Dear Employers,
This is an explanation on why your possible future employees no longer want to work all day for money that barely pays a living.
Every hiring company wants to hear that the job candidate is passionate in the field in which he is applying, or at least enjoys the working tasks. You know why, I know why, let’s speak frank and tell the other unemployed people too! Because it can be used as an excuse for bad treatment at the workplace, for crappy payment, and for overtime working hours (be it paid or unpaid). This is the story I know in Eastern Europe’s labor market.
I’ve been applying to some jobs lately and giving up after the first day of probation. At one job, the store manager wanted us to like talking about the fabrics of the products and basically selling clothing. Being the real blunt person that I am, I couldn’t fake it, even though I wanted the money and the job was not that hard. At the second one, the manager was speaking with superiority (didn’t get a call back because I was streching my nose in disgust the whole time). At the third job, I also didn’t get a call after that first day, because there were people with more experience than me at making coffee.
There are also people that can lie and say they enjoy the work and get the job, that can fake it until they make it and get the job, or people that made coffee for a living before, which means they are better than you at this, so they get the job. All the jobs here require experience, even if they don’t tell you in the official advertisement, so if you don’t have it, there are usually people that have it or lie in their CV that they do and get the job. And you know what? It’s fine! Lying to your employers is completely justifiable. I just couldn’t! Even when I am trying to sound like I care, you can read it all over my face and through my voice that I don’t. Also, if you haven’t worked before, there is also a lot of bureaucracy to get through by your employer, so it’s also justifiable that they choose someone registered in the labor industry already, it’s less work and effort for them or their team.
And only lately I realized that people who lie and accept the crappy treatment are the ones who get the job, but also that there are less and less people that do this. Our generation (Gen Z) lately does not accept these conditions anymore and refuses to work like this. We usually say bluntly that we are working for the money, trying to make a living. This is why there are so many employees that do the „quiet quitting,” monotonously doing the bare minimum to just get that paycheck.
It is amusing whenever the TV cahnnels post another report about Gen Z being lazy and spending too much money on clothes and vacations abroad. First of all, the clothes are lately very expensive because of the inflation. And about the vacations abroad, I wouldn’t go abroad if the cost of visiting the coast of my country wouldn’t be more expensive than on the coast of Greece, Italy, or Turkey, where you are met with hospitality and not bored looks, frowns and sometimes even yelling because of how poor the salaries of those people are.
In these feature reports, there are also people aged 40+ interviewed that talk proudly about the poor conditions in which they work or used to work and how the payment was always delayed and they were working endless hours just to make ends meet and they were indulging with the thought that this is life and it is going to make them stronger by character (and less healthy, of course). How wonderful of them! Now I’ll make sure to accept all of this from now on!
Get Irene Ellingson’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
We, as a generation, are less obedient, and some of us won’t accept to be paid minimum wage for 8 or even more hours of work a day. We want to be paid and live nicely with that money. We do not want to live to work, but rather to work for a nice living. And after working, we would also like to still have the time and energy to enjoy our life outside the workplace with that money.
We, as a generation, are less obedient, and some of us won’t accept to be paid minimum wage for 8 or even more hours of work a day. We want to be paid and live nicely with that money. We do not want to live to work, but rather to work for a nice living. And after working, we would also like to still have the time and energy to enjoy our life outside the workplace with that money.
I want to thank the opportunities we have today as a young generation. Media served as a communication between the human beings that live in countries with crappy salaries and high living costs and the ones in which you can still save up for like 5 years or so and afford your own place to live. This is how I have made myself aware of this problem. Also, we had access to higher education than our predecessors and our parents and were introduced to „The Labor Code” before most of us got to our first job. You are not able to provide me a paid workplace, but still, good job, my dear university!
The academic research I’ve discovered about the working environment attests that working in a team is not more efficient, it’s just an excuse for the people that want to work less to let the others (more responsible, capable, or interested) do the job. This theory is called „social loafing” and is as real as I am when reacting to fake people. Also, don’t work night shifts (unless you have a job that implies saving people’s lives). In this case, we are forever thankful! The night sleep is very important; it’s the only time you can experience the proper 2 full sleep cycles required for your DNA to regenerate. There are hundreds of research papers that demonstrate these aspects, I’ll cite 2 of them, in case you want to check them out, at the end of the text.
I also found some research presented by people on media that demonstrated that we are not the first „lazy generation” but that actually this media trend lasts since at least 100 years ago (check Paul Fairie’s posts on X from 2022).
What is the next generation to do about this economic problem? Make the employers aware of it. How? I don’t want to sound like a certain guy that took part in making Russia the way it is today, but I think the most effective solution would be to have a little „revolution” by major quitting, not quiet, but loud! When is this going to happen? I personally don’t see it coming too soon, since there are not that many of us raising awareness about this issue and even less willing to quit our jobs and risk not eating or having no place to sleep for a few days, not to talk about the high class that inherited a good living from their parents or the fewer ones that are lucky to work in those few places that actually treat the employees with humanity. Our change may not come in the next few years, this is why so many of us are leaving the Eastern countries for better places…
The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in a prison. — Fyodor Dostoevski
Read more:
1. Koritala B. S. C., et al., 2021, Night shift schedule causes circadian dysregulation of DNA repair genes and elevated DNA damage in humans (https://doi.org/10.1111/jpi.12726).
2. Shiue Y.C., et al., 2010, Exploring and mitigating social loafing in online communities (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2010.01.014).
