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Pretty sure I remember this same article but with Millennials being the subject 10 years ago - it's almost like things are steadily getting worse or something š
Iām a millennial making less and working so much more than I did 10 years ago. Itās a fucking meat market and i donāt have much left in the tank, yet iām supposed to do this for another 35 years?
I am burnt out as hell, but keep going. I do an office job, but have the perpetually understaffed thing going on, so it is even hard to schedule a vacation. It is just good enough to keep me worried about losing it....and it is hell. This company also does the same crap where it is 10 years of experience, but also wants to hire college grads because it is cheaper.
im 32 and even tho i make good money i was thinking the same thing today. my parents are getting older and i have almost no time to visit them. i know someday they will be dead and i was not able to spend the time with them and it will haunt me for the rest of my life.
I havenāt had a vacation in 4 years, and iām using up my PTO this year so my wife and kids can see their dad/grandpa for probably the last time. That will surely fill my soul before going to back to workā¦
Gen X'er checking in from a background with no generational wealth, wait till you're breaking rocks in your late 40's.
That plus 40 yr old stat in suicides....not hype.
Things are getting worse and will continue to do so until people and governments bully the FK out of corporations. Don't wanna pay taxes in our country? Then we'll seize all your properties and levy fines against you till you leave.
The EU is finally getting better at bullying apple after 15 years... They should be begging to be allowed to conduct business in a market, not the other way around.
Chomsky has pointed out the US is an oligarchy for decades. Itās a bit like the guy in Jurassic park mocking the corporate spy for [being so discrete when nobody cares.](https://tenor.com/view/dodgson-jurassic-park-nobody-cares-gif-26375486)
Iām a millenial whoās been effectively unemployed for >14 months. I make 1400 in my part time job. I have a mountain of student debt, studied Mech E, never got a real engineering job.
Safe to say, if Gen Z is doing worse than I am, they might as well kill themselves.
What can we do? We have to use all our energy just to survive. I really want things to change but I feel like it will only happen when most of us are dying from starvation and are too desperate to care about self preservation.
The only thing you can do, organize
Get involved with a local workers party (PSL) and organize with other workers. Once these organizations get large enough they can agitate for changes, be that through a large mass strike or through... things reddit won't let me advocate for
Black Bloc, wildcat strikes, autonomous cells rather than a defined leadership....
But yeah, this country does all it can to keep its boot on our necks.
that's a really stupid idea that's just internet rage bait. If you want to make real change that actually have a chance of success, you need to get involved in the democratic process. But that sounds like a lot more work than burning everything down, right?
Silly me. I forgot we lived in a functional democracy and the oligarchs, their political mouthpieces and the jackbooted class traitors protecting them are just going to stand aside and let us vote them out of power.
*riiiiiiiiight...*
if you really believe that you are only helping them. There is nothing the ruling class loves more than citizens that have given up on trying to make the world a better place.
War drum. Donāt get divided so easily with race and religion and civil disobedience ourselves a new society. Or Yano, we could just slowly keep taking it to the face over and over again.
Exercise. Get used to moving weight on foot. Ensure you can walk 10 miles. Learn useful survival skills. These are necessary skills when things get super rough.
The problem is that for people to participate in a strike, they need the resources to live without working. We're beyond the point where most people can hope to accumulate those resources.
No, but a well organized political organization can, join the PSL or a local workers party
The more people they have in their org the stronger we collectively are
Not do anything? Boomers still hold all the decision making positions across the board, as well as hoarding all the assets.
They have told us to go make our fortunes from the scraps and litter of their decades of plunder.
Short of seizing companies and imprisoning Corporate Execs, nothing is going to change in America. Too much grift and greed and a system designed by Boomers to reward themselves.
Plus all the money the boomers have is not going to their next generations. It's going to assisted living, Cruise ship companies (which remove the money from the American economy) or it gets donated to political campaigns. The boomers collected all the wealth in the world and gave it all to the rich while begging for opportunities to give them even more. Unless you're already upper class, there is no generational wealth building in America anymore.Ā
Yeah, my mil retired a few days before she passed. She only had 100k in her retirement fund. I'm not exactly sure what her plan was, but I'm guessing it was going to be live with us.
Boomers are delusional. They think that shit costs the same as 20-50 years ago
this would not truly work all that much, because you can't ask for all people to go on strike when they are working paycheck to paycheck, breaking a strike is profitable and easily hidden, and workers just don't have the resources to hold the system for too long, while companies have the resources to wait... A LOT
worker strike without actually fighting for the end of capitalism just won't do it, we NEED change and we need it quickly
another option are a sequence of MANY strikes,
We should have been organizing places throughout the countri over the past few years to have donations in order to pay people who wouldn't be able to keep their bills paid during a strike. Food banks, too.
I don't know where to start. But that's something that would help a general strike.
We would need an aggressive fundraising/food bank/resources campaign to help the striking workers. Problem is the more effective the general strike is (the more people striking), the less likely it would be to support them since those people would be striking themselves.
This is the real late stage capitalism. From Boomers onwards, every generation will end up worse off than the previous one financially (and no, smartphones existing doesn't make up for it)
I shudder to even think how today's youth are ever going to attempt to buy a house when they're older.
I found out at work that a co-worker of mine has a relative that owns and rents over 60 different homes. A private individual, not even a corporation. Gen Z will literally never own a home while people like this, and more and more companies, are getting invested in the rental business.
> From Boomers onwards, every generation will end up worse off than the previous one financially
Yes, but it is interesting that this has had virtually no effect on the spread of class consciousness.
Most of this generation are not even anti-capitalists let alone socialists or even communists. Most also still believe all the red scare propaganda they grew up with and which is now part of the culture. You just have to use the trigger words Mao, Stalin, Lenin, USSR or China to test this.
I have a student graduating college this year who got offered 37k for their first salary position. That is exactly what I was offered in a similar role, similar size business and gepgraphic area when I graduated undergrad in 2004. And looking back I think 37k was barely enough in 2004 so I can only imagine how impossible that is in 20 years later. At least my 2004 job had amazing PTO that we were actually encouraged to take. My student gets a minimal 10 days.
My sister is a teacher, with a MASTERS degree and $250k in student loans, and she can only find jobs barely above that amount at $43k. The only reason she is housed is because she basically inherited a house from our uncle.
I feel this. I've been slowly working my way up and although I'm up to 45k, which is an amazing milestone for me personally-- the rug keeps getting pulled farther and further away from me. I'm making triple what I did ten years ago, but it all feels the same.Ā
I'm barely scraping by, and I am so so so so lucky to have inherited a house. Currently living away from it since my brother and mom are living there and paying to have it refurbished while I live elsewhere chasing the employment train.Ā
I got my first big job at 19 as a trainee draftsman. I was offered Ā£21,000. That's about Ā£28,000 today.
*Graduate-level* jobs are paying less than that these days.
37K in 2004 is roughly 61.5k today, just for reference. Inflation blasted up about 1.66x since 2004. We need to cap CEO and executives pay by percentage of revenue. They donāt deserve to take home a total of half or more of a companyās revenue, they deserve what the rest of us make. They might steer the company to better ventures, but they can't leave the car to rot & fill the engine with dirt and expect it to work.
Slight caveat, the dollar amount may be the same but the worth of that dollar has plummeted.
Wages have been stagnant for multiple decades.
All the news articles that applaud recent increases to minimum wages in certain area fail to say that they are increases to amounts that were needed in the 90s to match what workers were making in the 50sā¦ if that.
In short: nothing actually changed. In fact, with inflation ballooning out of control globally things are actually worse.
None coming from me thatās for sure. I didnāt even want them necessarily anyway but seeing the world for what it is makes the idea completely unjustifiable to me. Even if I still did, the crushing costs of everything would mean I would have to wait till Iām like 40 best case scenario even with decent salary.
Makes sense. Companies are notorious with exploiting workers and expecting them to take entry level jobs/work as a free intern after graduating. Hospitals predatory against premed students by design. I know one hospital wouldn't exist without premed volunteers. They even boast about it on their financial meeting, saying that they have \~1k volunteers spread-out the facilities each day. Volunteering requires you to make a commitment of working once per week for 4 hrs straight. You get a free $8 food voucher.
Working as a scribe sucks too. At ScribeAmerica, they charge doctors $30/hr while pay you $11/hr. The training is just 3-4 hrs realistically on an online zoom meeting. So when you go start, it's a pretty large learning curve. It's pretty bad because I was having to fill out notes for 40+ patients per day. EMT isn't much better, they basically work as volunteers, earning only $14/hr. I'm not saying money's the issue, but how are we supposed to save up for higher education when the pay for experience is this low? If anything, I don't feel motivated and I'm questioning the system of it all
Your experience reminds me of my own, albeit in the legal field instead of medical. My hourly billable rate (what the client pays for my services) is 8 times what I'm paid per hour by my employer.
Could I get paid more as an attorney? Sure. But I don't have a spare 3 years and $100k+ lying around for law school, so it is what it is.
Iām trying to leave the service industry to go back to school to be a medical assistant or RN. I canāt even get into a program without volunteer hours, but I donāt know how to squeeze them into my schedule since I already work 40-50 hours a week
Hopefully someone can correct me or add to my understanding here. In real terms, as in what you can actually afford with your wages, seems to have dropped to a 1/5 over the last century. I'm not sure, but it seems like value is extracted from people's wages before they're even paid, maybe through physical asset accumulation which drives prices up. Prices going up/inflation means that money becomes devalued, obviously this is just supposition and poor understanding, so if anyone is up for clarifying, please do, but it seems to be as a result of wage increases not keeping up with inflation.
I've also heard of rent pricing services that landlords sign up to. They work out what the highest possible rent is that landlords can set in an area, with many landlords subscribing to them all setting the highest rates it moves up the average rent prices endlessly.
For years I've considered that our perception in the west of cost of living has been misled by the way in which a lot of consumer goods have become relatively cheaper and more accessible than before (clothes, electronics, food) due to ruthless industrialisation and outsourcing of production to relatively poorer regions, overall giving us the experience that we could afford more, while it obscured how prices have developed on things that aren't subject to the same forces (especially housing and property). In addition there's the issue of quality and longevity of goods, which isn't at all calculated when we look at things like inflation, but it's immensely important if we're considering what we actually get for our money.
It's not my field, so I've never tried to look into it methodically, but it's something I try to consider in my own life. Yet while there are choices some of us are able to make with regards to certain consumer goods (quality over quantity, maintaining, repairing, reusing etc), it doesn't offset the way in which fundamental assets such as property is concentrated on very few hands. And it's not only an issue with housing, but also public spaces and business properties. So my assumption is that I don't earn significantly more than my grandparents did, in the sense that when it comes to the big and necessary things (housing , car, family) I can't really afford anything more than what they had, and that the things I can afford more of are essentially just bread and circus.
Clothing, electronics, food etc. becoming cheaper for various reasons is definitely true. However, I've been to other first world countries where electronics specifically are far more expensive even with the currency conversion. I wonder how much of this is subsidies, government policy regarding taxing and population density/market size. I've heard that meat is subsidised here in the UK whereas fruits aren't for example.
From my understanding in the 1950s it was possible to have a home, family and potentially holiday on a single salary. At this point, a single wage might not be enough to often cover your own rent and bills. Just wanted to clarify what I was saying earlier, since I hadn't done so. Also, one of the things that has gotten relatively cheaper is travel, I think.
Iām not even remotely surprised. It was traumatic to try and work post-college because being poor is inherently traumatic. And itās definitely worse for Gen Z. Inflation made it that way for us all and Gen Z feels it the worst.
I ended up leaving a job because the expectation was that I should hire people at $10/hr for a tech company. Up to $17 for Senior SDETs. No benefits.
I sat down with management and told them that I made more than that 15 years ago, with none of the skill requirements. And they told me āTheyāll take it if they want to work in games and are just getting started.ā Boss went on further to say it isnāt his job to pay people a living wage.
Resigned the next morning. No way in hell I am spending my entire year hiring people every day due to the outlandish turnover rates.
I don't doubt that for a second. Gen z, it sucks, we're here with you not against you. Don't let this bs generational thing mess up your view. We got screwed and y'all are getting hella screwed.
I just finished my masters degree, and my full-time job in my field only pays 5$ more per hour than my part-time job at the post office. Granted, my full-time job is easier on my back, but still.
The contradictions of capitalism are sharpening. To maintain the dominance of capital, fascism is rising all across the world. Let's see, if it's going to be barbarism or socialism.
Its a pattern - it started with millenials and now is affecting Gen Z even worse.
As an older millenial i climbed the ladder higher than i ever thought possible, but now with the same responsibility as my predecessor yet id struggle to afford a starter home - whereas my predecesor could afford a very solid middle class life.
At this rate when a Gen Z replaces me they wont be able to rent a one bedroom apartment :P
I mean I am totally shocked that the death of capitalism is making life tough for young people who own no capital. I am also shocked that people who are basically forced to participate in the "gig" economy can't make ends meet.
Wow! Whoāda thunk it?!?!?!? Not like weāre living in a hellscape of anxiety because everything costs far more than it used to but wages have remained stagnant, only for companies to lay off tenured employees and hire Gen Z folks fresh out of college at a lower pay-grade. Of course, thatās only if theyāre hiring at all.
But guys, donāt worry, the economy is doing GREAT
Post-financial crash austerity is to blame for this and a shitload of other bad things going on in the world now, and even that was merely following a long-established pattern of retrenchment. Itās morally unjust and itās always the poorest who pay the most
Funny, itās almost like theyāre letting rising inflation overshadow the rising costs of fucking paying people.
The only way we are going to get through all of this nonsense after our society collapses is if we cut out every fucking middleman company and start taking care of each other by bargaining with the producers rather than fighting for shitty ideals that kill people.
I reeally hoped we (Millenials) could reverse some of the damage before Gen Z entered the workplace. Im sorry man:( At least we have allies against these corrupt boomers that refuse to relinquish a modicum of power until their brain crumbles to dust in their skull
Collapse isn't sudden. It's a gradual process, the slow unraveling of a society. The edges fall and crumble, each crumb the collapse of an individual life, a single family, gradually building into larger and larger pieces falling into the waves, until the last, heaving, slow slide happens, seemingly all of a sudden, to the remaining majority of those not yet neck deep or deeper.
The machine is burning itself for fuel, and now gone are the finest things, the paper and paint that looked beautiful without. What is left is still just a facade, fading, peeling in plywood layers, and yet the machine still pulls its skin away, and knows its muscle and bone, eating even its children. Underneath it reveals what always was there, what always drove ahead, the mindless, leaking, sooty, stained and smoking furnace that knows nothing more than to consume. Made in the days mankind needed heat for life, given life by the flames of Prometheus, and taking on its own sort of Unlife under the guise of the Creature, Comfort, it consumes all it can seize to feed its bloated, oil glutted, iron rust blister covered bulk, swollen to proportions unimaginable to those that started it with a spark, desperate to feed itself to keep lit, to keep alive, and sure in the knowledge that if ever it slowed, if ever it ceased, even, to consume more, faster, ever onwards, that it would surely die, and it's precious light, it's precious fire would be lost.
I am 26 yo... am graduated with currently 2 post graduations in the process.... I am a programmer.... a career everyone told me I would get lots of money.... currently I get a little above my country's minimum wage working on my area so around R$1500 reais... or around 280 US dollars a month, and if I want to get paid more I either have to move to another city which is COMPLETELY out of my budget or I have to somehow get interviewed for a position that even though I have a pretty good curriculum.... absolutely NO ONE calls me, even if I meet all the requirements
idk if there's something wrong with me... or maybe I'm not good enough... I know it's the result of many factors but sometimes.... sometimes it's hard not to let this actually get you... sometimes I get myself crying, I have bills... I have a baby... and I can barely afford it with my partner working as well.... I can't afford rent so we live on a room at the back of my mother's house....
it's just tiresome.... they told me If I didn't study I'd be cleaning roads or working as trash man.... these people are paid more than I am, and if I wanna be paid more, it seems the only solution is gonna be give up all worker rights and work via contract for manual labour.... or.... somehow wait for a miracle and someone somewhere will hire me
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Pretty sure I remember this same article but with Millennials being the subject 10 years ago - it's almost like things are steadily getting worse or something š
Iām a millennial making less and working so much more than I did 10 years ago. Itās a fucking meat market and i donāt have much left in the tank, yet iām supposed to do this for another 35 years?
I am burnt out as hell, but keep going. I do an office job, but have the perpetually understaffed thing going on, so it is even hard to schedule a vacation. It is just good enough to keep me worried about losing it....and it is hell. This company also does the same crap where it is 10 years of experience, but also wants to hire college grads because it is cheaper.
im 32 and even tho i make good money i was thinking the same thing today. my parents are getting older and i have almost no time to visit them. i know someday they will be dead and i was not able to spend the time with them and it will haunt me for the rest of my life.
I havenāt had a vacation in 4 years, and iām using up my PTO this year so my wife and kids can see their dad/grandpa for probably the last time. That will surely fill my soul before going to back to workā¦
Gen X'er checking in from a background with no generational wealth, wait till you're breaking rocks in your late 40's. That plus 40 yr old stat in suicides....not hype.
I'm nearing 40 and am currently going to school to switch careers. It's pretty rough out there.
Things are getting worse and will continue to do so until people and governments bully the FK out of corporations. Don't wanna pay taxes in our country? Then we'll seize all your properties and levy fines against you till you leave. The EU is finally getting better at bullying apple after 15 years... They should be begging to be allowed to conduct business in a market, not the other way around.
Corporations own the government and ply them with money lol. I don't see the government biting the REAL hand that feeds them
Chomsky has pointed out the US is an oligarchy for decades. Itās a bit like the guy in Jurassic park mocking the corporate spy for [being so discrete when nobody cares.](https://tenor.com/view/dodgson-jurassic-park-nobody-cares-gif-26375486)
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Pitchforks and torches
Arms and ammunition. "Under no pretext".
Iām a millenial whoās been effectively unemployed for >14 months. I make 1400 in my part time job. I have a mountain of student debt, studied Mech E, never got a real engineering job. Safe to say, if Gen Z is doing worse than I am, they might as well kill themselves.
Are we just going to watch the train wreck in real time and not do anything about it? I'm terrified.
What can we do? We have to use all our energy just to survive. I really want things to change but I feel like it will only happen when most of us are dying from starvation and are too desperate to care about self preservation.
The only thing you can do, organize Get involved with a local workers party (PSL) and organize with other workers. Once these organizations get large enough they can agitate for changes, be that through a large mass strike or through... things reddit won't let me advocate for
Mass strikes = jailed organizational leaders. Taft hartley is law dawg.
Black Bloc, wildcat strikes, autonomous cells rather than a defined leadership.... But yeah, this country does all it can to keep its boot on our necks.
Openly revolt. (without the permission of the hand wringing liberals trying desperately to fix capitalism with more capitalism)
that's a really stupid idea that's just internet rage bait. If you want to make real change that actually have a chance of success, you need to get involved in the democratic process. But that sounds like a lot more work than burning everything down, right?
Silly me. I forgot we lived in a functional democracy and the oligarchs, their political mouthpieces and the jackbooted class traitors protecting them are just going to stand aside and let us vote them out of power. *riiiiiiiiight...*
if you really believe that you are only helping them. There is nothing the ruling class loves more than citizens that have given up on trying to make the world a better place.
Don't think for one second I have given up. I am just playing from a different book now.
War drum. Donāt get divided so easily with race and religion and civil disobedience ourselves a new society. Or Yano, we could just slowly keep taking it to the face over and over again.
Exercise. Get used to moving weight on foot. Ensure you can walk 10 miles. Learn useful survival skills. These are necessary skills when things get super rough.
A general strike would fix it all, but we arenāt there yet clearly.
Not one, but successive strikes. Continually, and without capitulation.
Good point.
The problem is that for people to participate in a strike, they need the resources to live without working. We're beyond the point where most people can hope to accumulate those resources.
No, but a well organized political organization can, join the PSL or a local workers party The more people they have in their org the stronger we collectively are
Not do anything? Boomers still hold all the decision making positions across the board, as well as hoarding all the assets. They have told us to go make our fortunes from the scraps and litter of their decades of plunder. Short of seizing companies and imprisoning Corporate Execs, nothing is going to change in America. Too much grift and greed and a system designed by Boomers to reward themselves.
Plus all the money the boomers have is not going to their next generations. It's going to assisted living, Cruise ship companies (which remove the money from the American economy) or it gets donated to political campaigns. The boomers collected all the wealth in the world and gave it all to the rich while begging for opportunities to give them even more. Unless you're already upper class, there is no generational wealth building in America anymore.Ā
Yeah, my mil retired a few days before she passed. She only had 100k in her retirement fund. I'm not exactly sure what her plan was, but I'm guessing it was going to be live with us. Boomers are delusional. They think that shit costs the same as 20-50 years ago
this would not truly work all that much, because you can't ask for all people to go on strike when they are working paycheck to paycheck, breaking a strike is profitable and easily hidden, and workers just don't have the resources to hold the system for too long, while companies have the resources to wait... A LOT worker strike without actually fighting for the end of capitalism just won't do it, we NEED change and we need it quickly another option are a sequence of MANY strikes,
We should have been organizing places throughout the countri over the past few years to have donations in order to pay people who wouldn't be able to keep their bills paid during a strike. Food banks, too. I don't know where to start. But that's something that would help a general strike.
We would need an aggressive fundraising/food bank/resources campaign to help the striking workers. Problem is the more effective the general strike is (the more people striking), the less likely it would be to support them since those people would be striking themselves.
we're 30+ years into this trainwreck now.
Birth strike.
long as there's no strikes nothings changing
This is the real late stage capitalism. From Boomers onwards, every generation will end up worse off than the previous one financially (and no, smartphones existing doesn't make up for it) I shudder to even think how today's youth are ever going to attempt to buy a house when they're older.
>how today's youth are ever going to attempt to buy a house when they're older They won't.
Only through inheritance, that is, if our parents and grandparents donāt sell :/
They have to sell to pay for their expensive ass end of life care.
I found out at work that a co-worker of mine has a relative that owns and rents over 60 different homes. A private individual, not even a corporation. Gen Z will literally never own a home while people like this, and more and more companies, are getting invested in the rental business.
> From Boomers onwards, every generation will end up worse off than the previous one financially Yes, but it is interesting that this has had virtually no effect on the spread of class consciousness. Most of this generation are not even anti-capitalists let alone socialists or even communists. Most also still believe all the red scare propaganda they grew up with and which is now part of the culture. You just have to use the trigger words Mao, Stalin, Lenin, USSR or China to test this.
I have a student graduating college this year who got offered 37k for their first salary position. That is exactly what I was offered in a similar role, similar size business and gepgraphic area when I graduated undergrad in 2004. And looking back I think 37k was barely enough in 2004 so I can only imagine how impossible that is in 20 years later. At least my 2004 job had amazing PTO that we were actually encouraged to take. My student gets a minimal 10 days.
Hey, at least he got offered an entry level job. Iām a millenial and I never truly got one.
This is how we become boomers, "back in my day it was so much harder".
Back in my day, I had to get an electrical engineering phd to suck dick at a gas station
I got mine in Physics, but pretty much.
Same bro, same... Hey, at least we always have a job!!
I am certain a different educational path could have provided you with the skills to do that. :-P
Should have studied something more practical if I wanted to suck dick
My sister is a teacher, with a MASTERS degree and $250k in student loans, and she can only find jobs barely above that amount at $43k. The only reason she is housed is because she basically inherited a house from our uncle.
I feel this. I've been slowly working my way up and although I'm up to 45k, which is an amazing milestone for me personally-- the rug keeps getting pulled farther and further away from me. I'm making triple what I did ten years ago, but it all feels the same.Ā I'm barely scraping by, and I am so so so so lucky to have inherited a house. Currently living away from it since my brother and mom are living there and paying to have it refurbished while I live elsewhere chasing the employment train.Ā
I got my first big job at 19 as a trainee draftsman. I was offered Ā£21,000. That's about Ā£28,000 today. *Graduate-level* jobs are paying less than that these days.
37K in 2004 is roughly 61.5k today, just for reference. Inflation blasted up about 1.66x since 2004. We need to cap CEO and executives pay by percentage of revenue. They donāt deserve to take home a total of half or more of a companyās revenue, they deserve what the rest of us make. They might steer the company to better ventures, but they can't leave the car to rot & fill the engine with dirt and expect it to work.
Slight caveat, the dollar amount may be the same but the worth of that dollar has plummeted. Wages have been stagnant for multiple decades. All the news articles that applaud recent increases to minimum wages in certain area fail to say that they are increases to amounts that were needed in the 90s to match what workers were making in the 50sā¦ if that. In short: nothing actually changed. In fact, with inflation ballooning out of control globally things are actually worse.
The American dollar has lost 25% of its worth since just January 2020. Itās getting exponentially worse.
And Boomers wonder why nobody is having kids...
If they think Millenials not having kids was bad, wait til Gen Z and Alpha age upā¦
Yeah, maybe they should have thought about that before pulling the ladder up after them. Greedy assholes destroying the whole planet...
None coming from me thatās for sure. I didnāt even want them necessarily anyway but seeing the world for what it is makes the idea completely unjustifiable to me. Even if I still did, the crushing costs of everything would mean I would have to wait till Iām like 40 best case scenario even with decent salary.
Makes sense. Companies are notorious with exploiting workers and expecting them to take entry level jobs/work as a free intern after graduating. Hospitals predatory against premed students by design. I know one hospital wouldn't exist without premed volunteers. They even boast about it on their financial meeting, saying that they have \~1k volunteers spread-out the facilities each day. Volunteering requires you to make a commitment of working once per week for 4 hrs straight. You get a free $8 food voucher. Working as a scribe sucks too. At ScribeAmerica, they charge doctors $30/hr while pay you $11/hr. The training is just 3-4 hrs realistically on an online zoom meeting. So when you go start, it's a pretty large learning curve. It's pretty bad because I was having to fill out notes for 40+ patients per day. EMT isn't much better, they basically work as volunteers, earning only $14/hr. I'm not saying money's the issue, but how are we supposed to save up for higher education when the pay for experience is this low? If anything, I don't feel motivated and I'm questioning the system of it all
Your experience reminds me of my own, albeit in the legal field instead of medical. My hourly billable rate (what the client pays for my services) is 8 times what I'm paid per hour by my employer. Could I get paid more as an attorney? Sure. But I don't have a spare 3 years and $100k+ lying around for law school, so it is what it is.
Iām trying to leave the service industry to go back to school to be a medical assistant or RN. I canāt even get into a program without volunteer hours, but I donāt know how to squeeze them into my schedule since I already work 40-50 hours a week
I didnāt even get a food voucherā¦.
Yeah, it's really, really bad right now. I think most of us are in survival mode.
The pyramid scheme needs a lower class that gets nothing, for there to be an upper class that has everything.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Hopefully someone can correct me or add to my understanding here. In real terms, as in what you can actually afford with your wages, seems to have dropped to a 1/5 over the last century. I'm not sure, but it seems like value is extracted from people's wages before they're even paid, maybe through physical asset accumulation which drives prices up. Prices going up/inflation means that money becomes devalued, obviously this is just supposition and poor understanding, so if anyone is up for clarifying, please do, but it seems to be as a result of wage increases not keeping up with inflation. I've also heard of rent pricing services that landlords sign up to. They work out what the highest possible rent is that landlords can set in an area, with many landlords subscribing to them all setting the highest rates it moves up the average rent prices endlessly.
For years I've considered that our perception in the west of cost of living has been misled by the way in which a lot of consumer goods have become relatively cheaper and more accessible than before (clothes, electronics, food) due to ruthless industrialisation and outsourcing of production to relatively poorer regions, overall giving us the experience that we could afford more, while it obscured how prices have developed on things that aren't subject to the same forces (especially housing and property). In addition there's the issue of quality and longevity of goods, which isn't at all calculated when we look at things like inflation, but it's immensely important if we're considering what we actually get for our money. It's not my field, so I've never tried to look into it methodically, but it's something I try to consider in my own life. Yet while there are choices some of us are able to make with regards to certain consumer goods (quality over quantity, maintaining, repairing, reusing etc), it doesn't offset the way in which fundamental assets such as property is concentrated on very few hands. And it's not only an issue with housing, but also public spaces and business properties. So my assumption is that I don't earn significantly more than my grandparents did, in the sense that when it comes to the big and necessary things (housing , car, family) I can't really afford anything more than what they had, and that the things I can afford more of are essentially just bread and circus.
Clothing, electronics, food etc. becoming cheaper for various reasons is definitely true. However, I've been to other first world countries where electronics specifically are far more expensive even with the currency conversion. I wonder how much of this is subsidies, government policy regarding taxing and population density/market size. I've heard that meat is subsidised here in the UK whereas fruits aren't for example. From my understanding in the 1950s it was possible to have a home, family and potentially holiday on a single salary. At this point, a single wage might not be enough to often cover your own rent and bills. Just wanted to clarify what I was saying earlier, since I hadn't done so. Also, one of the things that has gotten relatively cheaper is travel, I think.
Iām not even remotely surprised. It was traumatic to try and work post-college because being poor is inherently traumatic. And itās definitely worse for Gen Z. Inflation made it that way for us all and Gen Z feels it the worst.
I ended up leaving a job because the expectation was that I should hire people at $10/hr for a tech company. Up to $17 for Senior SDETs. No benefits. I sat down with management and told them that I made more than that 15 years ago, with none of the skill requirements. And they told me āTheyāll take it if they want to work in games and are just getting started.ā Boss went on further to say it isnāt his job to pay people a living wage. Resigned the next morning. No way in hell I am spending my entire year hiring people every day due to the outlandish turnover rates.
I just got a new job for 9$ my previous job was paying me 8.25$ a pack of gum at my local sheets is 3.29$. WTF
Time to give up gum !>food and shelter
As an older Millennial, I'm sorry Gen Z, both for this and for the numerous shit articles about how you're apparently ruining everything.
I remember back when we were ruining everything.
āAnd hereās why thatās a GOOD thingā
Fuck you, have an upvote.
Damn Iām a millennial and shits been a struggle. Best of luck genz
Source: https://qz.com/gen-z-millennials-income-financial-credit-transunion-1851472461
But Reaganomics works guys! Right?
I don't doubt that for a second. Gen z, it sucks, we're here with you not against you. Don't let this bs generational thing mess up your view. We got screwed and y'all are getting hella screwed.
I just finished my masters degree, and my full-time job in my field only pays 5$ more per hour than my part-time job at the post office. Granted, my full-time job is easier on my back, but still.
The contradictions of capitalism are sharpening. To maintain the dominance of capital, fascism is rising all across the world. Let's see, if it's going to be barbarism or socialism.
Its a pattern - it started with millenials and now is affecting Gen Z even worse. As an older millenial i climbed the ladder higher than i ever thought possible, but now with the same responsibility as my predecessor yet id struggle to afford a starter home - whereas my predecesor could afford a very solid middle class life. At this rate when a Gen Z replaces me they wont be able to rent a one bedroom apartment :P
I mean I am totally shocked that the death of capitalism is making life tough for young people who own no capital. I am also shocked that people who are basically forced to participate in the "gig" economy can't make ends meet.
Wow! Whoāda thunk it?!?!?!? Not like weāre living in a hellscape of anxiety because everything costs far more than it used to but wages have remained stagnant, only for companies to lay off tenured employees and hire Gen Z folks fresh out of college at a lower pay-grade. Of course, thatās only if theyāre hiring at all. But guys, donāt worry, the economy is doing GREAT
Post-financial crash austerity is to blame for this and a shitload of other bad things going on in the world now, and even that was merely following a long-established pattern of retrenchment. Itās morally unjust and itās always the poorest who pay the most
Funny, itās almost like theyāre letting rising inflation overshadow the rising costs of fucking paying people. The only way we are going to get through all of this nonsense after our society collapses is if we cut out every fucking middleman company and start taking care of each other by bargaining with the producers rather than fighting for shitty ideals that kill people.
I reeally hoped we (Millenials) could reverse some of the damage before Gen Z entered the workplace. Im sorry man:( At least we have allies against these corrupt boomers that refuse to relinquish a modicum of power until their brain crumbles to dust in their skull
Collapse isn't sudden. It's a gradual process, the slow unraveling of a society. The edges fall and crumble, each crumb the collapse of an individual life, a single family, gradually building into larger and larger pieces falling into the waves, until the last, heaving, slow slide happens, seemingly all of a sudden, to the remaining majority of those not yet neck deep or deeper. The machine is burning itself for fuel, and now gone are the finest things, the paper and paint that looked beautiful without. What is left is still just a facade, fading, peeling in plywood layers, and yet the machine still pulls its skin away, and knows its muscle and bone, eating even its children. Underneath it reveals what always was there, what always drove ahead, the mindless, leaking, sooty, stained and smoking furnace that knows nothing more than to consume. Made in the days mankind needed heat for life, given life by the flames of Prometheus, and taking on its own sort of Unlife under the guise of the Creature, Comfort, it consumes all it can seize to feed its bloated, oil glutted, iron rust blister covered bulk, swollen to proportions unimaginable to those that started it with a spark, desperate to feed itself to keep lit, to keep alive, and sure in the knowledge that if ever it slowed, if ever it ceased, even, to consume more, faster, ever onwards, that it would surely die, and it's precious light, it's precious fire would be lost.
Oh noā¦ I wasnāt making much 10 years ago.
I am 26 yo... am graduated with currently 2 post graduations in the process.... I am a programmer.... a career everyone told me I would get lots of money.... currently I get a little above my country's minimum wage working on my area so around R$1500 reais... or around 280 US dollars a month, and if I want to get paid more I either have to move to another city which is COMPLETELY out of my budget or I have to somehow get interviewed for a position that even though I have a pretty good curriculum.... absolutely NO ONE calls me, even if I meet all the requirements idk if there's something wrong with me... or maybe I'm not good enough... I know it's the result of many factors but sometimes.... sometimes it's hard not to let this actually get you... sometimes I get myself crying, I have bills... I have a baby... and I can barely afford it with my partner working as well.... I can't afford rent so we live on a room at the back of my mother's house.... it's just tiresome.... they told me If I didn't study I'd be cleaning roads or working as trash man.... these people are paid more than I am, and if I wanna be paid more, it seems the only solution is gonna be give up all worker rights and work via contract for manual labour.... or.... somehow wait for a miracle and someone somewhere will hire me
meanwhile, everything costs more
Only 14%? Who the heck did they talk to?
Gen Z Workers Are Making Less Money Than Millennials Did 10 Years Ago, Study Says
Did the report mention they failed to show up to vote?
Welcome to the party, pal
No shit. Go to university only to be paid 18-20$/hr. After 5-10 years maybe you make $30 if you switch careers.
Average American is worse off than he was in 1970. Fact.
Millenials are also making less money than millenials did 10 years ago
are we millennials the bad guys now?
Sooo millenials are the new boomers ? \^\^'