Update: I forgot the best part - the reason we're like this? Apparently it's all Mr. Roger's fault. Seriously.
---------------------------------------------
I'm still catching up on stuff that I missed last week, and couldn't let this go by without comment.
On Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a program about Millennials in the work force that was just about as bad as could be. Reported by Morley Safer, a man who probably could have served in the Korean War, the program's findings, in short, run something like this: Millennials are narcissistic whiners who need to be coddled and don't understand the value of a hard days work.
Here are just a few choice quotes from the report, and why they are so incredibly one-sided and out of touch with reality.
Faced with new employees who want to roll into work with their iPods and flip flops around noon, but still be CEO by Friday, companies are realizing that the era of the buttoned down exec happy to have a job is as dead as the three-Martini lunch.
It's not immediately obvious when reading that quote, but the entire tone of the piece is that this is a very very bad development. That disapproval reveals a shocking lack of recognition on the part of Safer and 60 Minutes to today's work environment. Why should Millennials be loyal to a company when the corporate world no longer responds in kind by providing the security it did for our parents generation? Fewer and fewer employers provide health care, without which there can be no financial or personal security. We watched as thousands of our parent's generation lost their retirement funds to corporate accounting scandals. Why would we ever give our loyalty to such a dishonest and miserly master?
If Boomers (or Silent Generation) execs and media are upset about our view of the corporate world, they have no one to blame but themselves.
"They have climbed Mount Everest. They've been down to Machu Picchu to help excavate it. But they've never punched a time clock. They have no idea what it's like to actually be in an office at nine o'clock, with people handing them work.
Really? No young person out there born after 1978 has ever punched a clock? Worked an honest day's labor? Personally, I sure remember lugging around a bag of golf clubs for rich Boomers to finance my summer vacations and even accumulate spending money for school. I'm willing to bet there are a whole lot of folks who worked (and continue to work) hard just to pay tuition or support their young families. So this isn't even about the work habits of young people. It's about those of an economically elite subset of young people, with whom this report is concerned. Those who go to Harvard or other top tier colleges (and accumulate mountains of debt in the process, natch).
Today more than half of college seniors move home after graduation. It's a safety net, or safety diaper, that allows many kids to quickly opt out of a job they don't like.
"There once was, if not shame, a little certain uneasiness about being seen to be living at home in your mid 20s, yes?" Safer asks Mary Crane.
"Not only is there no shame with it, but this is thought to be a very smart, wise, economic decision," Crane says.
Yeah, it is an economic decision if you want to be competitive. Thanks to mismanagement of the economy, government subsidies to corporate lenders, and a steady rise in tuition prices (far outpacing inflation), most people graduate college with at least $20,000 in debt, a burden that most Boomers did not have when they finished college (indeed, one could still reasonably expect to do well without a college degree back when Boomers were young). Of course our habits and views are different, we face an entirely different economic reality than our parents did. That's not narcissistic, or the result of over-coddling, it is a rational response to our economic situation.
All of which has led, as you'd expect, to a whole new industry -- or epidemic -- of consultants, experts they allege, in how to motivate, train and, yes, sometimes nanny the extraterrestrials who've taken over the workplace.
Extraterrestrials? How about your children? This is really the crux of it. This piece isn't about Millennials at all, it's really about Boomer discomfort in a changing workforce that they created. It's a psychic cleansing of their own discomfort at facing what are natural responses and adaptations to their own excesses. In point of fact, there are only two Millennials in the entire piece, and they are used as a prop to support the Safer's thesis. Poor poor reporting on the whole from 60 Minutes, perhaps they should turn an equally critical eye towards their own work ethic.
