This thread and others like it have characterized the OWS movement as young, unemployed people who are too self-entitled to get jobs that are beneath them. I have no idea if this characterization is accurate, or even based on anecdotes.
My contribution:
I was thrust into semi-adulthood when I dropped out of college and enlisted in the Air Force. I married my college sweetheart, who busted her ass to get 2 simultaneous degrees and got a fantastic white collar job straight out of college. By the time we were both 23 we were living independently halfway across the country from our parents.
Meanwhile, a lot of our friends drifted for a while. Some went back to school full time in their late 20s, others have spent long periods of time under-employed. I would say the overwhelming characterization of these wayward youths is that they’re holding out for an ideal job that may or may not exist. In other words, I can agree that there’s a sense of entitlement; they’re willing to live off their parents, friends, spouses, or loans in order to live a life that they want. Some of them have taken 10 years to get there, others are still searching.
The thing is, none of these people are “unemployed” in the traditional sense. They’re making rent, they have food and iPhones and beer money. The people I know who moved back in with their folks did so on a temporary and mutually agreed upon arrangement. Nobody is living hand-to-mouth worrying about the water getting shut off while refusing to get a job at McDonalds. They’re also pursuing their goals, not sitting around all day playing MW3.
I do know a couple people who are close to living like that, but I would say the root cause of their problems is psychological. Depression, PTSD, etc. They are the exception, not the rule.
I’ll concede that my sample pool consists of people who largely come from upper-middle-class families, who can afford to support them while they figure out life. So what says the dope. Is the “OWS generation” a bunch of bums who need to get jobs? Are there people out there who really need the money but are refusing to work? I’m not looking for broad generalizations but rather specific (if anonymous) examples?
“Lucius” - Graduated from a top US university in 2005. Following graduation he worked a ski lift for a season in Colorado. After that, he got a master’s degree in the UK. After his time in Europe, he moved back to his hometown and looked for jobs related to his degree. Not finding any, he moved to Chicago and continued searching - again no luck. Recently he moved to the East Coast, where his girlfriend is completing her medical residency. He’s active in his field on a volunteer basis - got published, local meet-ups, field work, involved with a international consulting start up, etc. I have no idea where he gets money. He is pretty frugal, but having lived with him, I know he can afford rent.
“Mortimer” - He graduated with an engineering degree in 2006 and worked as an engineer for a few years at a major industrial company. His girlfriend relocated, and he followed her, leaving his job. That was about two years ago. He’s kept himself busy by writing Android apps, though I don’t think he makes enough to replace his salary as an engineer. I haven’t asked, but I think he lives off savings. He applies/interviews for jobs every once in awhile, but doesn’t seem all that rushed to re-enter the working world.
“Zebadiah” - He worked at the same company for 5 years and was recently fired for a dubious reason. He’s currently involved in a legal battle over his firing, and sending out applications to other jobs in his field.
“Knut” - Quit his job at a Big 4 consulting firm a few years ago and has supported himself selling stuff on eBay. And various green vegetables.
As someone who is 25 and starting a PhD program, I have to object to the idea that I am “unemployed”. My program pays me a full stipend, which isn’t a lot but added to my wife’s stipend we have enough to cover rent and a few creature comforts. We’re not relying on borrowed money at all whatsoever.
I’m working way more than 40 hours each week (probably between 60 and 80 depending on the week). I could make more money while doing less work by taking some sort of entry-level sales job but I chose not to. Why? Because I *like *what I do, and someone happens to give me money to do it. And I fucking earned this, by demonstrating my ability for many years. So yeah, I consider being a Best Buy Salesdude “beneath me”.
(perhaps there’s a bit of defensive rationalization here…)
To be fair, it’s more of a rebuttal against the linked column which states that today’s younger working generation is justified in being too proud to take “manual labor” jobs because society done taught them wrong.
I know a lot of people who have gone hugely into debt to get a certain degree, and refuse to take jobs that don’t use that degree. Our friend “Jake” trained as a landscape architect and just won’t do any other work. I guess it helps that he shacks up with his M.D. girlfriend, who considers dog-sitting a fair trade for financial support.
It wouldn’t be my first choice, but I wouldn’t consider myself “too damn proud” to take a manual or fast-food job.
It’s just hard when as a kid you joke about how loser X or bully Y will just grow up to bag my groceries someday…Only to find yourself ten years later working at a grocery store.
Even though people try to comfort one another with “Oh, it’s just the bad economy, everybody’s like this, it’s not your faut etc. etc.” it’s still really hard to going from having high dreams of living independently to living back at home and having your future dreams feel like a laughable impossibility at this point.
I’ve worked various jobs since graduation. Tutoring gigs and cashiering, mostly. My longest job so far was at a grocery store making minimum wage. It was one thing to have to put up with the attitudes of the customers on a daily basis (this was a bad part of town) but I was also harassed and bullied by other workers for being edumacated. It really sucked and was a mental battle just to get through a shift. I’ve luckily gotten a new job somewhere more upscale, but the pay is the same so I won’t be moving out anytime soon.
I feel like I’m taking a gamble by going to get my masters. I’ll either come out with a good job earning more money in one year than my bank account has ever held in my life (which isn’t much) or I’ll up my debt to $90k and be right back where I started.
It’s just hard when, as a middle-class American, I’m raised on the dream of independence…Living in my own place, taking care of my own bills, earning things, being the master of my own domain, the whole house with a picket fence and all…To being a kid again, living at my parent’s and under their thumbnail and abiding by their rules. It’s really hard to go back to that once you had a taste of independence in college and had such high expectations for yourself.
I’m currently unemployed. I’ve been employed working various jobs for as long as I can remember. I put myself through college and several internships where I worked insane hours for peanuts. Then, I decided to marry the man of my dreams. We had to move across the country for his work, to a place where the economy is so depressed, 95% of the job postings I’ve come across are scams. Because I’ve worked all my life and am exceedingly frugal, we have enough savings that my unemployment hasn’t hurt us too much.
It’s frustrating. Before now, I never had a problem finding a job. In the past, I’ve walked into places of employment and been hired that day.
If you haven’t looked recently, you have no idea what it’s like.
You know what? I feel you. It’s easy to yell at unemployed people “Go flip a burger!” from a comfy middle-class perch. I’ve had some hard jobs since I’ve reached adulthood. Physically tiring, dirty, dangerous, soul-deadening jobs. But they at least had the saving grace–even when they were low-paid gigs–of being jobs with status. I had to use my brain and my training. I wasn’t embarrassed when I told people what I did for a living. I didn’t have nice benefits and I didn’t pull in big dough, but at least I hadn’t lost my dignity. I was still “somebody”.
Working at McDonald’s, however, would definitely pull the plug out of my esteem. I worked a McJob in high school and college. To go back to that would simply suck. Ain’t gonna lie.
So I don’t blame people for not wanting to do those jobs…or at least not racing to them at the first sign of unemployment. Eventually survival must take precedence over pride, but that doesn’t mean people can’t still be pissed. Or resentful.
The other thread–when people were mentioning how easy it was for their folks–reminded me of my graduate advisor. She managed to get into her graduate program at NYU without having taken calculus at Cornell (she wouldn’t be able to do that today, no way). She was able to get an assistant professorship without having published or having done a stint as a post-doc. She made tenure within a few years after publishing just a handful of papers, with just a couple of grad students in her lab.
Until she retired a year ago, she sat on a tenure committee–where she and her other gray-haired colleagues routinely withheld tenure from the younger faculty. These “young Turks” were no slobs. They were all published multiple times over in top-tier journals–some right out of graduate school. They had all done impressive post-docs. And their teaching was in line with the older faculty–which is to say, not great but not horrible either. And yet these old folks, who had to jump through only a few hoops to get to their ivory perches, welded all the power to deny the faster, swifter guys in the pack the same security that they had enjoyed! And had the audacity to cluck their tongues if the candidates were not absolutely perfect (perfect meant pulling in million-dollar NSF grants apparently). After watching three of my professors pack up their labs because they weren’t deemed good enough, I became majorly disillusioned with academia.
So yeah, people feel entitled. But they only want what their parents got and bragged about. Perhaps they should stop whining, but then the people who “got” should stop acting like the game hasn’t changed. It has.
I moved in with my boyfriend this May once school was over. I canvassed the city, put in applications, called every place to ask about my status, and still couldn’t find a job until a few weeks ago (now I work at Walmart). That’s nearly six months of being unemployed, and not by choice. If he hadn’t paid my share and his share of rent for those months, I would have been homeless. My family doesn’t approve of our relationship and so pulled all financial support once I decided to live with him. I am seriously thrilled to finally find a job after so many months of feeling bored and depressed and worthless. I’d like to assure the naysayers that many of those “self-important, pampered babies” would be willing to work minimum wage, service industry jobs if it was at all easy to get employment at this stage. It’s not always that easy, though. It takes a lot of patience to even get a “shitty” job, especially if you live in a small city like me.
I agree with what you wrote 100% When I graduated and began to worry about debt and the prospect of finding a job, my dad and his siblings were like “$40k? That’s nothing! That’s like, the price of a brand new car. You’ll make that in no time.”
They are still in the mindset that degree = money, no matter what. I was raised in that mindset too, so it was like a bucket of ice water to the face when I graduated in 2008 that no, it’s not as simple as that anymore.
I’ve had grandparents that got lifelong jobs despite dropping out of high school, no diploma required.
With my parents’ generation, you needed a diploma at the least but no degree required.
With this generation, you need a degree at the least. I think it’s really hard for them to understand that. If I had know that, I never would’ve taken the college route I did (pointless major, private college chosen by aunt, did well but generally had a horrible time at college.)
I think it’s hard to see how much my parents were able to get with less effort. Not to dismiss their years of hard work, I just mean without having to go to college, land tens of thousands of dollars in debt, just for the *chance *to get a better job. My father was the type that got hired in and through hardworking and training got promoted. Around this area, jobs like that are dead. By my age my parents were married with two children, bought a decent house with a nice yard in a good neighborhood, the whole American nine yards.
I do have some friends that are doing the American thing. Their college degrees didn’t help them at all, everyone I know that is doing well started out in jobs such as Kroger or McDonald’s when they were teenagers and by now they have enough seniority and hourly pay that they can afford to buy forclosed homes to start their independence. I can not imagine myself owning my own place, having a decent car, or being financially independent, and that thought as well as being a burden and failure to my family makes me sad everyday.
May I ask, is it your opinion that people who live by mooching off their upper-middle-class families are representative of the “OWS generation”? And if not, what’s the point of bringing it up?
I don’t like “feel good” empty platitudes. But things do get better. You will eventually be financially independent, barring anything really crazy happening to you. And you may not get to be homeowner or drive the latest car, but those are just things. Happiness matters more. I think if the recession has any positive outfall, it’s that people will finally learn how to live happily without accumulating a lot of stuff.
I am finally making enough money so that I don’t have to go around singing the theme song to “Good Times” to feel better. But I’ve already accepted that I will not own a house, and that any car I own will always be older than fifteen years. Owning new things is nice, but if you start thinking of them as being special luxuries, then your life becomes a lot simpler. I know I’m not keeping up with the Jones’s and that my standard of living is lower than my parents. My father pokes fun at me; co-workers do too. It used to bother me, but not anymore. As you get older, you get accustomed to where you are and don’t even hear the comments from the peanut gallery. You’ll see.
I don’t think there is such a thing as the “OWS generation.” I’m merely responding to criticism that the OWS protesters are all self-entitled unemployed people who refuse to get jobs.
I fully admit that while my unemployed peers are unemployed choice, this condition is a luxury that not everyone can afford. In fact, I suspect that they’re in the minority.
I also suspect, and was attempting to suss out with this thread, that the vast majority of people who are unemployed against their will aren’t unwilling to take any job, like Stauderhorse, for example. I think there’s basically two camps – the involuntarily unemployed who are desperate for a job, any job, and would gladly flip burgers; and the voluntarily unemployed who loudly bitch about having spent good money to get degrees that they can’t use, and who soundly refuse to settle for a burger-flipping job because they’re able to make ends meet while holding out for a job in their desired field.
The public has conflated these two groups, I think, and has created a mythical population of people with graduate degrees who are on welfare or nearly homeless, forced to sleep in tents at OWS protests because they have no money, yet refuse to work at McDonalds. I don’t think these people exist.
Of course, I have no idea if any of my hypothetical populations actually exist at OWS protests. I don’t know who those people are, and I’m not sure I care.
I’m hopeful that the improvement in the economy where I live is going to spread quickly. It only took me nine weeks to get a new job, and one of my friends/coworkers who began his job search then too has also gotten a new job too. It could be luck, it could be that a lot of people around here are bizarrely impressed by seeing where we worked (or in my case still work at greatly reduced hours) on resumes, but it would be nice if it’s because the economy is finally turning a corner.
But really, things have sucked for younger workers for some time. My generation, I’m at the tail-end of Gen X, is the first to make less than our parents. Boomers and people even older who insist that it’s our fault, rather than an outcropping of societal change, have their heads buried in the sand.
From one boomer to all the young people complaining about how hard it is to find a job: Try it when you’re over 55 and get laid off. NOBODY wants an unemployed 50+ worker. Well, almost nobody. After 6 months of sending out resumes and going on one interview after another, I had to settle for a job that pays less than half of the one I got laid off from. I would get very enthusiastic reactions to my resume and phone interviews, but not one offer once they’d seen my 59-year-old self. The one I finally got they almost didn’t hire me because I was overqualified.
IMHO the best opportunity these days is to get some education in a health care related field. You’ll only be more in demand as the years go by.
The sure bet is mourtuary school. Less than five years ago the news was lamenting that enrollment is way down even though demand is up. Can’t outsource that field, too.
I hear you. I have a friend who’s in his late 50s who finally got work after two years of being unemployed. The kicker? He has been hired back as a consultant for basically the same company who laid him off. Of course, because he’s a consultant, he doesn’t get the company benefits.
Have you tried applying for burger-flipping jobs? In a lot of places, they aren’t available. Even when they are, they’ll reject you for being over-qualified. Furthermore, most burger-flipping type jobs aren’t sustainable. They have shitty health benefits, part time hours, and suck the moral right out of you. I’ve worked jobs much harder than burger-flipping jobs and I don’t want a burger-flipping job because I want something that will give me health benefits and room to advance. I don’t want to have to worry about bankruptcy because of health issues and I want to be covered by a decent policy if I should become pregnant. I don’t see why I should be punished because of greedy, immoral individuals who make money screwing other people over.
You sound like those people who are surprised that Americans aren’t rushing to fill farm jobs in states that are kicking illegal immigrants out. It’s easy to be on a high moral horse when you have no idea what the state of the economy is like or how much things have changed.
Even if there are a meaningful number of entitled unemployed, what should we do with them? Re-education camps? Deportation to Canada? Make their citizenship conditional on indentured servitude to offshore manufacturing plants? They’ve obviously forfeited at least some of their rights in the court of public opinion.
I’m 45, I’m too old to do much but sweep floors and wash dishes if the Arbeitkorps comes for me. But I’ve been awfully outspoken, so I suppose I’ll have to pay my debt to society in ways that satisfy my betters more directly - say cleaning toilets without a brush.
Been there, done that. “We’d love to hire you but with your degree they’d pull you off the floor within weeks. So it’s better for me to just train your replacement NOW.”
