Not long ago, you had to come up with a good reason why your product or service wasn’t doing well — economic downturn, change in the luxury market, decline in spotted trout populations, or the like — but in the last few years, the blame industry has run dry, and it’s all the fault of those young whippersnappers, the millennials. Millennials are killing the paper napkin industry, millennials are killing the diamond market, millennials are killing the housing market.
And let’s not forget, millennials have no loyalty or work ethic.
Millennials — those of us born from the mid-1980s to about 2004, to which I am part — are currently the most scorned and laughed-off segment of the population, treated as though we were children and discussed as if we were some kind of slacker plague that doesn’t want to work. But millennials, the ones in their 20s to almost 40s, are core workers in our economy. Not yet retirement age, we’re everyone from your servers at McDonald’s to the IT techs fixing your technology when you can’t figure out how to not reply to your entire company whenever you send an email.
It’s a demographic that has an odd relationship with traditional job models, for sure. For example, millennials don’t take a lot of sick leave — partly because we feel we’ll be retaliated against for it, and part because we have the drive to push through things that would slow us down, and get our work done anyway.
Millennials also change jobs more frequently than previous generations. When a company treats its workers in their 20s-30s as corporate cogs, as human resources rather than human beings, we leave. It’s not lack of work ethic, it’s knowing our worth. If a company treats us poorly, we leave for one that treats us better.
Common sense has taken the place of blind loyalty, because the old model of working 40 years for the same company, getting your pension, retiring and living off your 401k doesn’t work for us. We’ll never see a dime of the Social Security system we’ve been paying into since we were in our teens, and companies often go out of their way to cut enough hours to ensure their employees aren’t eligible for benefits, or worse, define workers as “contractors” and not employees at all. The idea of a corporation caring for its workers is long gone, and so are the young workers who believed in it.
Now we switch jobs every few years, growing, expanding our skill sets, experiencing new places and making new connections. In the last decade, real stability has proven scarce, and we do what we can in a world that still treats us like children. At least we know our worth, and refuse to just drudge it out despite poor treatment and hope we can retire before the CEO embezzles the pension fund.
The world is different now than it was a generation ago. It’s smaller, it’s more connected, and you can get more done in less time. Millennials are productive, we’re tech-savvy, and thrive in an adapting, ever-changing environment. A happy, motivated millennial brings energy and innovation to the workplace. Denigrate us if you feel you for some reason must, but in the long run, the only one you’re doing a disservice to is yourself.
Mitchell Bonds is a copy editor and page designer for West Hawaii Today. He can be reached at mbonds@westhawaiitoday.com or 930-8646.