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Gen Z does not dream of labor

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Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#251

Post by solenoidalslide »

stolenmerch wrote: post #147
skulk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He could've been a plumber/electrician/welder who would do really well in the current market. False. A plumber making $80k (US median seems to be around $60k) isn't going to be able to save up for a down payment if they're paying a typical mid-sized city's rent (~$1.2k a month). Not to mention housing costs going up during this period of saving up.

I honestly don't understand. When I bought a home I was literally making the US median income and bought an average priced house. My rent at the time was about a thousand a month. I had normal student loans and regular bills too. It wasn't easy but it didn't feel like a miracle either. Not saying someone making minimum can do this by any means, but there's a huge demand for labor in decent paying areas right now. I g…

What year did you graduate? It seems like most everyone who graduated in the past decade is screwed if they want to live near where the jobs are.

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#252

Post by closeparen »

mordymoop wrote: post #195
Jerred wrote: post #38

As a Gen Z it's not that our entire generation is lazy it's that we've seen our parents give their entire lives to a company or industry just counting down the years to retirement. That personally is my worst case scenario for my career. Sure some people my age just want to be famous and not do any hard work, but I'd say the majority just don't want to be a "good employee" for 40 years just increasing the number ever…

Your first paragraph is something that I, a middle-Millenial, could have written when I was 20. Fight Club , a film about young men broken by the dehumanizing nihilism of “working a job you hate to buy stuff you don’t need” (among other things) came out in 1999, and was something of a cultural bell-weather. (I think the main difference between now and 1999 is that simply working a job you hate no longer guarantees yo…

Actually the housing types we had in abundance in the 1900s-1930s - walkable, row houses, townhouses, garden apartments, apartments over the store - are now extraordinarily premium, luxury products. The modern car-dependent high-energy-use high-amenity high-sqft stuff is cheaper!

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#253

Post by gruez »

notacoward wrote: post #169
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > “My dad got a job straight out of high school, saved up, and bought a house in his 20s,” said Anne Dakota, a 21-year-old receptionist from Asheville, North Carolina, who earns minimum wage. “I don’t even think that’s possible for me, at least with the current money I make.” This anecdote is presented as the norm, but it’s actually far from it. “Minimum wage” is the tip off that the journalist went out searching f…

> Minimum wage jobs are literally the lowest paying jobs a person could possibly find. That is incorrect. There are whole categories of jobs that are exempt from minimum wage, and that doesn't even count gig work.

>There are whole categories of jobs that are exempt from minimum wage

I'm presuming you're talking about tipped jobs? It seems reasonable to presume that they earn close to minimum wage when factoring in tips, otherwise people would switch to non-exempt jobs.

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#254

Post by pedrosorio »

ghusto wrote: post #192
HWR_14 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't wealth _always_ more concentrated in higher age brackets? Yes. That's why the quoted factoid talks about "at this stage in their life". If you look back at boomers and genx, they had 4 and 2 times as much wealth as millennials do when they were the same age. > I've heard of millennials not turning up for work because they "didn't feel like working" that day. Why would that matter? Even if that happens sometim…

> Yes. That's why the quoted factoid talks about "at this stage in their life". If you look back at boomers and genx, they had 4 and 2 times as much wealth as millennials do when they were the same age. I missed and am continuing to completely miss this. Do you mean in the article? If true, would that align with the difference in population size (distribution of a finite amount of wealth to more people)? It would be…

You have failed to show any reasoning to explain how some millennials getting fired (or not getting fired, apparently, in this last comment) for being "lazy" and "not wanting to work" led that generation to having a much lower share of total wealth compared to previous generations at the same age.

As the comment above you stated, the lower decile/quintile performers getting fired (or lower salaries) because of their laziness, does not explain this, because most of the wealth is accumulated by the average and higher earners anyway.

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#255

Post by xur17 »

noasaservice wrote: post #178
kitten_mittens_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the sentiment, but what was the median house price v. the average?

A median is one such average. By wanting to know the mean or the range shows that you're trying to cherrypick the result you want. > The average house sold in 1946 cost 1.75X. The median salary was X. > The average house sold in 2022 cost 7.33Y. The median salary is Y. Its clear from all the communications, unionizations, Great Resignation, and more that wages are completely broken. And that above shows what it looks…

> A median is one such average. By wanting to know the mean or the range shows that you're trying to cherrypick the result you want.

I think GP is just trying to make sure we're comparing apples to apples. To me it almost comes across as you cherry picking data (average house price vs median salary).

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#256

Post by StevePerkins »

erosenbe0 wrote: post #234
StevePerkins wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention that plumber probably doesn't have health coverage. The people who love to talk about what a fine profession that would be (for other people's kids, of course, never their own kids) are the same people who fight tooth and nail against any kind of health care policy that might make a non-white collar career more viable.

Plumbers and pipefitters have a union that has plenty of power in current market. No health insurance and they won't work. Plumbing pays more than 80k in major cities. Plumbing contractors have to carry workers comp insurance.

Having grown up in a rural area, I assure you that any unions or health coverage is a strictly urban phenomenon. And $80k isn't all that great of a top-end, for people living in major cities with their cost of living.

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#257

Post by erosenbe0 »

ushakov wrote: post #130
rtlfe wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you have to choose your specialization wisely The problem is that most people don't get to choose. There are few of these high paying jobs, so by definition most people are excluded. Either because they're not "smart" enough to get into elite training programs (e.g. medical school) or because they don't have enough money to spend years in training with zero or negative income.

that's in the US though in Germany even if you're poor you can go to the University and succeed my friends all studied and they were from normal working-class families everyone gets a chance and all you need is put some effort

The US isn't different for 'regular' poor people. Two years of community college to be a nurse and you're good to go with a job in any city.

Except in the US there are enclaves of destitute poverty, generational poverty, extreme levels of incarceration, job prohibitions for low-level convicts (which can be 1/2 the men in some areas), high crime, schools with low graduation rates, weak access to things like dental care, poor transit options for medical care, pollution, insufficient care for the elderly, lack of mental health care, opioid addiction, children with high rates of lead poisoning, etc. Those people have the deck stacked against them.

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#258

Post by immigrantheart »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #222
immigrantheart wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't believe that.

Ok good to know that sort of makes this easier to respond to. So they’re not “rebelling against work” and the article as a whole is just so reductionist. What most are doing is questioning 1) what we find acceptable in a work environment and 2) what we find acceptable to pay people for a day of their labor. If you’re Gen Z, unlike middle to older millennials, chances are you weren’t raised with the “bootstraps” narra…

Okay, I think I sorta understand it, but I still wonder about how they will going to pay their bills. i.e, if they have their criteria on what is acceptable pay, won't the natural course of things is to quit on the unacceptable job and just find a better paying jobs, which means business as usual and wonder why there needs to be an article written on the first place. I was under the impression that the article seem to imply that Gen Z don't have the capability of choosing good jobs because of lack of good job market or marketable skills etc, and those Gen Z decided to just quit it altogether, which made me to ask the question on how they are going to pay the bills.

I am a middle millennial, but I think because of my upbringing (not in the USA), I am still fine with the bootstraps narrative, but at the same time also acknowledge that I cannot get a house with an entry level job (I have some other comments in this same thread that reflect this thinking), therefore I do need to study and get a better paying job. I am actually confused on how people were able to get a house with an entry level job at all.

My story is I came from outside of USA, got a green card, worked low paying jobs such as deli, laundry, dry clean, sushi, coffee, and then save money and got into a programming bootcamp, and then worked part time as SWE, then went to get a CS degree at a local public college. Currently I don't have any debt and earn L4 FAANG level salary. I always wondered that my fellow friends graduated from expensive Ivy Leagues, still have student debt and still not making more than me. I don't question the necessity of education but I do question the worth of expensive educations that my friends went through. I didn't go to montessori schools like them or was raised with privileges, but in the end (as of today) I still stand to them as equal (if not more) socio-economically, and I came from a 3rd world country.

So, my natural response to the Gen Zs would be like, "Yes I agree, don't work for $7.25. But why go to expensive college and get 6 figure debts, why not go to a trade school? Doing what you love is nice, but market forces still exist, and no amount of regulations can change that. People buy what they need first. We can't force people to spend money on art yet, when they need engineering first"

What do you think?

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#259

Post by gruez »

hakfoo wrote: post #120
causality0 wrote: post #10

It's a bit of a perfect storm. You have the rampant wealth inequality and abusive practices that came from decoupling worker productivity from worker compensation beginning in the 1970s with demography. 2022 is average year of retirement for the baby boomers, the largest generation. For at least the next two or three decades labor is only going to get more expensive.

It's harder to maintain the illusion of possible upward mobility. Let's look at a typical scenario. You graduate from university with 100k in student loans. Let's say you get a fairly decently paid entry-level job paying 75k. Great, you might be able to pay down those loans in 10 years, if not more. And when you're finally ready to buy a house, the ones that haven't been converted to rentals are all costing 8 or 10 t…

>Let's look at a typical scenario. You graduate from university with 100k in student loans.

A 100k balance at graduation is definitely not "typical". The average right now is $31k.

https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt-by-year

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#260

Post by kortilla »

StevePerkins wrote: post #256
erosenbe0 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plumbers and pipefitters have a union that has plenty of power in current market. No health insurance and they won't work. Plumbing pays more than 80k in major cities. Plumbing contractors have to carry workers comp insurance.

Having grown up in a rural area, I assure you that any unions or health coverage is a strictly urban phenomenon. And $80k isn't all that great of a top-end, for people living in major cities with their cost of living.

This thread is about saving up to buy a house in a city though.
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