Millennials work just as hard as boomers
You may have heard that people aged 18-33 don’t drive cars, don’t watch cable TV, don’t care one iota about politics (unless Bernie Sanders is on the ticket) and don’t value their privacy — or even, for that matter, know what privacy is.
Statistically speaking, almost none of this is true, but these myths prevail about everyone’s favourite scapegoat — the millennial — because it’s fun to rag on the young.
It’s true: I’m 27 and even I can’t shirk the desire to murder my own cohort sometimes. We are, after all, the reason why so many news headlines nowadays read like a transcript from Keeping Up with the Kardashians: “Donald Trump met the president of Mexico and you, like, totally will not believe what happened next!” . . . “OMG, Hillary Clinton’s email fail IS ALL OF US.”
But the place where anti-millennial sentiment is legitimately unfair is also the place where it’s most prevalent: at work. There is perhaps no greater myth about Generation Y than the notion that we are drastically different from our parents when it comes our working lives.
The stereotype goes, as championed by the deluge millennial- themed books published every year, that in the work world, millennials are practically an alien species. We are hyper-connected but scatterbrained, smart but ungrateful and shiftless. Our ideal work life supposedly consists of working remotely in spurts of 10 minutes, sitting on exercise balls and whining about our bosses on Twitter.
Though this is a fantastic image, it too is patently false. Here’s why.
According to a new study published recently in the Journal of Business and Psychology, entitled “Generational Differences in Work Ethic: Fact or Fiction?” baby boomers do not have a more robust work ethic than their allegedly lazy millennial colleagues. In fact, researchers from Wayne State University analyzed 77 studies dealing with work ethic and determined that younger people are just as prone as their elders to uphold the so-called “Protestant Work Ethic,” a.k.a. PWE, characterized by an uncompromising dedication to work and a disdain for leisure time.
It just so happens, according to an online survey released in August by the non-profit U.S. Travel Association, that millennials are the “most likely generation to forfeit time off.”
So what are we to make of this? Well for starters, write the researchers at Wayne State, the finding that generational differences don’t really exist when it comes to work ethic “suggests that organizational initiatives aimed at changing talent management strategies for the ‘very different’ millennial generation may be unwarranted and not a valueadded activity.”
In English: if you’re the CEO of a company looking to attract young talent, don’t replace all your desk chairs with exercise balls just yet. News of our radical laid-back-ness has been grossly exaggerated. We work just as hard as boomers.
Why then do popular myths tell us otherwise? They tell us otherwise, perhaps, because (as I’ve written about a million times before) young people exist in a precarious work world, millions of them on contracts that provide no room for ascension on the corporate ladder and scant benefits. So while they work as hard as they can in their jobs of the day, it isn’t rocket science as to why they are always on the lookout for different work — and why they report more than older generations a de- sire to work for several different employers in a lifetime.
I’m going to tell you a story. A few months ago, I received a phone call from a radio station. A producer there offered me job: she asked me if I would like to host my own show. When I asked her how much the job paid, she told me that, at present, it paid nothing. (They were waiting, she said, for sponsors to come in, and they might in the meantime be able to offer me a modest stipend.)
I may be youngish, but I am also an established columnist for a national newspaper. My intention here isn’t to toot my own horn, but to put into context what the work world is like for a lot of young people. If an already settled career person like myself is asked to do unpaid work as though it’s no big deal, what do you imagine finding a decent job is like for newbies trying to establish themselves? Yeah: not great.
So go ahead: keep ragging on us for peppering our sentences with gratuitous likes, but where our work ethic is concerned, like, give us a break already. It’s rough out there. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.