Young Americans are sick of being treated like crap

Letter #19

Hey Dad!

Reading your last letter made my blood boil, and I didn’t even work for that a**hole.

I’ll tell you one thing: I never would have put up with that crap.

And I don’t mean that as “I can’t understand how you stayed there!” or “I’m better than you because I would’ve left.” No. I think having the grit to stay amongst all that abuse shows a great level of mental fortitude and resilience.

Not to mention you had your best friend there, great benefits, and were supporting your family. It’s a lot more complicated than that.

But even still, I would have looked for work elsewhere.

At some level, that shows a difference between your generation and mine.

Here’s an interesting graphic I found from Career Builder:

My generation, Millennials, are spending 1/3 of the time Baby Boomers spend in a given role.

To add more gasoline on the fire, the quit rate in the United States reached a 20-year high in November of 2021. They called this period ‘The Great Resignation.’

This Pew Research graph is fascinating. Take a look:

“Felt disrespected at work” is the third highest reason people quit. I think that lands directly in the wheelhouse of what you wrote in Letter #18.

My generation just doesn’t feel like we owe anything to our employer.

On that same Reddit thread I shared above, there’s a comment from lazlo_camp which got 109 likes. They say:

“I think a lot of people are feeling less loyalty to their employers. It’s hard to feel a sense of loyalty when for many places internal promotions lead to only small raises but more work, you can be laid off with no notice even if you put your all into a job, etc.”

Pay keeps coming up in this discussion, too. The biggest reason people left their job in 2021 was pay. Dad, you told me many times ‘off the air’ (😆) that you weren’t given much of a raise for many years until just recently. Even though you deserved it! Even though the hospital you work at would’ve been in shambles if you weren’t there.

I remember your Cuban co-worker coming to our house for a Raven’s game. He impressed upon me just how great you are at your job.

That’s what makes this whole thing even more infuriating. The crew of guys you work with are who keep the hospital running. You all keep the operating rooms cold, which allows millions of dollars worth of surgeries to be performed every year in a safe environment.

You are the blue collar workers who allow the white collar workers to make all that money. It’s unfair that you were treated like that! It’s unfair you didn’t make more money, either.

In many ways, us young people are furious.

This is a Ted Talk given by Scott Galloway with 4.4 million views where he talks about how the U.S. has destroyed young people’s future:

It went absolutely viral recently. I recommend watching the entire thing with Mom sometime. Scott drops a nuclear bomb in these 18 minutes.

In one part he says: “A decent proxy for how much we value used labor is minimum wage, and we’ve kept it purposely pretty low. If it had just kept pace with productivity, it’d be about $23 a share, but we’ve decided to purposely keep it low. Out of reach, median home price has skyrocketed relative to median household income.

Pre-pandemic, the average mortgage payment was $1,100. It’s now $2,300 because of acceleration in interest rates and the fact that the average home has gone from $290,000 to $420,000.”

Dad, I’m 31 years old and I don’t own a house yet. I've had many years where I made over $100,000 and I don’t own a house. That’s in part because I had to pay off my student loans.

Here’s the kicker: I made $100,000 per year outside the system! I own my own business. How is it for people inside the system making $30,000 per year or $40,000 per year? How in the world are they going to be able to realistically afford a $2,300 monthly mortgage payment when the price of gas and other goods have gone through the roof since 2020?

We are pissed off!

And then all we hear about in the media is about how lazy and entitled we are.

NO! WE AREN’T LAZY AND ENTITLED! WE JUST WANT THE SAME OPPORTUNITIES YOU HAD AND WE’RE SICK OF BEING TREATED LIKE CRAP FOR $12 AN HOUR!

Sheesh, now look who’s getting passionate. 😆

The USA has a deeply rooted work culture. That’s what we do. We work.

On Dalia’s Instagram feed there’s videos of Mexicans who immigrated to the United States talking about how all they do is work and sleep. There’s no time for anything else. I take these videos with a little bit of a grain of salt, though, because the 12 year old kid who delivers water to my house every week tells me he works from 8 AM to 10 PM six days a week.

I think I’d rather be working in the USA.

Luckily in the United States, we also have laws that protect workers. Like the law that allowed you to care for Pop-Pop when he was sick. But even then, your asshole boss pressured you about it, didn’t he?

This is unfortunately the society we’ve built. A society that revolves around work. A society that demonizes the lazy and runs the people on the bottom ragged so they can increase their bottom line.

Maybe at one point in American history it worked. Maybe things started out great, but over time leaders started taking more from the workers at the bottom. Started running them harder. Started pressuring them more. Started paying them less in comparison to inflation.

Over long periods of time, we didn’t realize what was happening. Like a frog placed in slowly boiling water. But now? It’s reached a fever pitch. And for things to reach a fever pitch in the greatest country on earth means we really screwed up.

Look. Hard work built America. It built great cities, companies, technology, and wealth for so many people. Hard work, by itself, is not a problem by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it’s a virtue. But hard work that is not compensated sufficiently is a recipe for disaster.

I see it all the time here in Mexico.

People take little to no pride in their work here. Why? Because they’re getting paid like $10-$20 a day if that. I know someone with a Master’s Degree who makes $1,300 per month. I can understand why the server at the restaurant down the street comes over to my table two times in an hour-long dinner—once to take my order and once to collect payment. It’s because he’s making $15 a day. He doesn’t care.

I don’t blame him!

I think in the past the hours we worked and all the B.S. that came along with it was at least worth the pay. Nowadays I think young people have weighed and measured the costs and benefits, and it’s nowhere near sufficient.

In your last letter, you wrote: “This is a universal experience for the masses that will never end as long as there are fallible people in positions of authority. But the downright insensitivity and disregard for the value of a human being never ceases to appall me.”

I think this happens because of the culture we have in the United States as well. In general we love to blame the people on the bottom in many different respects. We blame the poor, the immigrants, the “lazy,” the young(!) for our problems when we should be blaming the people in power.

Dad, we’ve talked about this off air as well:

People love to blame young people, but who raised them?

It seems to me your old boss is a perfect physical manifestation of the beliefs of our screwed up culture.

If you had a problem with how he ran things, he’d just tell you “You’re too sensitive!”

That’s victim blaming.

He’d invade your personal space because he could, and you’d be powerless to stop it.

That’s the powerlessness a lot of us young people feel when trying to find a job that treats us well AND pays us a dignified wage. We’re stuck, and like you, Dad, I think we have a lot more mental fortitude for putting up with this crap than a lot of people give us credit for.

We have no hope. We have no savings. We have no house to call our own.

And I’m terrified to see what happens next.

Thank you for listening, Dad.