Corporate America has built and feathered their own nest with their move to “the company owes you no loyalty”… the generations who grew up thinking you owed the company 100% of your efforts, etc. accepted it while still working hard, but Gen Y, who entered the work force with no more guarantee than a paycheck for the work you do that day never built up that delusion, and yet Corporate America still wants the benefits of a loyal workforce… putting in extra hours when convenient for the company, giving notice when you quit, putting your life second to the companies scheduling needs, etc…. all while the company wouldn’t blink at walking you to the door tommorrow if they could outsource your job and save 20% of your salary, even if it is below the poverty line already. And now Corporate America realizes that this isn’t such a great deal for the companies anymore since people are wising up, so some are taking steps to be more attractive and provide more rewards for employees… while others bitch about the sense of entitlement of Gen Y’ers.

If you factor inflation into the starting wage most companies are paying less than the real starting wage when the current managers/top brass started out, and these guys also have the same myopic vision… to them, every success they had was because they were bold and siezed opportunity… not because the entire company did well in a growing market. If anyone has “entitlement” issues these days, it’s the CEO’s playing the “but he got more” game back and fort as the multiple of their pay compared to regular employees grows geometrically.

Now, that’s no excuse for Gen Y’ers living beyond their means, not appreciating what they have, balancing out corporate weakness with personal strength and savings, but when it comes to Gen Y in the workforce, my message to companies is “Supply and Demand, enjoy being on the short end for a change”… and I say this as an early Gen X’er who watched the shift from the inside and thinks this endless race to the bottom, sacrificing quality, value, and community wellbeing is the dumbest thing possible. (Although I am very pro: global free trade… just make sure everyone has to handle their currency fairly (no pegging) and follow the same human rights and environmental rules).

I did a presentation about debt a few months ago. The food server working the event asked me a question as I packed all the boxes up.

He wanted to know if I knew who he could contact to be able to get all his money instead of waiting for his income to rise to have access to it.

For the life of me I couldn’t understand his question.

He went onto explain his buddies all had there allotment of cards issued to them already and they’d led him to believe he’d get his when his income rose to such and such.

I explained to him that his friends were making payments and had created DEBT.

Oh, he knew full well about the payments. He just wanted to know who he could call to get all his money.

I think he was talking entitlements!

He also had no earthly idea he was talking about revolving credit and the interest paid on such an arrangement.

Just an anecdote for your consumption and not meant to be extrapolated to any particular classification of people.

I’m ready for the cyclical change for when workers keep their head down, don’t mind actually working to get ahead, and know the real value of a dollar.

The fact is, if it’s a youth problem it’s because they’ve learned it from somewhere else. Like their parents. Especially their parents, who in all likelihood are more involved in securing their own self-fulfillment and pursuing their own careers than they are to be actively engaged in rearing their offspring.

Or like an education system that seems to be increasingly removed from any sense of mission to EDUCATE – if you ask me any school that isn’t setting a high academic bar and expecting to have classrooms full of gifted and talented students is a school that is selling its students short. And yet in this day and age, teachers are teaching to those horrid tests and it really says something that there is a higher value assigned to teachers who get masters degrees in special education (e.g., remedial education) than teachers who get masters degrees in other areas. Like gifted and talented education.

I think it’s also part and parcel that we are growing increasingly relativistic. Not to say that I expect everybody to believe the same way I do, but we’ve thoroughly trashed the notion in this society that there is any hard and fast truth that holds to everybody. How else do we expect children to behave, if they grow up planted with the thought that their thoughts, feelings and experience have no moral consequence, because the only morality is the one they define for themselves and can’t be informed by any sort of norm based on a universally held truth. (For example, to believe in the wrongness of murder is a moral judgement based on the recognition that it is morally evil to deprive another person of life – one we really wouldn’t want to see left to the individual to decide whether they think it is a moral good or not. The less we are willing to state that murder as a de facto moral evil is a universal truth, the harder it and surrounding concepts like justice are to define). Relativism is a real Pandora’s box.

ON THE OTHER HAND — I have to say that I am personally acquainted with some great youth who give me hope for their generation.

DB

Having seen My Super Sweet 16, it is an absolute waste of money (in one show, a girl’s mother bought $700 sneakers for her and they looked no different from other sneakers). That money would much be better used to help poorer people or do something good with the money. Of course, some might say that one way to become rich is to take advantage of other people, but I digress.

I am 22 and try to be frugal. My parents didn’t discipline me that often (except verbally which I somewhat ignored), but I learned their frugal nature and never asked for things that I didn’t need. The question to ask yourself when you’re buying something is – “will this item or service provide me with enough utility (subtracting out opportunity cost of using the money for something else) that I won’t ever look at it with buyer’s remorse?”

To be honest once I get rich, I will raise my kids as if I were poor to middle-income, because the last thing I’d ever want is a spoiled kid.

And as far as school uniforms, it goes MUCH deeper than self-esteem. When you work in an area with gang violence, uniforms can be a godsend. It also makes it much easier to tell the girl who walks into your classroom with a skirt that barely covers her rear that she needs to go find different clothing to be in your classroom. Clothes can definitely be a distraction in the classroom.