The Post-Social Contract Generation
This week, the Rockefeller Foundation and TIME released a comprehensive survey, which asked several thousand Americans about their sense of economic security. One finding took us especially by surprise: almost half of America's youngest workers believe the nation's best days may have come and gone.
This is Generation Y: roughly 90 million Americans born between 1979 and 1990. They are the nation's largest age group, and increasingly its most pessimistic. They are America's future, but fear the all-too-real possibility they might fare worse than their parents.
The survey emerged from two years of work shaping policies and products that can help Americans weather the crosswinds of global economic transformation, but we learned, in the process, about the plight of America's broken social contract.
Between the bookends of the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations, Americans, their employers, and government entered into an implied agreement that afforded citizens a basic level of economic security if they worked hard and took responsibility for their families. Today, that 20th century social contract is in tatters, and eight in 10 of us yearn for a new bargain to help meet 21st century challenges.
Young people are leading the trend. Ninety percent say the social contract is broken and 87 percent -- the largest portion in any age group -- are calling out for a new one.
One reason is that they acutely feel the current economic crunch. We saw it repeatedly in the survey: six in 10 had to borrow money from a friend to meet basic expenses; four in 10 skipped a doctor's appointment because of the costs.
The job market also worsens every day. Tuesday's Washington Post reported that youth unemployment is now the highest in 60 years: 37 percent of teenagers are employed today compared to 51 percent in 2000. Why? Older workers, immigrants, and college graduates now compete for the same jobs as younger and less experienced applicants.
The underemployment challenge is just the beginning. Underlying structural changes have transformed the economy. Generation Y, in many respects, is the first post-social contract generation. By the time its consciousness emerged, the decline of America's New Deal political economy was well underway. Globalization washed up on America's shores. Now, as they begin careers, many choose work as freelancers and independent contractors -- as writers, website designers, physical therapists, or technicians. Very few are protected by employer-based safety nets.
Today's young people will surely change jobs more frequently than their parents did, but they are also more resourceful, and want to be self-reliant. They are well aware they live in an economy that no longer provides the services and support they need and are asking for.
Young people expect their government to do more. The survey shows they overwhelmingly support major investments to create jobs that won't go offshore -- public works and climate-conscious energy efficiency projects in particular. They favor new public policies that will make hard work pay off, which include increases in the minimum wage, employer-paid family leave, and more readily available, affordable child care. And they want new ways to save, invest, and build better futures.
They are willing to pick up their end of the bargain, which is why America needs innovation in the private sector too. In a dynamic global marketplace, with a more diversified workforce, different segments of society require targeted solutions to strengthen their resilience to economic risk.
The Rockefeller Foundation has committed $70 million to its Campaign for American Workers to expand and accelerate these efforts by helping to shape new policy proposals and financial products that promote and protect access to health care, savings, and long-term financial well-being.
Take the vicious cycle of debt and underinsurance, for example. According to the survey, young people are the most likely to disregard a bill because of the cost, and half of them lack health insurance. Yet, the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is medical debt. When young people max out on credit, they usually manage to stay afloat. Once faced with an unexpected crisis, however, they lack the capacity to cope.
Young people could prevent debilitating medical debt if they had better access to affordable, portable insurance -- which several Rockefeller Foundation grantees are developing. Qvisory, an AARP-style start-up, is gearing up to provide younger workers with exactly this, in addition to counseling services, free financial management tools, and low-cost savings vehicles. The Freelancers Union brings independent workers -- fully one third of the U.S. workforce -- the benefits of old fashioned, employer-based coverage. Finding the right fixes is predicated on understanding the workforce's diversity of requirements. We funded the efforts of Towers Perrin, a global consulting firm, to identify the specific needs of young people and other workers and to pinpoint the products and services that best fill them.
They say that youth is wasted on the young, but maybe wisdom is wasted on the rest of us. The generation that will define America's 21st century is sending a clear message. Young people may well look to the future with unease, but they are telling us which solutions -- which new rules and new tools -- they desire. Now it's up to us to listen.
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Maybe if this younger generation would actually try and get a good education and work hard, they maybe would get ahead in life? Nothing is free and nothing is given to you. Life is hard. Deal with it.
Wasn't it their parents who voted to essentially abolish the public school system?
No, they just let it slide into oblivion while they struggled to make ends meet, nose to the grindstone while being kept in line by the Tee Vee.
You are assuming that the people -- of whatever generation -- have power. Generational conflict does not help the situation in any way. There are Neocons of every age -- and quite a few young ones.
When I graduated from college in 1990 I only had $18,000 in loans. My sister graduated in 2005 w/ $60,000+ in loans. For the last three years... she's had more jobs than I've had in my entire life. Believe me when I say... she works a lot harder than I do. And that's the problem w/ this economy... it no longer rewards people for just "working hard" or having a "good education".
Oh wow.
Shame on you. I've worked consistently since leaving school. Believe me, I know nothing is given to me. However, wages have FALLEN in the last 30 years. The dollar doesn't buy what it used to. A $10/hr job just might make ends meet.
The idea that we want things handed to us is completely WRONG. You're the ones who got things handed to you, in such a way as to make it more difficult for US to achieve the same thing.
Hey, HBeachbum, just wave your fist and tell those kids to get off your lawn.
My daughter was born in 1987 and attends college now. It's amazing to me that an entire article could be written about the pessimism of Gen Y without once mentioning the physical shape the planet Earth is currently in. If you want to name one irreparable difference between the lives they face and the life the Boomers enjoyed at their age, it's the basic insecurity of a world which is overbuilt, undergoing climate change, overpopulated, with acidified oceans, species dying by the thousands, running out of cheap energy sources (and dubious about using oil anyway, because of global warming), with dispersed nuclear proliferation and a growing gap between the rich and poor. The economic factors, by themselves, can be fixed according to their own plan, after they get us out of the way. This wreck of a planet we're leaving them is another matter.
"Now, as they begin careers, many choose work as freelancers and independent contractor
I won't dispute that they're working that way. But I have to take exception to your use of "choose." You may find if you look into it that the choice is being made for them by employers who no longer want to pay for employees. (More and more, employers don't want to pay for anything.)
It's very true that employers are increasingly offering no other work than as freelancers and independent contractors. It doesn't just affect people who are entering the workforce, it's across the board. I'm 60 and still working, and since 2001 I have not yet found any job I could get with an unconditional full-time hire. It's been nothing but contract work. My current contract is better than most, it's for 2 years with paid holidays, but the entire labor force has been hollowed out by structuring all jobs as either part-timers or freelancers or independent contractors. Actual, real-live JOBS are so 20th-century. No employer offers THOSE anymore.
I myself am technically a tail-ender of the boomers (1959), was a bit too young for the previous "revolution," and started my working life in the early 80's. My opinions are exactly in line with with Generaton Y and have been since 1980 or so. I have always had a difficult time relating to the vast majority of both my boomer peers and the Gen-Xers, and am thankful that a generation has come along in such numbers that was surely raised to ignore and deny current realities but instead rejected the ugly fantasy entirely. Now, let's show my boomer brothers what the revolution really looks like, and see if it is allowed to be televised.
As a member of this younger generation, I will say that on one hand, this is a good trend. The idea that there was ever a true relationship of trust and mutual support between employers and employees is something of a myth: the current paradigm is both more honest and more empowering to employees (since job-hopping is no longer as looked down upon as it once was).
The problem is the government is stuck in the past: it hasn't done anything about this huge change in employer / employee relations. A more mobile and dynamic workforce requires a more mobile and dynamic social safety net. Isn't it obvious?
Job hoping is great... if you have a job to hop to. Do you? I would bet with you that most people do not.
The most important social nets are usually not designed to give safety for those who want to improve themselves. They are designed to help those who have run out of options. We have virtually eliminated those.
Then we moved on to make it harder to near impossible to be upward mobile through education by making it near unaffordable. So that keeps people in limbo between nowhere to go on the bottom but the street and nowhere to go on the top, either. Only if you have a social net called "parents" that can pay for your education can you afford to move at all.
I'm from the tail end of Gen-X and have been working professionally for about 10 years now. I'd have to agree wholeheartedly. In the past 7 years, I've been reminded how replaceable I am by multiple employers if I made any effort to point out problems in the business. There is no reason to be loyal to companies when all you are is the number on your cubicle.
If so, then Gen Y is the second consecutive generation to think this way: this article could just as easily have been written about my cohort, generation X, fifteen years ago. I couldn't tell you how we think now, as I haven't seen any polling on those who are in early middle age today. My gut tells me that little would have changed.
If this kind of reasoned pessimism in people who are in the prime of ther youth had been limited to the Xers, then it could have been dismissed as a cyclyc thing. Twice in a row shows a serious trend.
No wonder Obama's ambigious call for change is so resonant.
Let's see what they're faced with:
- No jobs (none that pay, anyway)
- No healthcare
- Student loans they can't pay for with the available jobs
- The prospect of being used, abused and tossed aside to rot in unemployment like their parents when they are no longer "productive" enough if they DO find employment
- Cancer is ravaging the planet
- Endless war
Damn cry babies!
I agree that I think the problem is older. But part of it is also perception. With only a few academics 40 years or more ago these people were very priviledged compared to the rest of society - which led very humble, yet, compare to today also less violent-prone lives. The academics or middle class in the 50is to 70ies accordingly enjoyed more comfort, priviledge and security than people with the same degrees now. Beware of what you compare.
As an early gen X I am watching with horror what the baby boomers are doing to this world. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The only hope is that the boomers are slowly going away. They are a catastrophe and as a group will never have the maturity to admit it or even to apologize.
One thing about the boomers -- we ended the war in Vietnam. Some of us were killed fighting for Civil Rights. Can you imagine young people out in the streets protesting the war -- the way a generation took to the streets in the '60s? Today's young people are the most apathetic people I have ever met. Their knowledge of world affairs -- and history -- is virtually nil. One of my students didn't even know that Vietnam was a place. She knew it was a war, but didn't know it was a country. Hardly any of my students know when World War II took place. If I ask "What happened in 1929?" nobody knows. If I ask "Does the sun set in the east or west?" you would be surprised how many college age students do not know.
But I am sympathetic. Their lack of knowledge and lack of understanding only makes it worse for them.
This is the generation that the PROGRESSIVE community must TARGET immediately. They are hungry for change and honesty. Right now they are in love with Barack Obama but they will need more than his campaign to mobilize them for the long term. The Progressive community needs to organize to reach out to this gold mine of younf bodies and minds.
Amen to that. Obama dare not talk about FDR and the New Deal yet, for tactical purposes, but it's becoming clear that another type of New Deal set of programs is what is needed.
We'll never get it
Which Progressive community is that? The one united with management to support "comprehensive" immigration reform designed to lower wages? The one united with management to not attack illegal immigration which is specifically underenforced by Republicans to undermine wages? The Progressive community who claims it is racist to disagree with immigration policies which disproportionately harm the job availability American citizens and legal residents of color? The Progressive community that reflexively adopted Karl Rove's propaganda over this vast "reform" ("it's a path to citizenship") without a tinge of embarassment.
The "social contract" is gone because both major parties have embraced "globalism" in most of its varieties. The elite Progressives identify with the foreign other than their own nation.
I agree completely
I personally think that's why so many young people ARE for Obama. They want government to do something and he is talking about the government getting involved w/ the people. He should continue to talk about the government creating "green jobs", infrastructure jobs, paying for higher education, etc. Paying for school and being able to get a good job are the things that matter most to young voters.
Of course they will fare worse than their parents. The Republicans, who have been hard at work dismantling the American middle class for the last 30 years or so, always intended that they would. And anybody who voted for the Republicans has nothing to complain about. What they were up to has been pretty obvious to anyone not born on the previous day.
Actually professor, if you did vote Republican and were screwed, and you are, you should have more to complain about than those who did not. See Fraud in Websters. At least the rest of us can enjoy our righteous vindication. In the soup line.
And that vindication is delicious, thanks.
The old establishment and their coporate buddies will make sure none of this ever happens.
There will always be another war to fight - and something else to be fearful of in order to keep the sheep distracted.
Soon, the USA will collapse from the rot within - just like all other failed empires. Then it will be somebody elses turn to play god for a while.
Such is the way of the world. How will we handle this situation?
This is why I teach 'em about the social contact and that they need to demand better treatment. Now moer than ever it's important. I was floored when some female student wrote a paper where she claimed that Rousseau wouldn't be popular today because "he demands an active citizenry which we feel would detract from our personal lives." Eeeeeek. Some get it, some don't. I think the apathy is slowly whithering away because the stakes have become so high -- at least to the "Daily Show" watching students, not the MSM watching ones.
Do you think maybe the apathy is fading because it's now affecting *them*?
I think there may be a slow reversal. But some students have been indulged so much and they have such a lack of work ethic that they're totally Paris Hilton types. I couldn't believe a college with 1st generation undergrads could be so whiny and lazy but there it was. Their weekends began on Wednesday, their attendance was poor, their reasoning was virtually non-existant. This was western PA. Very scary. I was so glad to get out of there.
This article almost brought a tear to my eyes with exactly how poignant and on point it is.
This sentence in particular:
Young people expect their government to do more. The survey shows they overwhelmingly support major investments to create jobs that won't go offshore -- public-works and climate conscious energy efficiency projects in particular.
holds much meaning with me as rebuilding roads, utility infrastructure, a new energy infrastructure, new mass transportation initiatives - these are not things that a giant private company, or even a few giant companies, or even many small local compaines, can handle on their own - it will undoubtedly take government's size and influence to initiate these projects that would bring so much good to this country, it simply boggles the mind that it is not being done.
Reagan's "raw deal" policies have culminated in massive failure regarding soulless profiteering companies offshoring jobs, unregulated investment banks almost singlehandedly destroying the economic vigor of the 90s - there truly does need to be a Renewed Deal for the American people regarding everything mentioned in this to-be-respected and listed-to post - and it shows that the next great generation needs and desires these initiatives with unprecedented agreement - and affecting this kind of change truly is up to us.
Now...if we would only vote.
Thank you Dr. Rodin, an outstanding post.
I am a Cold-War era child, not a member of Generation Y, but one does not have to be a direct recipient of the shafting young people are getting now to see it and understand that it is wrong and dangerous to everyone's future.
There is nothing more important than offering opportunity to our young people, and supporting them in getting started on a positive, productive path to the future.
I am most certainly not suggesting that anyone is entitled to anything beyond equal respect and equal opportunity. But we need to see that everyone is given equal respect and opportunity, so that for those that are willing to work hard, get an education, and aspire to a middle class life for them and their children, we must make certain that there is still a middle class in existence in the U.S. for them to aspire to, and that they may achieve their dream on an equal basis.
When we lose the middle class, we will lose any real democracy, our prosperity, our civil liberties, and much of what was great about America.
The Bush/neo-con "New World Order" has proven a disaster for the U.S. and the World, and the doors to the middle class are now closing for young Americans. They are losing their opportunity at living the American Dream.
And when we lose the American Dream, we lose America with it.
Amen to that. I graduated from college last year, and was forced to leave a city I love and all my friends because there are no jobs out there. I landed in DC, and have been temping ever since.
During my time here, I've met some incredible people my age, with remarkable resumes: tons of overseas experience, lots of volunteer experience, work experience, and great degrees from great colleges. So many of them are applying for entry-level jobs and not finding work, and there are more job postings for this area then on the West coast.
This boggles my mind!! And scares the piss out of me, as my resume is not as stellar as theirs, filled mainly if my experience as a temp. I look at their resumes, and I can't help but think, "Why aren't they hiring this person?!?! And if they're not hiring this person, what hope do I have?"
So yeah, we are pessimistic. It seems like to many of us, no matter what we do, it's not good enough, we're not qualified enough, we don't have enough experience. We were told that a degree equals a job, now we're being told that we have to go back and get our masters, and while we're at it, a PhD in order to be guaranteed anything. Meanwhile we have life to pay for.
We're the generation that is old enough to understand what's happening, but not old enough to do anything about it.
In Hawaii, people with degrees are competing for clerk jobs in retail stores. Only entrepreneurs are going to be able to get ahead.
Bravo. Some of us tried hard to get our legislators to maintain the social contract that FDR put in place... but the selfish voices drowned ours out. It's good that the young ones are realizing that capitalism works best atop a socialist base. I, too, hope that many more of us 'older folks' get the message.
It is my great hope that the 300 million Americans who do not find the lose of the American Dream acceptable will prevail over the handful of greedy traitors who have given us the current status quo, and who plan much more of the same for the future of young Americans.
It's time to take back our Nation and our future, because they both belong to us.
It's time to take back our Nation and our future, because they both belong to us.
Let's get to work !!!!!!!!
"Almost half of America's youngest workers believe the nation's best days may have come and gone."
Why narrow it down to the youngest? I'm a 58 year old worker and I, too, believe the nation's best days may have come and gone.
Demand better.
"Why narrow it down to the youngest? I'm a 58 year old worker and I, too, believe the nation's best days may have come and gone."
Same here. I've seen it happen right before my very eyes. I have a large number of nieces and nephews who are Gen Y's. They are faced with tough times. On top of all the other problems, they will never see the huge transfer of wealth from their parents to them because the baby boomers have spent it all their money on themselves. Sometimes out of greed, but more often out of necessity.
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