Most age groups find a days work stressful.
Young people are just the first generation to be unashamed to admit it.
In part because we grew up with to many rancid arse holes like Liz Kendal expressing her toxic crap.
Of course they’re framing that as the weakness of the young generation while glossing over the fact that they produce several times the amount of labor and product in the same amount of time as the generations before them.
I’m over 30 and I still find work stressful every day
I’m 38 and it wasn’t always like this.
There’s a woman in our office who has been promoted and seems desperate to make people who are under hers life hell. Fortunately I’m nothing to do with her but I still get a fair few snide comments.
What’s with the agism? Old geezers like me find a day’s work incredibly stressful!
I am really fucking tired of soundbite politics, of people saying a thing to rally their voters without any nuance at all. I know why it happens and I know that it’s always happened, but I wish it wouldn’t.
Of course young people find a day’s work stressful. Entry level jobs are almost always shit. You go from the easy(ish) life of full time education, into a world where adults belittle you while giving you tasks that they don’t want to do. For this you’re paid a minimum wage that’s impossible to live on if you’re under 21, and damn near impossible if you’re over 21. You suddenly have to pay bills, and have to choose between having a social life and being functional.
While all of this is happening, you escape into social media where you see people your age apparently making bank just by fucking about online. So you spend your time daydreaming and resentful that you have to go to a place you don’t want to be at an hour you’re not used to.
And despite your efforts, condescending shitheads like Liz fucking Kendall are there to tell you that your feelings on the matter aren’t valid.
So yeah, I’d say it’s stressful.
Many young people find toiling senselessly in a dystopian hellscape without hope nor future ‘stressful’, says I.
When you wake up early, start a long commute, work in a shit job (often with unpredictable hours), have an unpaid lunch break, work some more in your understaffed company, then start the long commute back home to your parents house because you can’t afford a place of your own, then yeah, I can imagine that’s stressful.
And it gets more so when you open social media or news and it’s always the privileged or the elderly (often they’re even one and the same) constantly shaming youth for being horrible lazy pieces of shit who won’t lift themselves up by their bootstraps.
The increase in minimum wage is a great thing. As is the incoming increase in workers rights. I won’t sit and pretend Labour are doing nothing. But more needs to be done if you want a mentally healthy workforce.
Just saying “too many find XYZ stressful” without detailing how you plan to change that isn’t helping.
I want workers to earn more, but can you really regulate the economy into being better like this?
The cost of living is insane, but the relative pay per hour of a worker competed to anywhere in Europe is already pretty high. Our current minimum wage is 25% higher than Germany, 28% higher than France, 81% for Spain, and 318% compared to somewhere lile the Czech Republic. Our economy is already stalled out, It’s already prohibitively expensive to run a company in the UK, and I don’t think making employees cost more will stimulate the economy.
Also if minimum wage rises aggressively then I think all that will happen is we’ll get a wage spiral upwards and companies will hire fewer and fewer peoeple. We saw a bit of this as we were coming out of covid as a reaction to inflation at the time. The concern is if wages do inflate quicjly, then that drivea prices higher, which results in people demanding higher wages, ect.
Tackling the actual living costs, housing, utility, food, I think that’s the only way to go about this. Anything like a minimum wage increase just rolls the snowball down the road, and it will 100% be bigger when you reach it again.
So what do you suggest then? I’m more skilled and have more responsibility than I did 15 years ago, yet I’m still earning the same figure.
I don’t have that many answers, but I’ll give it a go.
I think we need to come down extremely hard on landlords, potentially crippling their income stream. They chose an investment, and all investments carry risk, the risk in this case is that too many people can’t afford housing, and the government has to step in and heavily regulate those who profiteer off of basic shelter. This would apply to anyone with rental properties, second homes, long term investment opportunities, ect.
Along side that, a shakeup to planning permission. Fuck NIMBYism, sorry but you don’t get a say when people are paying 80% of their income on the bare essentials. From the top down, mandate construction of new housing in an aggressive manor. After Thatcher absolutely fucked us by forcing the local councils to sell off their council houses with the start of austerity, we’ve been at a ludicrous deficit. I think the figure I was reading is we need to be building about 400,000 houses a year and then in 5 years time, we’ll get “close” to fixing the lack of supply that we’re faced with now
Where does this money come from for that? I dunno, I would guess borrowing like we have done. It’s risky as hell, but it’s better than the current risk where we borrow against our rise in GDP, just hoping we outpace the loan rate without any long term plan to reduce the cost of living. Failing that, a wealth tax could maybe be possible? In the tune of 0.5% or so. That would generate an insane amount of revenue, but it would risk foreign investors looking unfavorably towards the UK. It would look risky for their assets, so foreign investment may fall in a dangerous way, maybe this isn’t the best plan? I just have no idea, it’s not my area of knowledge.
I think the above could be enough to trigger an actual wealth transfer. By dramatically reducing the cost of living, people will actually have disposable income. Income that can go into buying things. Say you work selling clothing, your customers suddenly having 50% more of their paycheques to spend is like the ideal situation, now they actually have the funds to buy your wares. With that higher income, well now you can hire more staff, you can pay your staff more also. You’re not having to work to such a fine margin as economically your customers aren’t as screwed just trying to survive.
I have no idea if this is all viable to be clear, I hope that I’ve come to some solid conclusions and ideas here, I’d love to hear pushback on all of that as well as I’m sure I’ve made some wack assumptions.
The problem with ‘cracking down’ on benefits is identical with the problem of ‘cracking down’ on immigration. These things are just not real problems and the people who think they are problems are flat wrong. You can’t do anything about unreal problems, because the people who believe in the fake problems just don’t believe in reality.
I’m not young and yeah, working 8 hours (or more) straight is not fun. Boring tasks, incompetent (and arrogant) people to deal with, never ending stuff piled on you.
Gen z is more than right to not put up with the stuff that a lot of people has gone through
I don’t know the career of this particular woman but a politician ragging on the work ethic of anyone is hilarious.
What statistic is she basing this on, any or just her feelings? Just go work at a grocery store? Maybe she should ask these “managers” who’s she’s basing this opinion on what their turn around on employees is, what their wages and guaranteed hours are. The opinion of managers on the work ethic of anyone means less than shit to me having met at least one manager in my life and having worked retail/hospo before.
Pretty easy to advocate for “young” people to go work shitkicker jobs in retail and hospo when you sit at a desk in air con all day for a living. I know if I lost my current career I sure as fuck won’t go back.
Now come on you can’t you say that she’s clearly gone through the same working experience as the young people she’s talking about . Like our recent tory candidate she prob had to do her work experience in Westminster, intern at Westminster, junior at Westminster,
Exactly, I know the type because I’m related to similar. Looks down on such work, would never do such work but everyone else is lazy because they won’t do it. Classic.
“no one wants to work anymore”
Equals:
The pay is not up to scratch.
"they had to understand that that was the world of work, that was just the nature of life and that isn’t stress or pressure”
Should we try to improve society? No! Life is pain! Get back in the bucket with the rest of the crabs where you belong!
So Liz Kendall thinks its odd that in a country where there are no jobs for life anymore, no real job security at all, zero-hour contracts and the bullshit of the ‘gig economy’ are rife, minimum wage is far below what the ever increasing cost of living can afford to pay for, where contracts (where they exist at all) can be redrawn at a moments notice to suit the whim of the employer and where the right to take strike action is pretty much gone has led to a stressed out, exhausted work-force? Or a reluctance to join it?
And then, couple that with the wait times now measured in years to access NHS mental health support and which largely constitutes being offered 4 hours of generic counseling and/or being told to download a fucking app she wonders whats going on and why so many people are so mentally unwell?
Meanwhile MP’s get subsidised food, booze, accommodation costs and vote themselves a pay rise every time its raised in parliament.
You’re taking the fucking piss Liz.
Gen Z are lazy and don’t want to work.
Millennials are lazy and don’t want to work.
Gen X are lazy and don’t want to work.
Boomers are lazy and don’t want to work.
Only one of these groups were hippies and were work shy, as a generation. 🤷
Just off the headline;
Ya think?!
