Millennial MP battles ‘lazy’ label
Early last week, on a stormy evening in downtown Toronto, 34-year-old New Democrat MP Niki Ashton led a town hall discussion about “Precarious Work in the Millennial Generation.”
Ashton, who represents the Manitoba riding of Churchill-Keewatinook Aski and is the NDP critic for jobs, employment and workplace development, spoke to a group of about 40 people — most of them under 40 — in a drab room at the United Steelworkers Hall.
At the back of the room on a table near the door, there was complimentary coffee in self-serve, cardboard carriers from a nearby Krispy Kreme. And up front, there was a lot of anxiety.
A nearly broke 30-year-old sommelier and restaurant waiter lamented the lack of advanced scheduling and regulation in his industry: “My dream,” he said, “is to be in the black.”
A woman, who said she was speaking on behalf of her 20-year-old niece, asked Ashton what could be done about employers who take advantage of their young charges. And a young man who said he worked in the Trump hotel, of all places, told a story of bad bosses and worse luck.
Almost everyone sought lower tuition fees, a $15 or $20 minimum wage and an end to a culture of crappy contracts for young people that offer no security.
Some liked the idea of “floating benefits,” a dental plan, for example, that follows a person from job to job. Others, in traditional NDP fashion, wanted everything and more: an overhaul of the system.
Ashton took notes and, like a northern Obama, thanked “folks” for sharing. But she couldn’t and can’t — at least not yet — offer anything in the way of a policy antidote to their woes.
This is because the MP is in the middle of a cross-country tour of sorts, hosting town halls on the subject of precarious employment, listening to the grievances of young people from Halifax to the West Coast who feel they will never be able to settle down, have kids or (the biggest long shot, especially in Toronto and Vancouver) buy a house.
Ashton will present the findings of her tour — and, she hopes, some solutions to the problem of precarious employment — at a forum in Ottawa at the end of October. The MP sat down with me the morning after she led the town hall in Toronto and, although she couldn’t tell me in specific terms how she would make life better for the 18-34 demographic, she did tell me this: In order to achieve any meaningful change, we need to first dismantle the popular stereotypes that millennials are “lazy” and “disinterested.”
“This requires a shift in mentality,” Ashton said, highlighting the fact that after she writes about precarious labour on social media: “I still have to go on my own politician Facebook page and erase comments like, ‘Oh, get a job.’ ”
The narrative of the ingrate millennial is so entrenched in our culture, she said, it turns up in places where people should really know better.
For example, Ashton told me she was at a committee meeting on employment insurance in the spring when a witness “went on and on about how millennials just don’t want to work.”
“This person made reference to some guy bringing his mom to a job interview,” Ashton said. “And even though the meeting was about EI and not this one guy, this is what my colleagues on both aisles chose to hook onto.”
There was no evidence, she said, as to who “this guy” was or whether he was representative of a larger group of lazy people his age, and yet some of the older policy-makers in the room determined that “this was a real problem.”
Yes, apparently, our elected officials, just like your crotchety uncle, enjoy sharing stories about that “one guy” who just so happens to confirm everything wrong with kids these days.
The funny thing, however, is that Ashton — a member of Gen Y, albeit an old one (her contemporaries include Nicki Minaj, 33, and Drake, 29) — has been characterized as a stereotypically flaky and hypersensitive millennial herself.
This was evident when she took a day trip to the campaign offices of Bernie Sanders earlier this year and was more or less characterized in the press as a kid playing hooky to see a rock concert. “I guess I hit a slow news day,” she recalled. “Because everybody and their dog was into it.”
And who can forget Elbowgate in May, when Ashton made the illadvised and, frankly, absurd suggestion that Trudeau’s accidental elbowing of a fellow MP on the floor of the House of Commons contributed to an unsafe workplace for women.
In the end then, Ashton isn’t just battling negative perceptions about an entire generation, but negative perceptions about herself, too.
She hopes, however, that by making the issue of precarious millennial labour official, via “town halls” like the one she conducted last week, older leaders and perhaps the public will have a change of heart.
I hope so, too.