This is a shout-out for millennials, today’s scapegoat generation.
Lost productivity?
This is what millennials, those age 18 to 34, hear ad infinitum: “These young’uns just don’t know how to work.”
Lagging sales?
“In my day, we beat the pavement.”
Oh yeah.
If it’s any comfort, us baby boomers got the same knee-jerk reaction from our elders. Back then it was how soft we were because we didn’t grow up walking 10 miles to school.
From our experience here at The Register, the younger generation are as productive, if not more so, than their elders.
The difference is that they work differently. Emails and texts can save time over in-person visits or phone calls. No, they don’t replace those essential face-to-face contacts. But oftentimes a text suffices for a phone call, an email for a drive across town.
Reporters these days use their phones to record just about every conversation. Instead of scribbling furiously to catch every word, they can better judge the tone of the event by looking at expressions and even engaging themselves in the conversation.
What I most appreciate about millennials is the creativity they bring to the job. I think this comes from their greater exposure to what’s possible from the internet.
Twenty-five years ago we used clip art from big catalogs to help illustrate an ad or story. Yes, it’s as crude as it sounds. With scissors we would clip packaged art — a drawing or photo of a car, bowl of fruit, an insurance policy — and paste it on the layout to be photographed and, oh, never mind. It was a long process compared to today’s computerized methods.
And it’s this broader exposure that instills in our youth a healthy sense of pride in what they do. No longer do they compare themselves to how it’s always been done. Instead, they put themselves up against what is being done all across an ever-changing world.
The other difference is that almost universally today’s young parents — both mom and dad — are employed. That means not only do they juggle both family and work but they also work to see that their kids have the opportunity to be involved in tumbling, dance, Scouts, soccer, 4-H, etc.
The gut punch to all this hard work is that for the first time in many generations, today’s youth face the prospect that their standard of living will be less than that of their parents. That’s a bitter pill to swallow. On average, millennials today earn 20 percent less than baby boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve.
Today’s 30-year-olds have half the net worth of their parents at the same age. The rate of home ownership is lower, while student debt much higher.
And yet Congress refuses to raise the minimum wage, which remains, after nine years, at an insulting $7.25 an hour. A full-time job at minimum wage equals to $15,080, almost $3,000 above the federal poverty level for a single individual. Kansas is one of 20 states that sets its base wage to the federal level.
Whether an industry pays minimum wage or not, the tone set in Washington, D.C. and Topeka speaks volumes about what value we place on entry-level workers.
SO THE NEXT time you’re tempted to bash the young, hold back and think. Just because they work differently doesn’t mean they work less. It just could be that they work smarter.
