First posted on my 360 blog at Yahoo on Thursday August 9, 2007 - 06:44pm (CDT)
Reading some commentary about generation Y and its future in the workplace by one of my least favorite bloggers (Penelope Trunk, aka "The Brazen Careerist"), I couldn't help but notice just how much our smugly passionate defender of the status quo was predicting that the very youngest adults would be able to get away with, and the reasons she gave for this.
"What’s the point of baby boomers complaining about Generation Y at work? First of all, it’s a cliché, because people over 40 have been complaining about “young people” since forever. Even worse, it’s a losing battle. Generation Y is huge. It’s one thing for boomers to verbally squash Generation X — that was no problem. Gen X is tiny and the baby boom was huge. ...
1. They won't do work that's meaningless. These kids grew up with parents scheduling every minute of their day. They were told TV is bad and reading is good, and are more educated than any generation in history. They just spent 18 years learning to be productive with their time, so they're not going to settle for any photocopying/coffee stirring job. ...
2. They won't play the face-time game. We've known forever that it isn't necessary to be in the office from 9 to 5 every day to get work done. But many of us have missed family events only to sit at a desk all day getting pretty much nothing done because of the stress of missing a family event. And there didn't used to be any option -- if you wanted a successful career, you made sure co-workers saw that you were putting in the hours. Generation Y wants to be judged by the work they do, not the hours they put in. ...
3. They're great team players. If you've climbed a corporate ladder your whole career, then it's probably inconceivable to you that Gen Y doesn't care about your title. But it's true -- they don't do rank. Chances are they saw their parents get laid off in the '80s, so they know how ephemeral that special rung you stand on is and they don't want to waste time trying to get there. Generation Y played on soccer teams where everyone participated and everyone was a winner, and they conducted playground politics like diplomats because their parents taught them that there's no hierarchy and bullies are to be taken down by everyone. And Gen Yers take these values to work -- they expect to be a part of a team. Gen Y believes that no matter how much experience an individual has, everyone plays ...
4. They have no patience for jerks. Generation Y changes jobs every two years, typically because the work isn't a good fit, or the learning curve isn't steep enough, or they don't like their co-workers. And Gen Yers will disengage from a jerk before trying to get along with him or her, ..."
Stripping away the rhetorical spin, what are we left with? A "team" being built of insubordinate post-adolescent employees who may or may not show up for work on time, heading out the door whenever they feel like, treat their jobs like they were hobbies, really not with much more seriousness than that, and will just get up and quit if their every whim is not indulged. A work place in which the 22 year olds are calling the shots, and take a look at the argument being offered as to why this is the case, something we may well wonder about when we consider, for example, how thoroughly disempowered generation X has been in the workplace. So much so, in fact, that far from asking to be pampered as Trunk's glorious twentysomething divas have supposedly been doing, the members of the crowd immediately preceding generation Y were often viewed as being throughly unreasonable because they asked for safe working conditions, to be paid for the overtime they worked and to have some reasonable limits on that overtime so that they could have personal lives as well as jobs, to in general be allowed to live like human beings and to be treated as such. Why the difference? According to Trunk, because generation X is small and generation Y is large. In power politics, that may work as an explanation, but in the context of the free market dogmas that we are expected to accept without question, as those who (like Trunk) are fond of saying that what is reality in the market defines what is justice, this produces an ideological crisis that Trunk herself does not seem to see. Why? Go back to the Microeconomics 100 course in which you were first indoctrinated into believing that economic might made right, and remember the theory that you were taught.
"That which is scarce becomes dear, that which is abundant becomes cheap". But if labor is just a commodity, as our apologists for outsoucing and other neoliberal delights insist, then labor should be a more valuable commodity when it becomes scarcer, which means that generation X's negotiating strength, member by member, should have been increased by the small size of that generation, and generation Y's negotiating power, on an individual basis, should be decreased by its large numbers. Yet we have Trunk insisting that the exact opposite is the reverse, and who notices the incongruity of this?
Interesting, don't you think? So which is the fantasy? The rosy picture that Trunk is painting for this reportedly privileged generation, or the economic theory that is used to tell us that what common sense would tell us is unjust is merely the inevitable way of the world, and thus above question? Or perhaps, could it be both? What happens to a political ideology should the supposed social science underlying it start to crumble?
