Young people - workshy, or a wee bit canny?

[SwanBuster]

Inspired by a spirited discussion in the Scottish highlands.

A local cafe owner (late forties) was bemoaning his staffing situation to another forty something man, who was buying a coffee with his daughter. I was waiting for mine.

”I’m understaffed - can’t get the workers. I’m paying them 20% above minimum wage but the 18-30 generation don’t want to work - they’d rather sell drugs or be on benefits’.

The chap he was talking to said :

‘oh really - yeah it’s terrible that, they just don’t have the ethic’.

At this point I (another forty something) interjected, and said :

“Well, can we really blame them? Vast swathes of them have been disenfranchised through the cost of housing. They don’t see a path to a stake in society any more”

He said “Utter bollocks - I worked hard and they don’t want to”. The other guy agreed.

Then another guy (again forty something 😂) started agreeing with me, saying he sees it in the corporate world that it’s the sorted 50 somethings who bought cheap houses who are the workshy ones cruising along.

I agreed - imho, no point in working unless you get £100k. Only then can you hope to match the lifestyle of a retail worker from the past”

All the while a young person was waiting for her coffee looked very non pleased and the cafe owner apologised saying “not all young people obviously”

AIBU to think the young are right to “lie flat” and not bother if things don’t change?

Why on earth were you using SE England salaries/house prices etc. in a discussion about young people working in the Highlands? You must have sounded extremely out of touch, in your SE England bubble.

@Wbeezer Totally. I think a lot of them are lacking in attention to detail too and as you say are just working to save money to have time off or travelling. I also think lots think they will be ok with a bit of freelancing. Yep all well and good till your client doesn't pay you for 5 months or goes bust-- I think a lot of them need to wise up about creative industries and actually build up before slacking off! And I don't agree with the person saying who wants to put maximum effort in for minimum reward- sorry but in certain industries that's how you actually get on !!!

Agreed. Both my 15 and 17 year olds have worked 3 full days a week over the summer holidays to earn money and get extra experience. Not lazy at all. In fact none of the young people I know are. Know some very lazy adults though.

Not really. I checked the house prices for the town I was in. They weren’t exactly cheap.

I would say someone on £12 p/h in the highlands still has about as much chance of feeling disenfranchised as someone in the south east of England.

A little less fucked is still fucked.

the only difference is the scenery was dramatically better.

For example, my son had a very tough job in a restaurant kitchen this summer, he chucked it in as soon as he'd saved enough for something he wanted to do, no worries about letting the boss down or building his savings up for a rainy day...

Your son obviously had no notice period written into his contract.

How much notice do you think he'd have got from his boss if they'd needed to let him go? Zilch. Nada. Why the fuck should employees give more consideration to their employers than their employers give them?

I don't care what the prices were. Talking about 100k salaries as being the bare minimum in the Highlands is massively ignorant.

Also, I think that "hard working" is kind of over emphasised as a virtue.

Self sacrifice made sense back when you worked hard for the company, and it looked after you. I personally won't sacrifice myself for a company that will replace me without a second thought tomorrow.

We're not meant to do nothing but work. That's a product of the industrial revolution. Biologically, we are meant to lots of time resting and playing.

Well it depends what you’re letting them go for.

Redundancy has very particular criteria.

Hiwever is they’re letting someone go because, for example, they stole or sexually harassed a colleague then why should the employer let them hang around? That’s a case of employees not giving much consideration to their workplace.

I mean IME if you work hard and keep your nose clean and put the effort in, your work will give back in the same way to you. Or at least decent workplaces will.

Well, I think it is and was absolutely relevant.

like I said - it’s not just housing - you have to consider pensions, kids, and a relatively decent standard of living.

Again, to repeat myself - £100k is £66k after tax. It’s shit money.

the fucking cafe owner was charging £10 for a very, very crap sandwich and a small coffee. That’s the equivalent of £15 gross income.

Fucking right I need to be earning £100k gross not to feel robbed at those prices.

I'm not young but it's futile having loyalty to a company. If you drop dead at your desk, they will just replace you. I work my hours and leave on time. If I didn't, they would keep chipping away at my work-life balance.

The more you give, the more they expect and for what reward? Wages haven't kept up with the cost of living and bonuses don't seem to trickle down to the masses.

£10 for a sandwich and a coffee is extremely reasonable!

That covers not only the food, staff wages but also the heating, maintenance, facilities, , water and lighting

TBH OP I’m not sure what kind of country you’re expecting the UK to be when £10 for a sandwich and coffee is considered a ‘Rob’ but entry level jobs should be £100k. That’s not a sustainable model!

Also when we are facing yet another energy cap rise which means MORE people (and countless children) will be plunged into poverty, I really can’t be on with people moaning that a £100k salary isn’t enough.

If you can't hear how massively out of touch you must have sounded, telling people living in the Highlands that £100k was a crap salary, the bare minimum that a young person should earn to have a good life, I have no words!

A person on £100k today can afford a better lifestyle than a retail worker in the 90s. That's a fact and I'm flabbergasted that you think otherwise.

Few are overjoyed to go in to work every day. It's common to feel you're not fairly compensated and to be somewhat dissatisfied with your lot in life, but what's the alternative? You still have to support yourself (or you should), even if you know you'll never be able to afford everything you'd like. If you won't even try to win success for yourself by doing more than the bare minimum, you shouldn't expect sympathy from anyone else, regardless of your generation, your upbringing, the housing market, etc.

Didn’t Happen of The Year Awards

I can see why young people don't want to work for him if he holds them in such contempt 🤷‍♀️

But, even through those difficult times, people could afford to buy a house on an average or even low wage. They could afford to have children. They could afford to look after those children themselves for the most part if they wanted to and didn’t feel forced back to work FT when their baby was only 6 months old.

yes, people had to make cutbacks on day to day living for some periods of time, but they had a decent roof over their head and had their family unit.

My comment was to the person who said we had v difficult times in the past also

Self sacrifice made sense back when you worked hard for the company, and it looked after you. I personally won't sacrifice myself for a company that will replace me without a second thought tomorrow.

But no-one is talking about "self sacrifice". Any company will replace their staff without a second thought btw - do you seriously think that at any time in history employers have been devastated when their staff leave? It also works the other way - how many seriously give much consideration to their employer when they leave for another job? However, that is not what is being discussed here. There are lots of brilliant young people starting out in the workforce, but there are a certain number who think they can start at the top, avoid doing anything they don't want to do, think some tasks are beneath them etc. In other words, they seem to think they shouldn't have to do what their employer is PAYING them to do, and the concept of starting at the bottom and learning your way up is foreign to them.

Upthread someone said that many people have to spend 30-40% of their after tax pay on housing, as if that is astronomically high. Isn't that the norm? I always thought that the goal was 1/3 each for housing, bills and spending, and if you have any left over that covers savings.

I do think that a lot of us have normalized quite a high standard of living and expect to have the money for a phone, new clothes, nights out etc. My first mortgage was a bargain at a fixed rate of 15% interest. The deposit was tiny compared to today's but the monthly payments were over 50% of our take home pay. We lived an incredibly frugal lifestyle as a result.

Some young people are getting into the property ladder, otherwise we'd see a collapse of house prices. If all young people are unable to buy property then the market will adjust.

Most of the young people I know have jobs.

You have no idea what it's like now. It's bl00dy hard to 'work your way up' the salaries are crap and employers just will not pay decent wages. I've been 'working my way up' for 15 years, despite a good degree from one of the top unis and a lot of hard work in 15 years I've managed to get from 18k, to 34k. Sorry but that's crap.
I get excellent performance reviews, do typically 3-4 years in a job before looking for a promotion, but in that 15 years the highest cost of living raise I've ever had was 1.7%. inflation has been MUCH higher every year, so the real value of my wage has been slashed. My 34k SHOULD be around 50k, or even higher. And employers wonder why they are struggling to recruit?!?? Oh and in that same time, my once good pension terms have been altered to give me a far poorer pension, while the contributions I'm expected to make have over time, doubled in percentage. Fabulous! Hard work is doing wonders for me!!!

I've recently recruited for a junior post, (London, 30k + benefits) would suit a new grad or possibly a 2nd jobber. I had a shortlist of 12, all marketing graduates, initial interviews by video call.

Eleven were hopeless. There's no other word for them. One couldn't tell me what her degree had been about, at all. One told me he really wanted to do something else and as soon as an opportunity came up, he'd be off. One interviewed in pink pjs with hearts on and hadn't even brushed her hair.. Another introduced me to her cats and said she liked staying at home and cooking. Most of them hadn't looked at our web site, done basic prep or prepared any questions. These were business graduates not 16yos. One boy was enthusiastic but not right for the post and we subsequently hired him for something else. In the end I hired a 2nd jobber we got chatting to in a pub.

My impression was that they want to work, but have no idea what is expected. I suspect lockdown has hit a lot of students who don't have business people for parents. There seemed to be so much basic work they hadn't done.

It’s definitely much harder now to leave home and start work and living independently. A starter salary is a struggle to pay rent and bills in many areas.

Young people will and do stay home much longer. But this isn’t always possible. So those earning £2k a month but alone v someone supported by family will really struggle in comparison.

But I think the mentality of commuting hours, working long late days, lots of overtime is now shifting. Younger People now say 9-6pm in office is fine, but no way are they going to do hours every evening overtime for free, and this should be correct. It should be life has a work and family balance, not just work work until you retire or die.