In an age as affluent, educated and enlightened as the one that we live in, it is unthinkable to many that millennials struggle to cope in the workforce in ways that weren't required of generations before them.
Social commentator Jane Caro articulates the malaise that characterises being a millennial employee perfectly in her essay 'The Generation Games' in issue 25 of literary journal Kill Your Darlings. Commenting on how the jobs were there in the 1970s if the 'lucky tail-enders of the baby boom' such as herself needed them, Caro observes a rise in anxiety in younger generations that coincides with an upsurge in youth unemployment and underemployment.
'The sun had set on the postwar boom, the chill had set in and parental anxiety had begun to grow. Globalisation led to the realisation that our children were at risk of being "left behind",' she writes.
The fear of being left behind is a pervasive one. Belonging to a generation where I was constantly told I could do anything I set my mind to, I was carted off to every class imaginable as a young child — art class, violin class, music theory class, English literature tutoring and so forth.
But the advent of unparalleled choices that was constantly peddled to me did not coincide with an increase in the spaces that are available for young people to excel, or much less be employed, in the fields of their choice.
The Life Patterns: Ten Years Following Generation Y study released by the Melbourne Graduate School of Education in late 2015 refers to 'precarious' employment as a combination of low pay, employment insecurity and working time insecurity, and it is a reality that confronts many millennials upon their entry into the workforce.
Youth unemployment rates rose to a new high of 14 per cent in January 2015 and at least seven out of the ten participants in the study were working some form of irregular hours in 2015 as a result of combining both work and study.
'In an environment where the nature of jobs is changing, it can be difficult to predict which jobs will be plentiful when a person graduates. The transition from education into a job is also made more difficult by the recent slowdown in the creation of full-time jobs and by a broader competitive pool of educated young people,' the study says.
"Goals such as 'to live up to ethical principles' have grown in importance when compared to goals such as 'to make a lot of money' and 'to achieve a position of influence' when surveyed among millennials."
The last few years have also seen an uptick in unpaid internships in the creative, not-for-profit, law and government sectors that have come to replace traditional entry-level positions. Privilege plays an immense role in determining who can afford to do an unpaid internship and who can't — further solidifying entrenched class disadvantage and impeding social mobility.
As American writer Dustin Guastella writes in Jacobin, the higher levels of educational attainment in nearly half of the millennial population have not coincided with more stable economic and financial circumstances. 'Theoretically there is no good reason to assume that education has an intrinsic relationship to class or social mobility under capitalism. Just because education provided a pathway to mobility in the past doesn't mean it always will.'
Compounding this disparity is the fact that millennials will be the first generation to earn less than their predecessors over the course of their working lives, when you adjust their pay packets for inflation. This generational pay penalty is coupled with an astronomical upsurge in the prices of buying property, an asset class that remains a key source of wealth generation for many Australians. A house in Sydney now costs 12 times the annual average salary, compared to four times the annual average salary in the mid-1970s.
That millennials are eschewing the traditional career trajectory of generations before them and choosing instead to invest their time in personal relationships and experiences could be then framed as a response to a dearth of choices. It's not that young people don't value full-time, secure work — it's that these jobs are becoming increasingly harder to secure.
But the common refrain that millennials are lazy, entitled and self-centred appears most displaced by their exemplar record in working for social justice causes they feel strongly about.
With an increasingly ravaged planet and rising social inequalities becoming harder to ignore, research released earlier this year by REST Industry Super revealed that nearly half of millennials would take a pay cut to work in a field they are passionate about, while the aforementioned Melbourne Graduate School of Education study revealed that goals such as 'to live up to ethical principles' have grown in importance when compared to goals such as 'to make a lot of money' and 'to achieve a position of influence' when surveyed among millennials.
If there's one silver lining to the changing working conditions, it'd have to be that.
Sonia Nair is a freelance writer and critic who has been published in The Big Issue, the Australian Book Review and Books&Publishing. She tweets @son_nair and blogs about how she never follows her food intolerances at www.whateverfloatsyourbloat.com.
This is the latest article in our ongoing series on work.