I stumbled across this article at Yahoo News by Orianna Rosa Royle and it touched on so many recurring themes here that I just had to pass it on. Here’s the situation:
“This is the most humbled I’ve ever felt in my life,” a teary-eyed Gen Z graduate reported back to her TikTok fans while holding a stack of résumés after a disappointing day of job-seeking—and the brutal wake-up call has struck a generational nerve.
In the video, which has amassed over 23 million views, Lohanny Santos, a 26-year-old from Brooklyn with a dual degree and three languages up her sleeve, shared that she’d been going door-to-door to find work to no avail.
but then you dig a little deeper:
After her online venture didn’t generate enough income to pay the bills, she went into several coffee shops to hand them her resume—just like she did when she was 16 and was looking for a job. But it wasn’t long before the Pace University graduate realized that not even “two degrees in communications and acting” is enough to land a $16-an-hour job in New York in the current tough job market.
“It’s honestly a little bit embarrassing because I’m literally applying for, like, minimum-wage jobs,” she cried. “And some of them are being like, ‘We’re not hiring’ and it’s like, ‘What?’ This is not what I expected.”
“This sucks,” she concluded.
and this gets to the crux of the matter:
Just last month, 27-year-old Robbie Scott similarly went viral on TikTok for insisting that Gen Z isn’t any less willing to work than generations before. Instead, he said, they are “getting angry and entitled and whiny” about the prospect of having to work hard for the rest of their adult life, only to “get nothing in return.”
“What’s sh-tty is, we’re holding up our end of the deal,” Scott said. “We’re staying in school. We’re going to college. We’ve been working since we were 15, 16 years old…doing everything that y’all told us to do so that we can what? Still be living in our parents’ homes in our late twenties?”
How in the world can this be happening when the unemployment rate is 3.7%? Let’s decompress this a little. Jobs today fall into several categories:
- Low-skill jobs that must be done in person. Wages for such jobs are under pressure from constant immigration and have been for thirty years.
- Jobs that must be done in person, are licensed and require credentialing. Some of the jobs in this category pay very well indeed but require specific skills and training and are frequently quite constrained in number.
- Jobs that can be done remotely and require the ability to read and write in English but not much else tangible. Wages for those jobs are under pressure from offshore and have been for thirty years. What’s worse those jobs are about to fall off a cliff in the form of large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI).
- Jobs that can be done remotely, frequently require a college degree, and require skills and often credentialing in some specific disciplines, e.g. web development. Those jobs, too, have been offshored for decades. There are nearly as many people in India with college degrees as there are people in the U. S. Entry-level jobs in this category, too, will be under pressure from LLM AI.
Now let’s consider this young woman’s situation. The jobs she has been looking for are in the first and third categories and, frankly, she’ll never be able to make a decent living doing them. Her degrees are non-disciplines. Acting and content creation require talent, drive, and, realistically, looks but not a college degree. That has been true for a century or more. Her two degrees are useless. For the jobs that must be done in person, she’s competing with large numbers of immigrant workers and for the jobs that can be done remotely she’s competing with everyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection. I wish her good fortune and her TikTok post will probably help her but I don’t envy her.
There are strategies which could mitigate the problem but they’re wildly unpopular because each of them gores somebody’s ox.
Is she missing an important point here? When she handed her resume to businesses when she was 16, she didn’t have college degrees. Isn’t it likely that informing employers that she has college degrees hurts her chances at many jobs? She looks like someone who is “settling” for the moment, and won’t stay long.
Yes. She looks like someone who is gone as soon as possible and may be resentful while working there. Anyway, there will always be individual bad stories. Taken as a whole, Millennials earn more, adjusted for inflation than boomers did, own homes at the same rate, live in NYC at the same rate and are just as wealthy. The rate of increase has slowed down and they do need to change jobs and move more often.
Steve
She’s Gen Z rather than a Millennial.
Just a nitpick. At 26 / 27, they aren’t millennials, but gen-z.
Surveys are suggesting gen-z has had a quite difference experience from millennials.
There are a large number of “ghost” jobs posted but not available.
Some such as Amazon fulfillment centers have such high turnover that they simply keep advertising positions as open.
For more skilled Tech jobs companies collect resumes for their data under assumption that the applicant will eventually be hired by one of their competitors and may at that point be pursued.
I simply detest companies like Uber that take advantage of poverty by offering people the opportunity to sell off what is probably their most valuable asset, their vehicle for a little money, day by day.
People who are thus “employed” will have nothing at all by the time old age overtakes them. Without social security earnings, there will be an explosion in the number of people applying for need based disability and the treasury, which doesn’t collect disability benefit insurance,
Will collapse.
Always forget the dividing line between Millennial and Gen Z so my bad. Being retired now I didnt have to work with Gen Z that much. There certainly seem to be a lot of complaints about employers not wanting to hire them because they are more difficult. However, that sounds a bit like what we heard about millennials so hard to know if tis true or just old people always thinking younger people are worse. I do think the pandemic has skewed things for this group so need to wait to see longer term results.
Steve