thirty years ago, she says, you could walk into any hotel in America and everyone in the building, from the cleaners to the security guards to the bartenders, was a direct hire, each worker on the same pay scale and enjoying the same benefits as everyone else. Today, they’re almost all indirect hires, employees of random, anonymous contracting companies: Laundry Inc., Rent-A-Guard Inc., Watery Margarita Inc. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office estimated that 40 percent of American workers were employed under some sort of “contingent” arrangement like this—from barbers to midwives to nuclear waste inspectors to symphony cellists. Since the downturn, the industry that has added the most jobs is not tech or retail or nursing. It is “temporary help services”—all the small, no-brand contractors who recruit workers and rent them out to bigger companies."
From the fantastic https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenn...
It seems like this would only make economic sense if the end company isn't using them on a regular basis, so overall efficiency goes up by multiplexing an employee out to multiple companies as needed. It seems implied by "Rent-A-Guard", but I'm musing out-loud. I haven't had a chance to read your article yet.
Essentially, yes.
Couple the prevailing sentiment with a change in the type of available jobs. Physically demanding work is less common now, and manufacturing, long a mainstay of male occupation, was moved overseas. Office work is more about people relationships, which generally favors women. Our education system is similarly biased against men these days.
I'm at the old end of the millenial generation, but if I was 25, I don't think I'd be too motivated either. I'm not surprised when these young men favor sitting in a basement playing video games over getting a job. Or watching porn instead of going after a girlfriend. The culture has shifted. For some people it's a huge win and there are a wealth of new opportunities - but it is a zero sum game, and now we're seeing the losers.
I have tried applying through Seek and TradeMe, and got no response. I tried writing custom cover letters and applying on company websites. I've rewritten my résumé several times based on contradictory advice. I updated my LinkedIn, and made a second LinkedIn profile to add strangers. I asked recruiters for help. I put side projects on the web, especially Show HN, to try to get attention. I asked friends who I worked with at Fisher & Paykel Healthcare when I was there before. I found random people on Github and offered to work for free on open-source projects just to get an introduction. I contacted computer repair shops and asked them to put up posters advertising data migration services that I could do with my old Apple II. I've contacted every Apple-certified repair person in NZ/Aus/Can to ask them for help. I've tried praying about it. I've tried spamming the companies that have emails readily available, from the accredited employers list. I posted a desperate plea on Facebook, and followed up on advice (+1 introduction) from friends. None of these methods are working. I've had only two interviews. Most companies don't even send rejections. I've lowered my standards so now I'll accept any kind of job, anywhere.
This is a cry for help. I know I'm doing something totally wrong. I just don't know how to contact companies. Please tell me what to do. Please tell me email addresses of people who care.
* Remove all the logos/links. They're not helping the first impression, and they'll almost certainly confuse the systems that are used to scan/store your résumé.
* Take out the reference to military technology in your objective. If you get an interview you can ask them if they do military work and explain your reservations.
* Simplify your work history. Try to make it as sequential as possible, with as few gaps as possible. If you have a lot of work experience that is not directly relevant to the position you are seeking, consider changing the format and just list "Relevant Experience".
* Make your education section simpler. Just list your most advanced degree, or include your Bachelor's degree if it is in another field. Don't show your GPA, but include any academic honours you received while obtaining your degree.
* Remove all the icons on the second page, including the flags.
* Condense your charity work/hobbies/extra-curricular activities to a short list. Do list any directorships you held/hold. Don't list specific job titles unless they directly relate to the position you seek.
* You might consider just saying "References available upon request."
Your résumé comes across as kind of "all purpose". Maybe that's just because it's the one you include in your profile. If you aren't creating a focused résumé for each opportunity, you might want to consider doing that.
Email addresses. Please tell me somebody who can give me a job if I do this right. I need somebody who can help. Not somebody who will complain. Somebody who cares. Somebody who can give me food and shelter, a minimum wage. Anything.
Your bio also shows you lived in 12 countries in less than 10 years, and possibly worked in many of them: sounds fun, but also doesn't sound like someone who is willing to commit to a job long term.
I just spent the last 4 years in Taiwan, proving that I can settle down.
Also recruiters are a dead end for everyone who isn't already a very close match for a job that's going. It's incredibly frustrating for everyone, but that's their incentive structure.
And what do you mean Apple II? Isn't that ancient?
I don't know how to find people on LinkedIn, but I created a new account just to spam that way. I'll keep trying to add lots of strangers and hope I find a friendly one.
Yes, I used an Apple II with ADTPro to migrate data off lots of old 5.25" floppies for archiving purposes. I thought that I could start a business to do that, if I could get computer repair shops to advertise for me. So I asked the repair shops, but most didn't even reply, and the only one that did told me that I should set up the business first and then they'll ask their manager whether they'd be willing to put up a poster. My logic is that older people are rich and powerful, and fondly remember their old computers. So the data migration would put me in contact with people who could give me a real job later.
I have spent the last ten years moving from country to country. I work on my own projects, and fortunately do ok.. I'm not sure if someone would hire me. :-)
There's a sofa bed and the occasional friendly cockroach. :-)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15...
I've raised this point to a fair few of my friends and colleagues recently. I think it is becoming increasingly hard to contribute to society, because everything is so gosh-darn technical.
Companies _scream_ for developers - but not junior developers, or people who they can teach to program - but developers with 5+ years worth of experience.
I think this will only get WAY worse in the future. Unfortunately, I also think it will mean that people who fail to get a job after taking their degree will be worse off than people with little or no education, who has always had a job (no matter the type of job).
So if you're done with college/university (which is when you're around 25-30 y/o in Europe), and you can't get a job, and you can't put your education to use. You're pretty much shit out of luck in most cases. Of course you can always dig yourself out, but doing so would most likely mean working a min-wage job for 8-10 hours a day, and then spending all your free-time and weekends learning a useful skill, which doesn't leave much time for friends or family (or making a family).
Uh, what? You're done with university (masters) at 22-23. Late 20's when you include PhD.
You can see a figure from ministry of education here (first figure - it shows the age of the starting student): https://www.dst.dk/pukora/epub/Nyt/2005/NR242.pdf
The title of the chart is translated into "Average age of new students", where the top part addresses bachelors-students from each of the 5 mayor areas (technical, societal etc), while the bottom part of the graph shows the vocational education system here.
After they start, they will use 5 years minimum to get their degrees. Bachelors are worthless in Denmark.
EDIT: I know the first article is from 2004. Here's a 2016 article that states that new students at the University of Copenhagen (largest in Denmark) had an avg. age of 22,7 in 2016, which was a year younger than the avg. age in 2015: https://uniavisen.dk/alderspraesidenter-eller-groenskollinge...
I don't know. But right now, companies are trying to solve the problem in other ways, which is ultimately not addressing their core need.
I just feel like some sort of educational system (bootcamp'ish) would be able to make a good business case for most companies.
But I don't know how many you could train within a cost-effective timeframe.
If you're selling a thing and the market price is lower than the thing is worth, then you don't sell it.
If the minimum wage kept up with the increase in worker productivity over the last 50 years, today's minimum wage would be about $19.50.
So workers who refuse to take dead-end jobs are simply rational economic actors refusing to sell a large fraction of their existence for a pittance.
If employers have job openings they can't fill, while workers are idle because they won't work so cheap, then shouldn't the market-clearing wage increase? If not, what's preventing it?
Other workers will work cheap. See, it doesn't matter what you think your time is worth. The supply of people willing to work is what determines what it is worth.
Minimum wage jobs can literally be done by almost anyone who is not mentally or physically handicapped. You can "refuse to sell" your labor at that price, but when you have nothing in the way of skills or experience to offer, you really are just choosing to be unemployed.
If you are correct that other workers are willing to work that cheap, then the jobs would be filled.
Workers exist but are unwilling to work that cheap, so they're idle while employers have unfilled jobs.
Whenever you see a news story that says "employers having difficulties finding qualified workers," you can safely replace that phrase with "employers are unwilling to pay the market rate for labor."
[1] U.S. job openings hit record high of 7.14 million https://www.investing.com/news/economic-indicators/us-job-op...
Increasing the minimum wage results in some people getting a higher wage and other people getting $0.
It depends on how you look at it. Don't get me wrong, men have had lots of privileges, but they have long been expected to work. Those social expectations are rapidly disappearing, and somewhat shifting to women, and we're seeing rates of depression and suicide rise for women in roughly the same time frame. Calling it privileged is a very one-sided way of looking at it, as the "privilege" comes with lot of responsibility that quickly becomes burdensome. With affordable home appliances, online services through your phone, video games, Netflix, and PornHub, the house wife/husband is obsolete. Why take on the same burdens your fathers did when little to none of that existed?
With wages being stagnant since the 1970s, the ridiculous housing market, the materialist debt-slave culture, the decline of marriage, and the decrease in sustainable jobs, why exactly should millennial(and increasingly Gen Z) men bother working as much as their fathers? I come from a very wealthy area and only one of the dozens of men my age, with whom I grew up with, own what their fathers did when they were their age. Millennial men are rife with disenfranchisement that flies under the radar because the economy has enough shit jobs to allow them to scrape by, and the media is generally not compassionate to the issues of men. I mean, just look at this article which is clearly written as an underhanded criticism of young men.
Let me repeat the question in the last paragraph:
Why exactly should millennial men work as much as their fathers?
I can only offer my perspective - I take on those burdens because I want what my fathers had. I want a stable family, a wife who is able to stay home and care for and teach our children, a comfortable retirement, and the ability to help both my extended family and my community at large.
Still, I don't disagree with your comment overall. It seems that I am a bit of an outlier among my peers to want those things. I don't blame people for deciding that this path in life isn't worth it to them, and that they'd prefer to walk another.
For that matter, if hadn't met my wife so early in life, I'm not sure I'd be looking to get married and start a family now. I'd probably be living a minimal existence in a van or small RV in California, working at FAANG, and putting back as much of my pay as I could. A few years of that and I'd be financially able to move back to rural America to live a comfortable life and never have to work again.
I'm literally going to have to "shop around" for my next appointment should I need one.
- Go to college? Get massive debt, insecure about losing whatever job you get after. Lots of other people have paper too. Oh and they also want to live near where degree jobs are, just like you.
- Start in the mail room? They don't promote from the mail room anymore.
- Work minimum wage? Everything costs what it needs to cost for you to have zero saving or extra time.
- Buy a house? Houses already cost a lot. In fact every investment asset costs a lot.
- Start a business? Even starting a restaurant is different from a couple of decades ago.
- Learn a trade? This one sounds reasonable to me actually. All that "you must get a degree" has left a hole that plumbers and electricians can fill. But you have to get used to being looked down on. Plus many people use prestige as an indicator of income, so they might not discover there's a reasonable living to be made. Still requires you to apprentice for a bit though.
I think a lot of the challenges you list apply to most people, and even then white males have a big leg up on most anyone. Times are tough all over. Tougher for those more disenfranchised, already.
And no, I'm not arguing against the privileges of men. I'm criticizing the use of that word, in comparison to the rest of the article, as a covert gendered judgment. Just because men continue to have a "privilege" doesn't mean they will continue to want that privilege. When there's no incentive, why exactly would a man or a woman want the responsibilities that come with a high-flying career, dating, marriage, having a family, home ownership, retirement planning, et cetera et cetera? What this journalist sees as "perplexing" is hardly inexplicable.
Yes, those challenges indeed apply to most if not all people. Just because other people have things worse than others doesn't mean that one privileged group's behavior can't be explained by their own disenfranchisement. The fact that nobody can answer the question I've repeatedly asked demonstrates my point; the benefits of the man's privilege is in decline, hence men aren't going to participate in the economy the same way they used to. Why is it that you are redirecting the discussion to those(unnamed) with relatively worse privation?
I weep for the one young man who is studying to be an EMT. I learned recently that that job, which is tasked often with saving lives, pays ~12 bucks an hour. The "hot" labor market is a farce.
That's a really awesome job for someone who is struggling to make ends meet at a pizza joint (example from article). This is 100% anecdotal and regional. So take it with a grain of salt.
No shit, I was a data center manager then and contemplated switching jobs.
Source: I hired both union and non-union (union guys on the side) for electrical work in DC area data centers.
Given these are the types of jobs these men are leaving, and assuming these are the types of jobs still available, it's these jobs.
The market is hot because jobs are available. It's not hot because good jobs are available.
I personally had one hell of a time going through the hiring process despite my credentials.
I was also amused by the comment, “I’m very quick to get frustrated when people refuse to pay me what I’m worth.” This seems like a conversation I have at least once a quarter with someone. You're worth what the market is willing to offer you, not what you think you are worth.
They may well be able to do without but the supply will adjust accordingly. Look at mining boom towns and their crazy inflation - one could say line cooks aren't worth $35/hr but if they can get a $50/hr mining job the local market will be in a perpetual shortage because they refuse to "overpay".
If you think of the housing market as a rough example, a house may have been "worth" 500k in 2006, 350k in 2010, and 525k in 2018, but unless you sold it, the "worth" didn't matter. Likewise, the individuals you are describing are choosing to hold themselves off of the labor market due to the opportunity costs of selling their labor at a cost they consider to be below value. No idea if they're wrong or right about getting a better deal by waiting, but your worth is not market dictated until you accept employment somewhere.
This is an absurd statement, the market is not a god. It does not have a value system.
The word "market" is just a convenient tag to refer to a collection of individuals like you and me looking to buy/sell goods and/or services, and deciding what's best for them given the choices available, their priorities, and the information they have.
Thus, when anyone refers to what "the market is willing to offer", they are referring to what the individuals like you and me who are shopping for a good/service are actually willing to pay in exchange for it.
Are you willing to pay a philosophy major a 70k/year salary for him to research a topic? No? Neither is anyone else. Thus, in short, the market for philosophy research is not willing to pay for that.
> Butcher has a high-school diploma and a resume filled with low-wage jobs from Target and Walmart to a local grocery store. He’s being selective as he searches for new work because he doesn’t want to grind out unhappy hours for unsatisfying compensation.
I believe that having a job that you love is a luxury. It is something to look at once basic needs are met.
There are jobs out there, and even jobs that train entry level in a trade. No, it may not be the job you love... but as Stephen Stills said:
> If you're down and confused And you don't remember who you're talking to Concentration slip away Because your baby is so far away
> Well, there's a rose in a fisted glove And the eagle flies with the dove And if you can't be with the one you love, honey Love the one you're with ...
That doesn’t mean one should love that unsatisfying job, but recognize that not everyone will have that dream job.
I think this is a large part of the issue here. I only have my experience employing millenials to go by, but they're a group that seems to be less focused on compensation and career advancement than generations before them. They're version of the American Dream is also different than generations before them. It's not get job, make money, get a house, have kids, etc. There's nothing wrong with any of that. Society has changed, and the economics have changed.
I graduated college in 1997 with $30k in debt, which was a lot at the time. Now, that'd be below average. I was the only one of my large group of friends that didn't own a house within 5 years of graduation. Contrast that with the cohort of millenials I've managed, and I don't think a single one out of several dozen have owned their own home. It's either not a high priority or seems so out of reach when student loans and the high cost of ownership in this area (Boston) come into play. Sure, they could maybe buy a place in suburbia, but again that's a smaller priority than in was before them.
My tl:dr; for the article is that they're less willing to work "just because" and have different goals than generations before them, and that's hard for people to grok.
I've seen the "I've been looking for a job for six months and a recruiter contacted me about a position at {finance, defense, public sector, back office retail}, but I turned them down because I don't want to work in that industry."
Sometimes its a "you keep saying that you're looking for a job, but you aren't applying where there are openings."
I've worked big tech before the layoffs in '09. Since then I've worked back office retail, GIS logistics and now public sector... I won't say that any of them are jobs that I would say that I love (they aren't the dream job), but I am able to find meaning in them and enjoy the work that I do because there are hard problems to solve. When I was looking for a job, I took my time picking, but I didn't say "no" when they had an offer and I was unemployed.
One of the things that the line that I mentioned above...
> Butcher has a high-school diploma and a resume filled with low-wage jobs from Target and Walmart to a local grocery store. He’s being selective as he searches for new work because he doesn’t want to grind out unhappy hours for unsatisfying compensation.
Switching jobs every few months trying to find one that is satisfying means that the next employer isn't going to invest as much to train that person and isn't as likely to chose that person for promotion to those higher paying jobs within the company.
One may claim that they value their (in this case just a high school diploma job) at $40/h, but if they can't produce $20/h of value for the company, well, they're not going to get hired at $40/h.
Follow your passion (that seems to be something many millennials have as their version of the American Dream sounds great... but really should be "Find the hard work you're willing to do" (see http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018-1... )
So now living with your parents into your 30s is like taking basic income. This is all fine if someone is truly doing this to invest in more education to get out of the unskilled labor market, but bad when it is just an excuse to be lazy. I too worked low wage jobs when I was a teen and in college to pay my way, I find that when people leave the upward trajectory by leaving school or their job for "something better" they end up becoming lazy and end up worse.
When I was in my late teens/20s I never thought moving back home was an acceptable option. Working at McDonalds or delivering pizza and living with roomates felt more honorable than moving back in with my parents.
I can grok 'lazy' or non-participation, but adding kids to the mix?
1) Women tend to marry up. An accomplished woman with a great job wants a man with a better job. That shrinks the pool a lot for her! A beautiful woman wants a beautiful man, or is willing to trade some beauty for other qualities like status, money, personality, etc. This shrinks the small pool even further.
2) An accomplished woman is likely in her mid thirties, she's got just a couple years to find someone and start having kids to have that family. A small pool with a tight time-frame.
3) Many of the "good men" in 35-45 age group are already married. That pool just keeps getting smaller.
I mean really she wants a 35-45 year-old hyper-successful man who's still single. Those kinds of men are probably not looking to marry 35 year old women. They're super desirable men and they can date from the pool of more desirable twenty year old women. Seems like a very tough situation to be in.
Why should the individuals in question follow traditional paths, when there's ample adequate satisfaction and happiness to be found in life paths that carry less personal responsibility and financial burden? If having children and a life-partner does not out weigh the relevant stressors, in their subjective assessment, then I see no reason why they'd choose as I have.
From what I can tell, women who consistently complain they can't find a good man wants a self-made man who's already succeeded, instead of one in the process of acquiring that success.
This is identical to a guy who quits on the third day because he's not the CEO yet, even though his job is in the mail room and no one even knows his name yet.
Want something in life? Work for it. There are no participation prizes in life: this goes for both the traditional male and traditional female roles. Success only sees success, no matter what you choose to do in life.
No one wants a partner, regardless of gender, that doesn't contribute.
