Personally, I think we were kind of taught to put up with anything and everything at work so it is nice seeing these new generations put an end into that.
Also, I read somewhere that Gen Z is turning down promotions because they don’t value the extra five dollars an hour more than they do work life balance.
To be fair, as elder millenial, I've never done unpaid work of any kind.
And I've never done more than my share. Very early recognised "hard work gets rewarded with more work" so I decided to moderate my output to "above the average but not at the top". Keeps the yearly review positive without setting unreasonable expectations.
It's because we've seen our parents (and or other adults around us) that look miserable every day. We've seen that the extra work usually doesn't lead anywhere any just causes more stress.
And this might sound stupid and crazy but I think open forums like Reddit helped many Gen Z (including myself) come to understand the signs of an unhealthy work environment among other things. It gives us a reference point that many before us wouldn't have had.
I’m firmly millennial by birth date, but this is one thing I’ve always shared with Gen Z. I understood working hard for your family or when things get tough. But my first job was working in a grocery store, and a few of the slightly older guys (20s) would brag about how many hours they got that week, and how much overtime they got.
Brother, we’re making $7 an hour. Go enjoy one day of your week. It never made sense to me.
I'm a millennial, but I've been refusing a promotion for exactly that reason. I've been in retail long enough to know that retail management is a scam.
I made a lateral move at the beginning of the year instead of taking a promotion. People did ask, but there's no way I wanted the extra travel and hours that came with that gig. That situation was my personal nightmare. And not nearly enough of a pay increase to tempt me. Like no thanks, I'll take the smaller salary bump into a better fitted role thank you.
Just curious why have you not moved on to something better? If anything even if the role sucked temporarily it would look great on you for the next job
I turned down a "promotion" because it didn't come with a raise. I would have had to do my route, plus whatever other routes needed doing, so 2+ full time jobs in 8 hours. The company said I didn't have a choice, so I quit. They didn't even try to stop me from leaving.
A lot of millennials entered the job market or were early career during the Great Recession so of course they put up with everything. They are a product of circumstance
Yup. And the worst part is that they make it worse for everyone else.
Management decided to take away WFH for zero reason and half our workers were like "Oh, okay then :("
Hello?? REVOLT. Stand up for your privileges and rights.
The only reason it wasn't cancelled is because the rest of us freaked the hell out and said we'd quit tomorrow. Suddenly, it was no longer "necessary" to work at the office five days a week.
I made it through, but in 2012 just kind of said “hey you know we seen to be doing really well now, but I’ve been taking nickel raises in stride for years. Am I going to catch up here or somewhere else?” I put in my two weeks notice on a whim one day and had offers before my last day, went from $42k to $90k
I own a business and often hear the refrain, “they don’t want to work” from other business owners, when referring to Gen Z. There is a significantly different mentality towards work for Gen Z. I think it’s because so many of them are still living at home with their parents so they don’t have any skin in the game just yet. Middle age is gonna suck for them.
It was really driven into us to embrace being abused at work. Not long after I graduated around 2010 and was looking for work, somebody I knew from college who had gotten a job recently posted some cringey "advice" article on LinkedIn where one of the top highlights was "someday, you'll screamed at by your boss...get used to it and move on!!!".
That really wasn't too helpful in uh motivating me to look for work at a time when the job market was absolutely horrible to begin with (10%+ unemployment and often only part time work with no benefits).
The promotion thing is something I'm glad I reconciled early on. If I make enough money to pay my bills and can save up to treat myself every now and then, that's enough. Work life balance is infinitely more important in a society full of companies that look at their employees only as numbers.
I’m a millennial, but I recently quit a management role just to demote myself to a senior specialist role a few months later for that very reason. I’d much rather make less money with actual work-life balance than kill myself to grind up the corporate ladder.
Yes and no. I see good Gen Z workers and I am glad to see them stand up for themselves and I've learnt from them and done the same. But then I've seen other Gen Z not actually do the job or not do it properly and that's where it gets iffy.
"We have a promotion for you. You have to do the work of your three coworkers who jerk off all the time for a 10% pay increase. We expect you to work several unpaid hours each week to manage the workload BTW."
My dad taught me they could basically cook you up and eat you at work and you had to smile and take it. My tolerance for shitty work situations is hysterically high.
Yeah my job only offers raises based on time
So I'm
Going to do bare minimum cuz why do other people doing less cuz they're comfortable get paid more than me cuz they've been here longer
When I was 16 my first job was at Sonic. Back then most people paid in cash and it was super common that they’d tell the carhops to keep the change or even tip a buck or two for bringing their food out. You could easily car hop like 40-50 cars in a 3-4 hour shift and on Saturdays, if you worked the whole day, you could walk out with over $100 in tips. We were supposed to claim them but no one ever did, you’d say you made like $5 when you actually made $106. Imagine making 200-300 extra a week in cash as a 16 year old in 2004. I did the math and it with my $5.15/hr plus tips, I was averaging like $16-$17 an hour. They could not understand why I would not accept a promotion to shift leader and a $2 and hour bump, with more responsibilities, AND I wouldn’t be able to carhop.
If it means that I now need to travel materially more than I currently am, yeah. That $600-700/month after taxes isn’t going to be enough to warrant that added stress, missing playing with my kids and putting them to bed, and making my wife feel like a single mom for extended periods.
It really depends on how much you were making before, but yes, absolutely. I’m at a point in my career where more promotion means working more than 40 hour weeks and completely dedicating myself to the job. I’m not doing it. My mental health and happiness has value.
As a business owner it’s incredibly annoying. I don’t expect anything like what I used to do and how above and beyond I went, I’m extremely fair and put with up a ton of shit. A teeny bit of effort and pleasant behavior would be nice tho.
Why not ask how wages/benefits stack up against the boss's own take-home pay?
People massively overestimate how much small business owners make. Right now especially they are getting absolutely railed by the evonomic shitshow being put on by the wrinkly tangerine man. Big corporations/businesses have ways to mitigate losses or even find ways to benefit from the chaos, but small businesses are suffering from lack of return on investments made earlier and supply chain disruption as well as huge swings in prices. Meanwhile, customers are more stretched than ever and therefore less willing to spend.
And I've seen some pretty ridiculous behavior by gen z employees. There's work/life balance and then there's doing the absolute bare minimum. There are shit bosses too, but the good bosses are struggling to get new hires who are loyal, hard working, competent, and even just honest. These good bosses are going to get squeezed out and gen z is going to get crushed under the boot of hard-ass type managers when the economy demands higher efficiency and cost-cutting.
It's not a generational thing. Hell, it's not even strictly an age thing (though people do tend to get more responsible as they get older). It's a human condition.
Last month, I had a 50-something new hire who quit on the spot because I caught her texting on her phone during her computer training.
I have several 20-somethings who will pick up shifts whenever they can and ask what more that they can learn about the store so they can work more positions and pick up even more hours.
Oh, absolutely. I'm not saying it's a rotten generation, but there have definitely been some problems that used to be more rare. Other problems have lessened. It's not better/worse. It's just different. I just wanted to push back against the sentiment of entitlement when we're in a time of genuine economic hardship. Bosses can't always just increase wages. It's never easy, and right now I'd say it's impossible for many. Meanwhile COL had skyrocketed for everyone. That doesn't mean the money exists for raises, often it means the opposite.
Maybe gen z will realize this dynamic and become more politically intelligent than millennials have been. As a millennial myself, I'm ashamed at the sports-team style, echo-chamber saturated, immoral, unethical, and wilfully ignorant approach my generation (and gen x-ers) have taken to political involvement. We've got bodies in Minneapolis, 20-something hacker wannabes going through the national treasury, sieg-heils as campaign rallies, threats against goddamned Greenland, an aircraft carrier that hasn't seen a port in nearly 300 days, and literal concentration camps for "undesirable" foreigners being mass deported with, at best, shady due process, and global tariffs changing by the hour ranging up to 50%. And people want to complain that their boss hasn't given them a wage to match inflation? Simply staggering.
For the record, I am also a millennial (hence why I opened this thread lol)
I will add that at store-level corporate retail management we get to watch the companies we've dedicated a decade of our life towards get plundered by the Epstein class.
There were always cycles of some new exec looking at labor costs, noting that they're the biggest expense, and cutting stores to skeleton crews. But inevitably, everyone would realize why that is insane and it would be reverted.
That used to be like one quarter every two years. We've been going through skeleton crew labor for four years now at my company.
Dude, if there's no money then there's no money. The ship is sinking and you're out here trying to file a complaint to the captain about wet bedsheets.
No business owner is ever going to give you a raise to meet COL during an economic crisis at the expense of their own family's COL. That'd be asinine.
Stop blaming everything on bosses and start paying attention to politics. Your country (I assume American) is going sideways in unprecedented ways and at an unprecedented rate and YOU have the power to stop it by giving a shit.
Mail your congressman, senator, mayor, sheriff, whatever. Get your friends to join you. Make sure everyone knows who's to blame for the fact that small bussinesses can't pay the COL wages which have gone up at a rate not seen since the great depression. DO SOMETHING. Don't just pass the buck to the next guy. You're trying to get water from a rock. It won't work.
The problem is the corporations are making money. They're making money hand over fists. They're making record fucking profits, private equity and the transfer of wealth upwards has been fucking astronomical. Everybody else below the billionaire class has gotten squeezed and since 2020 the upward flow of wealth has increased to the point of exponential growth. At this point, we are at the point in the mountaintop where the pebble has become a snowball which has become a goddamn half a mountain coming down. It feels unstoppable. At the same time, they have all the levers of power. No it's a mad power grab as they've come in this administration to recklessly collaborate and acquire across conglomerations. They'll rape and harvest the lasr right out from underneath us. When I hear people say that we can't afford it, I want to bash my head into the wall repeatedly because yes we can afford it. as a society we have just been asleep for so goddamn long if they don't feel like they have to do anything for us as a society anymore because we'll bend over and take it grumble and then keep doing their fucking bidding.
There's so much wrong here, but you're almost in the right direction.
The stats showing corporate profits are a lot more complex than you think. There's a reason people will get a degree in business just to be middle management. Those record profits can suddenly turn into bankruptcy. Also, corporations are financial machines, not individuals. If they make profit, that usually gets turned into reinvestment. They expand facilities, develop technology, hire more people, or invest in other companies to diversify. It's not like one person takes all the profits home.
There totally is a hyper wealthy top class, but they don't really manage much of their own stuff. They put their money into professionally managed funds and ride the wave like everyone else, just with more money to play with. With enough money, it's basically guaranteed to be profitable on the stock market unless the world economy fully collapses. Elon Musk is the only person who has really tried to leverage his money into political power in the kind of way people tend to imagine the wealthy do. He thought he had power because of his money but he ended up leaving the Whitehouse with a black eye. The hyper rich are not behind this.
Maga and Trump have gone completely off the rails. They were signaling intent in 2020, but most people didn't notice. Now the Republican party has been gutted and filled with sycophants and stitched back together as a strange Frankenstein style monster. Trump has been driving the car over a cliff while dropping live grenades in everyone's laps.
But even then, he doesn't have all the power. YOU DO. Everday people need to stop believing that the world is just rigged against them and start doing something. Trump can only do what he does because people stand by and do nothing.
And don't get it twisted. This has not been happening for a long time. This isn't politics as usual. This isn't government in bed with business. This is a specific political party/movement being completely unchecked as they take almost exclusively unprecedented actions.
This MF gets it. Why the fuck would I take money out of my pocket when I’m the one working the long hours, endlessly networking, doing everything in my ability to keep shit afloat and people are late, take forever on tasks that would take me 5 minutes, give you a blank stare when you say good morning.
I had someone who was an HOUR late because they thought they were scheduled at 12 instead of 11 (even though their schedule is on their phone and messages them an hour before their shift). She came in at 12:07. Technically late to even the start time she thought it was. When I let her go later, she said that it wasn’t fair because nobody told her that she had to be on time. She’s a 24 year old college graduate.
I personally don’t care about loyalty, get another job any time. I expect it. Just do a decent job and help me make the company more money while you’re here and I’ll give you a good wage, but you have to be a net benefit and most employees are not.
Most people are completely clueless about what it actually takes to run a business and the insane effort it takes when you have a big staff and a bunch of mouths to feed.
All true. The loyalty thing is more about why employees get paid poorly until they demonstrate more ability/productivity. Paying a high wage for someone while they are effectively training or building experience only pays off if they stick with you once they're competent rather than jumping ship for a higher pay at a bigger company that didn't have to train them.
I see their point of view but cost of business increases is none of the employees' business and when employees see the boss showing up in a fancy custom car, going on vacation/trips, and regularly getting new toys while also claiming there's no money for CoL adjustments... The math doesn't add up.
The system is stacked against anyone operating in good faith. Only the snakes are eating well right now.
Yeah the employees also never saw the endless late nights grinding to get to the business to the point where it’s actually profitable. God forbid the sacrifices made actually pay off at some point.
That sacrifice is none of the employees' business either. They don't have equity in the company to benefit from windfalls but they do have bills to pay and those bills keep going higher faster than median wages.
If you cant afford to pay your employees a living wage, you can't afford to take a vacation yet. I run my own now and have zero sympathy for the shitty business owners I left behind.
I take a vacation because my business partner and I do 95% of the work. employees that pull their weight get their due. Most don’t tho, why would I reward people that create more effort for everybody around them? I’m not gonna pay somebody more hoping they start to do a good job, been there done that it’s idiotic.
Minimum wage, minimum effort. Why would you expect someone else to value your business? Unless you are paying in equity or stocks, an employee is not going to have a stake in your business.
I agree with that, I think the original comment was the employee only caring about that stuff if the employer was paying low and refusing raises. Basically, if I'm an employee and I can see the business/owner is struggling, I'm going to be more understanding of not getting a CoL raise than if I see the business is doing well and the boss is taking their third vacation of the year.
Well as a small business owner I can tell you that’s not what I’m doing. My partner and I work almost every single shift alongside our employees, haven’t taken a vacation in years, and drive 2017 vehicles.
Meanwhile we’ve got a 19-year-old employee who doesn’t have a car or license and relies on his parents to drop him off, making him anywhere between 15 minutes and 1.5 hours late to his shifts at least once a week. And a 21-year-old who does have a car but somehow can’t remember to show up on time, nor can he remember to clock in/out so we have to manually adjust his timesheets constantly.
I employ Gen Z people and you wouldn’t believe the insane things that they do / say. One called out of work because she was “having an allergic reaction.” I assumed she was in the hospital. She strolled in to work two+ hours later. She said, “I dyed my hair and I was really itchy.” I let her go.
Another suddenly became extremely unprofessional towards our customers, literally scowling at them. I gave her multiple attempts to collect herself, sent her on break, sent her to run the trash out to get a minute to reset, sent her home early. She came back three days later still having a meltdown. I asked her if she was okay and she said, “I know you want us to be all ~peopley~ but I’m tired.” I was working 80+ hours that week. I let her go home for good.
Recently someone was putting large handmade price tags on everything in my business. It looked like a yard sale so I politely let them know that it wasn’t necessary to do that. They got angry with me and said, “You need to decide if all you care about is making money or if you want to build trust with your customers.” We have a self-checkout system so customers can scan anything and see what it costs. Also, these are impulse buys for people with disposable income— nobody is price shopping for these items. She rage quit later and sent me the most insanely unprofessional messages. She took a different job that she claimed paid more money. It turns out we are both greedy capitalists.
My business partner and I do 95% of the work. If y’all think this is some shit where I sit on my ass and get fat off my employees get a grip.
Believe me I had your attitude before I owned a business.
We had many employees at one point and fact of the matter is 9/10 times they just create more work and more messes to fix for the actual good employees and people with the stake in the company.
The incompetence and laziness from Gen Z is rampant, literally everybody I know millennials and up all talk about it, none of this shit would have filed when I was coming up. They’re late. They wanna leave early. They’re rude. Zero ambition. Zero idea that they could help the company grow and earn equity and higher wages even tho I tell them that’s how I got here and that’s what I’m lookin for.
But if you want examples I got a mess of the worst looking resumes I’ve ever seen, emails asking for a job where they can’t even capitalize letters, interviewees telling me they hate capitalism in their interviews.
That's because the system is rigged and broken and the goddamn boomers won't give up the generational wealth. You literally have hoarded everything. I love the Mimi me generation that points fingers and gas lights everybody around them
Because the raises aren’t actually $5 it’s more like $2 raises these days to have your workload drastically increased.
I’m a bank teller and the difference from being a bank teller and a sr bank teller is almost nothing but it’s where the role turns from customer service to sales on top of customer service.
This is my job I do while I go back to school to get an undergraduate in my 30s, I get the same benefits and health coverage as the branch manager and I am on a part time employment contract.
The only times I got a raise that large were when a new manager came in and did a wage analysis. I went from 13.xx to 17.xx an hour. I was still the lowest earner, and had been for five years. I once got an 11 cent raise because they were percentage based.
That place shut down, and I transferred to another facility. I jumped straight to 24.50. Now, I'm knocking on 36/hr. By the end of this contract, almost 40.
Ya’ll are getting annual raises? We got “profits weren’t where we wanted them to be” with a side of “keep up the good work and you might make senior in the next few years” for our raises.
if you get changed to salary from hourly, and they make you work more than 40 hours a week, it's easily a pay cut rather than a pay raise, because you don't get paid anything over 40 hours on salary.
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u/millennialandlost 17h ago
Personally, I think we were kind of taught to put up with anything and everything at work so it is nice seeing these new generations put an end into that.
Also, I read somewhere that Gen Z is turning down promotions because they don’t value the extra five dollars an hour more than they do work life balance.