I mean I’m GenX, and I’ve been fired from three different jobs for reasons beyond my control.
The concept of working for one company for your whole career, getting promoted to a high paying position, retiring with a healthy pension simply no longer exists anymore. You can work hard and do everything right, even be in a division that’s making money and you still might lose your job simply because laying off employees looks good to the shareholders.
But it’s all the fault of the young people! You just need to work harder… on your LinkedIn profile because what you do for the company you’re at right now doesn’t matter, it’s what it looks like you do that matters more now.
The company I work for had record earnings recently and there were high spirits, long praising newsletter from the CEO. Praise for maintaining a very stable production and higher output with fewer people than competitors.
Until our closest competitors reported their earnings. Which were higher, not surprising as they are bigger than us. Then it was doom and gloom
All of a sudden we had to have substantial budget cuts, and couldn’t rehire to fill a position for someone who had left.
Crazy huh, earned a boatload of money, but someone else earned a bit more. So then we have to cut expenses and optimize.
They still had the audacity recently to try to push the company “spirit and mindset” to employees. Something something buzzwords…
They will still discard you as fast as yesteryears iPhone.
Yup it’s all the fault of Jack Welch. He worked at GE and company culture at the time was to be proud of the number of employees they had. Some companies were proud that they never laid anyone off even during the great depression. They proudly took a loss rather than lay off anyone.
So Jack works his way up the ranks of GE which is how things worked back then. He got all the way to the top of this great company that was proud of his employees. And as soon as he was CEO he started laying everyone off. And the stock price of GE soared.
Ever since then that’s what every CEO tries to emulated. The stock market sees the CEO emulating Jack Welch and buy buy buy.
But it’s all short term thinking. Products get worse and worse, nobody give a shit about their job, work doesn’t get done. But just blame the employees and do another layoff.
Jack Welch fucked us all, but very few people even know his name.
“We care about you until you start underperforming during a global pandemic because of mental health. Then fuck you”
It’s easy to tell when a company actually is serious about caring about employees. Our executives took $0 bonuses last year so employees could have normal bonuses, and they bought everyone a free turkey for Thanksgiving. Our financials aren’t the best right now, but we still have a 401k match and all our benefits, and they’ve frozen hiring so they don’t have to do layoffs. Our CEO chats with us weekly and takes questions, and he tells us to not worry about the stock price. We do good work, and success will follow, he says.
Anecdotally, I had a serious health issue at the beginning of this year, and my boss told me to take off all the time I needed. I’m still on leave through the rest of the month, no questions asked. My previous company had people like that, but they weren’t supported by HR policies.
I’m still very wary however, because it doesn’t take long at all to get screwed over.
I’m GenX, and I spent about ~25 years in the corporate racket before I realized that they don’t give a fuck. I’m all about living now as well, and I encourage others to do the same.
Your parents got more than we ever will. We'll work until we're physically broken and will be lucky to die in a cardboard box, let alone receive a pin to barter for a crust of bread with.
Oh I know. And I have explicitly moaned on about it. They don’t understand. They don’t need to rent. They are mortgage free and just don’t understand the world anymore. No point on me banging on about it.
I think this is a huge part of the problem. Rental property owners are just a liability buffer for the banks. There should be mortgages at a 1% down payment for first time buyers with a proven track record of making rent payments on time. Maybe the rates are a little higher, with the extra interest giving the banks motivation for taking on the extra risk. Then after the first term the owner can renew with a normal rate.
Doesn’t help with the demand issue, but maybe all the rentals will flood the market after nobody is being punished for not having $100k laying around because they’re busy paying someone else’s carrying costs.
Right, like the majority of my millennial friends also work to live, not live to work, it’s just that living is so damn expensive that after we’re done working enough to pay rent, there’s not many hours left in the week to live.
I’m incredibly privileged. I have no debt, no loans, and housemates to split bills with. I only do 20 hours of paid work per week, and my hourly rate is pretty damn decent for my industry (I’m a coordinator in a community centre, I make $32AUD an hour).
I enjoy my work life balance and I wouldn’t have it any other way, I have time to care for my chronic illness properly, and time for friends, and family, and to volunteer in my community for passion projects that could never in a million years pay the bills.
But being in your mid thirties and splitting rent with other people is tough, I fortunately don’t want marriage or kids, but I can’t see how I’d make it work if I did, babies can’t help me split the rent, and most housemates don’t want to live with a crying baby that isn’t theirs.
So when my friend leaves his fun job for a grind company we know sucks our your soul, but it pays 8x as much and it’s “just for 2 years until the deposit is saved for and the baby is born” then it’s completely understandable why the next 24 months of my friends life is consumed with work. Because he needs that work now, so that he can live later.
But 2 years becomes 5 years becomes 10 years because first it’s the GFC, then it’s the housing bubble, then it’s the mini recession, then it’s covid, now it’s whatever the fuck times were living in.
And at some point for millennials (and many younger Gen X’ers) living became surviving and we work to survive, we don’t even know what thriving looks like.
I’m a milennial. I live in a country where we try not to work ourselves to death. Even my employer encourages an active separation between work and personal life. I do not remember what my monthly or yearly salary is, but I am able to have a good personal life with alot of spare time and money for my hobbies.
When I talk to my friends over the pond to the west, I’m always shocked about what I hear. 40+ hour workweeks, hardly any time off from work, etc. I also have a couple of friends in Japan, and their stories are actually worse compared to across the western pond.
Me and my girlfriend rent, which is somewhat unheard of around here. After the war, the economy was based on owning your own home. I made a few stupid choices when I was in my 20s, and I’m paying for them now by renting. The prices of homes are skyrocketing, so that every time I save some money, the prices increase and I have to save more to get a loan. Tough luck, but that’s the way it is. I do not want to get a side hustle just to kill my self getting enough money to buy my home.
Those disgruntled people in this thread. I suggest you read the article. The first thing it talks about is how companies started outsourcing and treating employees as replaceable, and employees were slow to respond at first, so companies just kept pushing until they finally fucked around enough to find out that they caused this mess.
It’s a pretty good article, and argues that the employers need to step up and start showing real leadership, instead of chasing the lowest contract, and single quarter vision.
I agree that it's a good article, but I find it highly unlikely that businesses will do those things. Private companies, maybe. But public companies need to keep the line going up, so they will always be short-sighted. It's why I don't want to work for public companies in the first place.
Why would they, Gen X grew up with both parents working jobs instead of the previous generations when one income was enough to support a family.
Society has been letting each following generation down even more than the previous. The boomers fucked everyone when they pulled the ladder up behind them.
America isn’t a country, it’s just a business. That business minded model for society has drained all decency out of it. The US is a kleptocratic, psychopathic, oligarchy that has rotted out the brains of formerly decent people who have become the monsters we all see in stories like these. It will take multiple generations to fix this, if that is even possible.
Your brainwashed mesmerized grandparents and their lazy non-voting baby boomer children let Reagan through the door in no uncertain terms, and in that environment the 80s “hostile corporate takeover” and junk bonds fever set in; with bottomless greed as the virus, which like herpes, seems to stick around forever.
Lazy voters stayed home and let Trump in. (With a strong assist from the Democratic party.). That’s not what happened with Reagan. Reagan had incredibly broad popular support. I don’t know if that’s more or less damning of American voters, but no amount of additional turnout would have saved Carter.
Clearly more than the average, but not “most”. Last I remember the figure was something like 12%.
In a small company it sure makes a difference if your senior management are sociopaths, but if the company is large enough that you’ll never see the CEO I’m not sure what difference does it make that he doesn’t care about you personally.
You’re just wrong. Psychopath is just a less skilled version of the same damn thing. They don’t make it CEO’s except that rare instance of inheriting the wealth. Then, sure, we get a great example of it like Elon. But then they’re just that.
That’s what it comes down to: You are expected to have loyalty to your employer, but your employer has 0 loyalty to you. If you want me to break my back for a single company, it needs to do right by its employers first.
We need unions that span many companies to which workers can join for the long term. That is the kind of organization to be loyal to for the long term.
I knew it would happen again the other month, when I was reporting on white-collar workers who secretly juggle multiple full-time jobs. Overemployment, as the phenomenon is known, violates society's implicit norms of loyalty to one's employer more flagrantly than anything else I've encountered. But when I asked these overemployed professionals whether they felt bad that they were essentially cheating on their bosses...
What the fucking fuck? This guy actually articulated this thought as if it were rational?
IMO the weekend should be longer than the fucking work week. We have this shit backwards. Work is 5 days and then we have barely 1 day to relax, since you need one of the weekend days for errands.
I loved working 4 10s (and at that place it was more like 4 13s) because it gave 1 day to relax, 1 to run errands/go to weekday appointments, and 1 to clean the house/relax. Id much rather work longer 4 days a week and have an extra day off the workday is so long anyway especially with a commute that I can’t do anything after work anyway (and I was too tired to).
If you work from home, you can do things during the work week too. Say you have a meeting where you only talk for 5 minutes. You clean or do chores the rest of the time. Just wear and earbud and put yourself on mute.
You can have your whole weekend off. I’m never going back to in office work unless the pay is doubled. It takes up all your time.
Even worse, during the Great Resignation, employers effectively penalized employees for their loyalty, offering sky-high salaries to attract job candidates while neglecting their existing staff. As I reported in 2022, veteran employees received salaries that were 7% lower, on average, than new hires.
The biggest raise I've ever gotten in my 20 year career was 10%. The smallest increase in salary from switching jobs was 20%, and that's an outlier. Staying in one job just isn't worth it anymore.
His boss apologized, telling him that the layoffs had nothing to do with him. It was just business.
And there's the problem. Employers are businesses, and no matter how loyal your boss is to you and vice versa, some beancounter will axe your job without a second thought. "Just business" is anathema to loyalty.
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