JOBS
A favorite trope of the last decade has been how unreasonable Millennial expectations are in the workplace: we want to move up the ladder too quickly, we job-hop with no sense of loyalty, we’re overly sensitive to criticism and under-receptive to feedback. But the reality is essentially the opposite: we are working exceptionally hard just to tread water. We just work differently than previous generations. That’s partly out of choice. But it’s mostly because of the double whammy of two financial crises.
Boomers were the last generation to enter a job market offering living-wage blue-collar work. In Rust Belt towns, even in the mid-1960s, you could graduate high school straight into a factory job that would keep a nuclear family afloat. A college degree was far from a universal job requirement, but if you did have one, it was a big advantage: it meant higher compensation, status, and social mobility. Boomers also grew up in a different cultural landscape, where men were still expected to be the primary breadwinners for nuclear families, but women were entering the workforce in record numbers. A job meant not just a paycheck but a whole package of benefits, including vacation, sick time, and retirement.
For Millennials, it’s a different world. Our colossally expensive college degrees are more important than ever, often mandatory for jobs that would have required only a high school education a few decades ago. But getting those degrees costs more, leaving many Millennials in debt before they receive their first paycheck. That higher price of entry doesn’t come with higher real wages, though, and these high-credential jobs are clustered in high-priced cities with ever-rising rents. Women in the workforce are now the norm, but women with advanced degrees don’t advance as far as their male peers—despite graduating in larger numbers from law school than men, women make up less than a quarter of law firm partners, for example—and are more likely to step back when they have children. Millennial women without college degrees are funneled into “pink-collar” jobs (home health care, domestic work, retail) that come with lower pay and fewer benefits than the traditional blue-collar work that allowed Boomer men to support entire families. Meanwhile, as factories continue to shutter and mines close down, eliminating America’s last well-paying blue-collar jobs, Millennial men are hesitant to move to “women’s work” like eldercare and nursing, even as female-dominated industries like health care grow.
The global economic downturn caused by the coronavirus has already hurt Millennials more than any other generation, and that’s on top of the damage done by the 2008–2009 Great Recession. Add to all of this the fact that so many members of our cohort, and especially the men of color, have been incarcerated at astronomical rates (further denting their income and job prospects), and it’s easy to see why it’s hard out there for a Millennial.
Less Money, More Problems
There are two big stories about Millennials and work. The first lies in the numbers; the second is about our priorities.
As a result of the financial collapse and the Great Recession of 2008–2009, many Millennials graduated college into the worst economic landscape in nearly a century. That made it harder for older Millennials to get their first jobs and more likely that they would be let go from any position they managed to pin down. Younger Millennials had a brighter path—until COVID-19 hit in 2020. The markets tanked, and millions of Americans, disproportionately Millennials, lost their jobs. “This is a jobs crisis of the young, the diverse, and the contingent, meaning disproportionately of the Millennials,” Annie Lowrey, a journalist at the Atlantic and one of the most astute and prescient thinkers on Millennials and economics, wrote in the early days of the pandemic. “They make up a majority of bartenders, half of restaurant workers, and a large share of retail workers. They are also heavily dependent on gig and contract work, which is evaporating as the consumer economy grinds to a halt. It’s a cruel economic version of that old Catskill resort joke: These are terrible jobs, and now all the young people holding them are getting fired.”
The ensuing economic fallout will reshape America as we know it. And for Millennials, the economic outlook is especially grim. Whether we are just beginning our careers or are reaching our prime working years, Millennials will experience income losses in this recession (or depression) that will dog us for the rest of our lives. That’s because if you start off being underpaid, even with standard raises, you’re going to continue making less than someone who was paid more from the get-go (this is one reason why gender and racial wage gaps tend to get more extreme with age).
That’s not a maybe; we’ve already seen it happen. Since 1980, when the first Millennials were born, US GDP has increased by a whopping 79 percent. But we haven’t seen the benefits of that increased output: we make an average of $2,000 less, adjusted for inflation, than our parents did the year our generation came into existence.
A Millennial male head of household, a Federal Reserve report found, earned over 10 percent less in 2014 than a Boomer head of household did in 1978, even though 2014 America was significantly wealthier. And even though Millennial women are more likely than Boomer women to both work outside the home and have college and advanced degrees, Millennial female heads of household still make only marginally more than Boomer female heads of household did when they were young. When you look at median income, Millennial female heads of household make less than their young Boomer counterparts did.
Boomers’ household earnings were just $10,000 behind the nationwide average when they were young. Millennials make closer to $25,000 less.
One of the most jarring comparisons is what Boomers made when they were young versus what Millennials make today—and the now massive gap between what a young family earns and what the average American family makes. Adjusted to 2016 dollars, the average young Boomer household led by a male breadwinner made $56,100 in 1978; in 2014, Millennial households at the same age brought in just $49,500. Even worse: While young Boomers were catching up to their elders, Millennials are not. Boomers’ household earnings were just $10,000 behind the nationwide average when they were young. Millennials make closer to $25,000 less.
The stats aren’t any better when you jump ahead a decade and look at Boomers in 1989, when the youngest were twenty-five and the oldest in their early forties. In a 2017 report the youth advocacy group Young Invincibles found that Millennials make about $10,000 less per year than Baby Boomers did when they were young adults in 1989—a 20 percent decline. Our net wealth and our total assets amount to half of what Boomers had amassed when they were about our age.
This is all the more shocking given that the average national income has gone up since then. And even though the American economy has nearly doubled in size since the late seventies, the average income for a young household has gone down. Now with the 2020 crash, Millennials stand to lose even more.
To be fair, American wages have stagnated across the board. But that stagnation does the most harm to the folks who made the least to begin with and who are entering their prime working years with the most to gain. Gen Xers were pummeled by the wave of the 2008 recession, too, and they were actually the hardest hit by the initial tsunami. They were mostly in their thirties—roughly the same age older Millennials are now, as we get slammed for a second time—and as young workers and homeowners, they lost more wealth than both their Boomer elders and their Millennial juniors. A Pew Research Center analysis of Federal Reserve data found that in 2007, on the eve of the Great Recession, the average Gen X household was worth $63,400 and had $66,000 in home equity. When the economy went over the cliff, Gen X incomes and home values went with it: in 2010, the average Gen X household was worth just $39,200 and had $37,600 in home equity.
But here’s the thing: As the economy righted itself and began to grow again, Gen Xers fully recovered. Boomers, who were doing better than Gen Xers to begin with, also steadied themselves.
Millennials didn’t.
That means that as we enter the second major recession of our young lives, we’re in a worse position than Gen Xers were as they stood on the precipice of the 2008 crash. A much worse position, in fact. Far from the $63,400 that the mostly thirtysomething Gen X households were worth in 2007, twenty- and thirtysomething Millennial households were worth a paltry $12,300 in 2016. Americans under thirty-five are worth 40 percent less today than that same age group was in 2004. But in the same period in which young Americans saw our resources decline, Boomer fortunes grew: the net worth of Americans sixty-five-plus grew by 9 percent.
While Millennials were the most likely group to lose a job in the 2008 recession, we did end up with the most significant employment recovery, with more of us returning to work by 2017 than older adults. But a return to work does not necessarily mean a return to normalcy. The shock of unemployment translated into a 7 percent loss of earnings for Baby Boomers. Millennials lost nearly double that amount. And Boomers saw significant recovery afterward. By 2010, their losses had already shrunk by 65 percent. Millennials didn’t see a comparable bounce back.
With limited employment histories, little or no savings, and a vanishing social safety net, we didn’t really stand a chance. And now we’re gearing up for round two.
The hangover from the 2008 recession means that today’s young workers face high rates of unemployment and underemployment: working less than they’d like or at jobs they’re overqualified to do—for example, bartending when they have a college diploma, as Millennial congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did after she graduated from Boston University. A study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that nearly half of recent college grads are working at jobs that don’t require a college degree. A 2019 New America analysis was even more dire: only about half of Millennials, by now adults in our twenties and thirties, were employed full-time. And unemployment is especially pronounced for young workers of color. A 2017 analysis by Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute found that young black workers, those aged sixteen to twenty-four, are unemployed at more than twice the rate of their white counterparts, and four times the rate of all workers aged twenty-five to fifty-four.
The pandemic-fueled 2020 recession only widened these racial disparities. Shelter-in-place orders meant that certain employees could work from home, while others were simply out of work. This worked out especially badly for black and Hispanic workers: Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that while close to 30 percent of white employees have jobs that can be done via telework, the same is true of just 20 percent of black employees, and 16 percent of Hispanic ones. And the best-paid employees are six times as likely to be able to work from home as the lowest-paid ones.
The 2008 recession, coupled with demands to cut costs by squeezing employees, also meant that basic benefits were slashed, and it’s Millennials making do with the tatters. In 1980, half of workers had access to a retirement plan through their employer; by 2015, the Pew Charitable Trusts found, that share had slipped to 45 percent. But even that proportion doesn’t tell the whole story. While nearly 70 percent of working Boomers had access to employer-sponsored retirement plans in 2012, a Pew analysis of Census Bureau survey data found, more than 40 percent of working Millennials aren’t even eligible to participate in retirement plans—because their company doesn’t offer one, because they work too few hours to qualify, or because they haven’t been employed long enough. And the youngest Millennials were the worst off: by 2015, Pew found that only 30 percent of workers aged sixteen to twenty-four had access to a retirement plan, compared to more than half of fifty-five- to sixty-four-year-olds. And when Millennials do get the chance to contribute to a sponsored plan, it raises the question: With what money? Extra cash goes to paying back student loans, paying for childcare, or making rent, not investing in the future. Millennials are, in fact, saving more for retirement than our Gen X predecessors did at our age, a small bright spot in a blighted financial landscape. But still, according to the National Institute on Retirement Security, two-thirds of us don’t have any retirement savings.
So what do Millennials get out of these lower-wage jobs that demand higher credentials and offer fewer benefits? It’s not less work, that’s for sure. Not only do Americans work more than we did in 1980, but we work nearly an extra month every year.
What a raw deal.
The Head and the Heart
The numbers are stark. But there’s something else going on here, too, that has less to do with wages and more to do with values. Millennials grew up hearing that we could be anything we wanted to be. We were raised with creativity and ambition. Boomers were the original helicopter parents, and Millennials were the first generation to be so intensively parented—raised with strict rules around television-watching and bedtime, helped with our homework, encouraged to forgo drugs and delay sex so that we could realize our dreams. Millennials, and especially but not only the more privileged among us, grew up being micromanaged and overscheduled; our lives from toddlerhood through college were extremely structured.
The crankiest folks now complain that Millennials all think we’re special snowflakes. We have too many interests outside of work. We’re too idealistic. “Millennials who have grown up on a steady diet of participation trophies and self-esteem boosting seem uniquely unable to adapt when the feedback and coaching comes in forms they don’t like,” griped Nebraska senator (and, despite his Boomer energy, technically Gen Xer) Ben Sasse in his book The Vanishing American Adult. “The generation’s shared sense of entitlement in the workplace seems to reflect a reduced sense of toughness, grit, and resilience compared to that of their ancestors.”
Not only do Americans work more than we did in 1980, but we work nearly an extra month every year.
But guys: Who do you think made us that way? Our Boomer (and Gen X) parents buckled us into the car seats they never had; they worried that we’d end up on a milk carton. We absorbed that greater scrutiny of our safety and well-being, and the perhaps inflated sense of our own importance. We didn’t buy those participation trophies for ourselves.
So what does this have to do with jobs? For more than a decade, Millennials have been begrudged for our individualism, our idealism, and our alleged sensitivities. But these values actually make for a generation of relatively decent people. You can cast our values as naïve—we want to change the world, we all think we’re so damn special—or you can open the frame a little wider and see us for who we are: in general, people who want to be good, do good, and make things better for those around us. Yes, that means we are more open to, say, using pronouns that reflect a person’s gender identity. It also means that we want to do work that promotes our values, or at least be in workplaces that are somewhat aligned with what we value. Add this to the fact that we have never been able to count on either the government or the market to take good care of us, and that we know we may never financially thrive, and well, you can see why we conclude that if we’re not going to be rich, we might as well be happy.
This is certainly true for Justin Pinn. Born to a teenage mother in rural Ohio, he heard again and again that college would be his “Willy Wonka Golden Ticket”: the promise of a good life. He was the first in his family to go to college, and after Georgetown, he could have gone to law or medical school, like many of his peers, or taken any number of handsomely paid jobs on offer to graduates of elite schools. Instead, he gravitated toward work that felt more personally meaningful: teaching. Justin, now twenty-nine, joined Teach For America, which brought him to Miami, Florida.
“I realized that I was making forty thousand dollars a year,” Justin says. “And that is the largest amount anyone in my family had ever made—legally, that is.”
Even so, $40,000 isn’t much when you’re renting an apartment in Miami, let alone supporting family back home and trying to pay down credit card debt you racked up when you were a broke student. “People like me still want to contribute to service in powerful ways, and finances shouldn’t fully deter us when it’s just basic necessities like housing—it’s not like I want to drive a Lamborghini,” Justin says. “I think you’re going to see a hemorrhaging of talent, especially of first-generation students of color, because financially it’s not possible,” he says. What he means is that the near impossibility of working in mission-driven jobs and still making rent will force talented Millennials out of the work they love.
For now, Justin is putting off the rest of an adult life. A house and kids? He would love that, but even though he’s nearing thirty, it doesn’t seem possible anytime soon. “When I was younger, I was like, oh, maybe later in my twenties, that’s when I’ll think about it,” he says of owning a home, getting married, and having children. “And now it’s like, okay, maybe in my thirties. It’s kind of like we’re kids. And it’s because of money.”
Yes, privileging a specific city and career over a house and children is a choice, and one some Boomers (and Gen Xers, let’s be real) may deride. After all, Justin doesn’t have to live in a big, expensive city. He didn’t have to teach in an underserved school, or teach at all, or move into his current role as a director at Teach For America. He could relocate to a cheaper city where he could afford more even on a relatively low salary, or take a higher-paying job. But for Millennials like Justin, happiness and purpose are just as important as, if not more important than, wealth and security—perhaps because they have seen how easily the latter two things can be yanked away.
“I love Miami. Miami has taken me in,” Justin says. “I think about the rising cost of housing and all the challenges that come with it, and in my head I think, hmm, I love the service work I do, but what if I went and worked in the Midwest and went to corporate America and made some money and then could come back to the work I love? But that wouldn’t make me happy and it’s not mission-aligned.”
Of course Justin could choose one—the corporate life, say, or the job in the Midwest—but he doesn’t want to compromise. And Millennials understand better than just about any other generation that even well-paying jobs aren’t guaranteed to last. That’s a very shaky promise of success, and just isn’t enough of a guarantee to cede one’s happiness.
Matt Dubin, a thirty-one-year-old Los Angeles native, holds a PhD in organizational psychology and leads a consulting practice focused on developing company culture and bridging generational divides in the workplace. He draws a straight line from the financial challenges Millennials have faced to the kind of values-based career decisions that Millennials like Justin make. “The recession was a rude awakening,” Matt says. “Millennials growing up were told that they can be and do anything they want. Follow your passion. And as a result of the recession, a lot of Millennials couldn’t even find a job, let alone follow a passion or do whatever you set your mind to do.” That in turn disabused Millennials of the notion that hard work would mean a good job and a stable life, a prescription that many of our parents had conveyed as a promise.
“In an instant the economy can crash and we can’t even find jobs. It totally altered the mentality that Millennials have toward work and what they look for out of a workplace,” Matt says. “A lot of the cultures that are more interesting or innovative and provide flexibility, almost everything we see out of a modern workplace, is somewhat a result of the recession. What was promised to us, that’s not happening, so we have to carve our own path and work a different way. We’re not going to be able to climb up the corporate ladder the way our parents were.”
And if we’re not climbing the ladder, then what are we focused on achieving instead?
“A defining characteristic of Millennials is that we are the first generation that is not going to be better-off than our parents,” Matt says. “So there’s a big push to decide, okay, I might not be able to buy as nice of a house as my parents had, or send my kids to the same types of schools, so how can I make life just as meaningful? How can I set goals to be happy? A defining characteristic of our generation is that work is more than a paycheck—I want to find something that is interesting to me, that I enjoy going to every day, that is a source of meaning.”
Millennials obviously did not invent the desire for meaning in life. But we do seem to be distinct from Boomers in that we want our workplaces to be as reflective of our values as our families or homes are. That doesn’t mean we’re all working at nonprofits. But it does mean we may prefer to work for, say, Netflix instead of Fox, or Sweetgreen instead of Chick-fil-A. Nearly nine in ten Millennials say they would consider a pay cut to work at a company if they believed in its mission and shared its values (barely one in ten Boomers said the same). And even if our job or our company isn’t an extension of our values, we want our workplace to be open-minded and fair. We want to feel heard and respected.
So is that why we change jobs so often? Not exactly.
“I think the stereotype of Millennials as job-hoppers stems from an idea of Millennials as snowflakes, as self-centered in some way that somehow Boomers weren’t,” says Gray Kimbrough, an economist at American University (and, according to his Twitter bio and a Washington Post reporter, a “serial millennial myth debunker”). “But they’re not job-hopping. They’re actually switching jobs less than people used to at the same age. So it’s just a complaint about young people.”
Boomers also changed employers frequently in their early years in the workforce, but eventually settled into jobs with clear trajectories, often staying at the same company for years or even decades, incentivized to put down roots. Millennials don’t have that luxury. Many of our jobs were casualties of the recession, or never came to be because of that downturn. That may make us more likely to stay put in the early years of our careers. But we know that when companies downsize and cut jobs and benefits, we’re often first on the chopping block. So we stay nimble—even as Boomers forget their own job-hopping and see ours as disloyal.
There is also “a huge conflict around paying your dues versus being entitled,” Matt says. Boomers were raised on hierarchy, and the workplaces they built tend to be hierarchical. But they didn’t raise Millennial children with the same rules. “Boomers say, ‘I’ve been in this company for twenty or thirty years, I had to pay my dues, I didn’t get my first promotion until I was thirty-three, and then these Millennials come in and they want to be CEO right away.’ ”
Matt points to how Millennials are dinged for wanting “instant gratification.” Our generation, he says, doesn’t understand the point of waiting seven or eight years to rise to the top, particularly because there is another model out there—new companies, with younger CEOs, where their friends rise fast. “There used to be a mentality of, your boss tells you to do something and you just do it,” Matt says. “Millennials have a different view of authority now. Their parents were often their friends, coaches were friends, teachers were friends. They don’t see the boss as an end-all be-all authority figure. They have to understand the why behind the what, and how their work is contributing to the company and the team.”
Millennials also prioritize efficiency and a logical and collaborative (rather than traditional and hierarchical) way of doing things. This means that there are communication breakdowns between generations: I don’t understand why my boss doesn’t respond to my emails and insists on wasting time talking things out; she thinks Millennials can’t make eye contact, are always staring at their phones, and expect instant personal and professional gratification. (To that, Matt says: “With Google and all these apps and instant communication, instant gratification and reinforcement is what they’ve grown up with. You can’t get mad at someone for having life be a certain way for them and having that be what they expect at work.”)
That emphasis on efficiency also has a lot of us wondering why we spend forty-five minutes or an hour commuting each way to work, just to sit in an office surrounded by our coworkers, each of us wearing noise-canceling headphones. There are of course some jobs that have to be done in person—you can’t be a remote food-service worker, ambulance driver, or plumber—but for many jobs in the growing information and creative sectors, sitting in an office all day (not to mention getting to and from an office) feels pointless, which is why so many of us have long clamored for remote work. That our desire for more flexible workplaces abruptly became reality thanks to the coronavirus wasn’t exactly how we wanted this to go. But Millennials have long been pushing for the kind of work-from-home ability—not to mention economic security—that we’re now seeing as more valuable than ever.
This was certainly the case for Rhiannon Cook, who began her career in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at a legacy advertising firm. “Advertising is a Boomer’s game,” she says. “Things are done a certain way based on tradition. My office was in Pittsburgh and my client was in Atlanta. I would fly down probably once a month for a meeting in person. The client had mostly Millennials on their marketing team, and sometimes they were able to work from home. Because Atlanta’s traffic is so terrible, I would fly down for their meetings, get to the meeting on time, and end up having a video conference with a client in Atlanta because they couldn’t get there.”
This clearly was a ridiculous system. But in a traditional vertical workplace, it didn’t matter. “No matter how bad of an idea something was, we had to do it if it came from someone higher up,” Rhiannon says. “Business operated a lot on ego. I cannot count the number of times I said, ‘This is a horrible idea that’s not going to work,’ and everyone was like, ‘I know, but it’s Bob’s idea, so we have to make it work.’ ”
I talked to Rhiannon, thirty-one, via video chat from her current home on a coffee farm in Manizales, Colombia. She’s not flying to Atlanta anymore to meet with clients who conference in from a few miles down the road. Instead, she’s working at a coffee subscription start-up, founded and run by Millennials, with no central office and a workforce that is 100 percent remote.
“The larger theme of a lot of my career and life has been built around 2009, when the economy tanked,” she says. “It’s not unique to me, it’s the story of a lot of Millennials, the idea that I did everything I was supposed to do, I followed all the rules, I did all the internships and the externships, the teaching roles, the study abroad, all of it, and 2009 hit and nobody wanted to give me a job. That made me think differently about what we’re told we have to do and how we do it, because there are no guarantees.” After a few years in the first corporate job she landed at after the recession, she began to wonder, Why am I working in a way that works for other people but doesn’t work for me?
Rhiannon’s mother had raised her with the view that it’s okay to make your own way and do your own thing. “She lived a very nontraditional life, raising a biracial child as a single parent in rural northeast Ohio in the nineteen-eighties, before having children a different race from you was trendy,” Rhiannon says. And she felt pushed, she says, by “learning so much about American history and the history of people of color everywhere, knowing that so many people don’t have any opportunities, and I had the opportunity to do this. And it feels like, not an imperative, but you feel the blessing of being able to live this way. Culturally so many people who look like me and come from where I come from are just trying to get free. And I look at one definition of freedom—getting a job—and it’s a lovely life, there’s nothing wrong with the traditional American way of doing things. But it didn’t look like my brand of freedom. I didn’t feel free.”
So when she got a job that let her work anywhere, she flew south. And while the digital nomad life is temporary—she will likely end up back in the United States at some point—this way of working is not.
“Right now, the thing I most value and what I know would be hard to give up is freedom,” Rhiannon says. “Freedom in the sense that my time is my own. I can choose where I want to be. No one can tell me anymore that I have to be on a flight to Atlanta at eight a.m. on Monday morning for a twelve p.m. meeting. No one can tell me I can’t spend time with my grandmother. Nobody can tell me that you have to be creative and productive between nine a.m. and five p.m. because that’s when the world is creative and productive… I’m a better person. I’m healthier. I get more exercise. I get to make my own schedule. I produce way better work for my employer because I’m not forcing myself to be creative or productive. It’s flowing out of me much more naturally.”
This, Matt Dubin says, is typical, and challenges the stereotype of the lazy Millennial. “Millennials are willing to work really hard,” he says. “It’s a misconception that they don’t want to work as hard and just want crazy work-life balance. But they do want flexibility. They’re willing to work their butts off, and they’re willing to work at night and on the weekends, but having the flexibility of ‘I want to work from home today’ or ‘I want to come in late today’ or ‘I need to go to an appointment on this day.’ They don’t want their workplaces to be rigid. They wonder, Why do I have to sit in this chair and get all my work done from nine to six?”
Maybe to Boomers this all sounds indulgent. To Millennials, it just seems smart.
Rise ’n’ Grind
And yet.
There is a downside to this new work culture. A flexible and always connected workplace also means an always-on workplace. And a desire for meaning and personal betterment combined with an economy that has already proved capricious and tenuous leads to a whole lot of young workers who feel like they can never take a break—and that they need to keep racking up the professional and personal accomplishments to stay relevant. The #hustle is real, and it’s Millennials who shoulder the demands of the new always-on lifestyle. We feel all the exhaustion, anxiety, and burnout that comes with it.
Takeru Nagayoshi is twenty-eight and a teacher in an underserved school. He works in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. The son of Japanese immigrants, he grew up doing well in school, graduated from Brown, and chose to work in a field where he felt like he was living out his principles. That choice didn’t come without sacrifice—Takeru lives in a house with five roommates (all fellow public school teachers) so that he can afford to live in Providence, an exciting and culturally rich city, on a teacher’s salary. But doing good matters more to him than making bank.
Doing good as a teacher, though, means doing a lot more than it used to.
“A lot of us Millennials are so conscious about branding ourselves that every single part of what we do, be it work or hobby, becomes an extension of that self,” he says. “Teaching is a profession that requires you to stay constant from seven a.m. to three p.m., but also has a lot of gigs and outside work that you can take on. A lot of the work I do is cultivating this teacher-educator brand, and I feel like that’s such a Millennial mindset that my colleagues from other generations don’t understand.”
For Takeru, who goes by “TK” in professional settings (“because most people don’t bother to remember a foreign name,” he says), building a brand, bettering himself as a professional, and being a Millennial all go hand in hand. “I do think there’s something Millennial about this desire to constantly work, constantly brand yourself, hustle and grind,” he says. He is on Teacher Twitter (he skips the also popular Teacher Instagram). Both are loose networks of educators who exchange ideas, and some barbs, via social media. He is in three different fellowship programs that focus on projects as diverse as recruiting and retaining teachers of color and aligning third-party curriculums with state standards. Every week he’s at three or four different networking engagements: maybe he’s speaking on a panel, or attending the Teachers Union’s LGBT committee meeting, or going to a professional development event. He writes the occasional op-ed. Oh, and he also teaches five classes a day, five days a week. Recognized for his dedication—Takeru was named the 2020 Massachusetts Teacher of the Year—he loves his work.
But he’s exhausted.
“No one tells me I have to join all these fellowships and do these projects and offer consulting services,” Takeru says. “And yet I feel this need to. I feel like that toxic pressure is such a Millennial trait.”
Hard work has long been part of the American ethos. But the idea that work should be all-encompassing and central to one’s identity is newer. The shift toward the workplace-as-everything perhaps began in Silicon Valley, where tech companies like Google and Facebook began offering perks that encouraged employees to stay at or around the office all day long: lavish cafeterias, fancy gyms, even massages and dry cleaning. The idea was to make things easy for employees, sure, but it was primarily about efficiency: the less time employees spend dropping off their own dry cleaning or going out for sushi, the more time they can spend at their desks. For employees, that kind of efficiency and the productivity it allowed was supposed to pay off in higher wages and more leisure time.
Instead, Millennials are getting paid less and working more. Even our “leisure time” is spent on activities that aren’t leisurely at all: networking, brandbuilding, essentially performing.
The exhausting Millennial hustle became a topic of broad conversation when BuzzFeed writer Anne Helen Petersen published “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” an essay that quickly went viral in January 2019. Petersen detailed all of the ways in which Millennials were raised to be production machines, having been promised that hard work and efficiency would pay dividends. “Yet the more work we do, the more efficient we’ve proven ourselves to be, the worse our jobs become: lower pay, worse benefits, less job security,” she wrote. “Our efficiency hasn’t bucked wage stagnation; our steadfastness hasn’t made us more valuable. If anything, our commitment to work, no matter how exploitative, has simply encouraged and facilitated our exploitation. We put up with companies treating us poorly because we don’t see another option. We don’t quit. We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig.”
The hustle may feel especially acute for the many Millennials trying to jump into the middle class. Prita Piekara grew up in a challenging family situation, dropped out of high school as a sophomore, and ended up moving from California to Washington, DC, with her sixteen-year-old sister, whom she then raised, despite barely being an adult herself. She worked all day, took Georgetown classes at night, and then switched to an online university. Many of the jobs she’s held since graduating came through recommendations from coworkers, contacts, and former bosses. When it comes to the hustle, “I feel like I had to,” Prita says. “In DC I feel like jobs are gotten by who you know, and who can lift your resume out of a stack of papers.” Her husband, Evan, agrees. “Millennials get knocked for being lazy and entitled, but from what I’ve seen there are a lot of people in our generation who are hustling,” he says. “They’re part of the gig economy, they have side things, they’re networking and joining meetups.”
The two talk about retiring eventually—Evan’s parents, Boomers in their sixties, are both stepping back from work, and that has Prita and Evan considering their own futures—but “we don’t think we will retire, or at least not fully,” Prita says. “We can’t imagine, ‘Oh, we’re just done and we’re not doing that anymore.’ ” The hustle culture, she says, is too built into their habits and identities. And the hustle doesn’t stop for anything. “I’m on maternity leave right now and I’m still calling into team meetings when they’ll let me,” Prita says. “I’m still trying to do networking things even though I’m on leave and can unplug, but I don’t think either of us know how to do that fully. It’s ingrained in us: there is no completely offline.”
It’s easy to say that no one is forcing us to work until we drop. But Millennials aren’t wrong that the demands of the modern workplace (and world) are more extreme than ever before. Since 1980, the Pew Research Center found, the number of jobs that require social, analytical, communication, computer, and critical thinking skills has increased by about 80 percent. More than twice as many people now work in jobs that require social, analytical, and communication skills than work in jobs requiring higher-level physical skills like carpentry or dry cleaning. And jobs that require these social and communication abilities are clustered in the fastest-growing sectors of the economy. In short, they are the jobs of the future. Workers know this, which is perhaps why 85 percent of them say that computer skills are either very or extremely important to succeed in today’s economy; more than a third say the same about social media skills. Nearly all of us are anxious about what automation will mean for our jobs.
The jobs of today also require more preparation, whether that’s formal education, training programs, certificates, or licensing requirements. That’s econ-speak for: people who want these jobs have to hustle, spending more money and time to get the credentials they need. Workers know this, too: according to a 2016 Pew report, almost half say they took an extra class or training program in the past year.
People today are more likely to be working as contractors or freelancers—something that researchers call “contingent” or “alternative” work arrangements, and which the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn’t even start tracking until 1995. Gig economy jobs like driving for Uber or running errands as a TaskRabbit remain a tiny slice of overall employment, and demographics can be hard to obtain, but most research indicates that Millennials are disproportionately represented in them. Estimates of how many Millennials work in the gig economy range from as low as 10 percent to as high as nearly 50 percent. And gig economy Millennial workers are disproportionately people of color: some 17 percent of black Millennials have held gig economy jobs, and even more—31 percent of employed black Millennials—have taken on second jobs and supplemental contract work, according to researchers at New America. That’s also true of 20 percent of Latinos, 18 percent of whites, and 11 percent of Asian-Americans. Worldwide, half of Millennials say they would consider ditching their traditional jobs for full-time gig work; 61 percent say they would supplement their existing jobs with gig assignments. Close to half of Millennials have taken on freelance work.
The number-one reason Millennials say the gig economy appeals to them? Money. Side hustles are an economic necessity in a nation where wages have stagnated, and where the federally mandated minimum wage is so low that a parent can work a full-time minimum-wage job and still live below the poverty level. “There is not a single day, a single moment that passes that I don’t think about money,” says Constance C. Luo, a twenty-seven-year-old community organizer in Houston. She pinches pennies and lives in an affordable apartment, but worries about her student loan debt keep her up at night, and she often finds herself browsing “how to make money” self-help articles at two or three in the morning. “Sometimes I feel like I’m being gaslit by the media, gaslit by older folks—some of whom are people that I look up to in the workplace and my own family,” she says. “On one hand I’m told that I’m entitled, lazy, unambitious, spending money on all the wrong things, and generally worthless, and on the other hand, coming from my end, I think about money all the time.”
Millennials also realize that we are not staring up at the same career ladders that our parents climbed. If we want to be successful, there’s a sense that we can only count on ourselves. Intellectually, we understand that’s not true. We know that you can hustle your whole life and still die at the bottom, if there’s no broader social mechanism to enable you to climb the ladder. We know that employers rely on gig workers to cut their costs, not to help employees thrive or live better lives. We know gig jobs are not the solution to our financial insecurity; we’ve already seen them collapse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overwhelmingly, Millennials say we would prefer a long career at a single company to cobbling together gigs and freelance projects. But as Constance puts it, “To me what defines being a Millennial is this daily constant struggle of staying in the game, staying employed, staying in your home, and trying to balance it all without losing your mind.” What other choice do we have?
More Diversity, Less Security
As demanding as our new work culture is, it’s particularly challenging for Millennial women, who are still paid less than their brothers and husbands, and still doing more on the home front. We think of Millennials as “young,” but in reality, we’re adults, and many of us are parents. To be sure, compared to their fathers, Millennial men have stepped up in taking on home labor, but Millennial women still do most of the work at home. We’re hustling, grinding, and raising babies. Meanwhile, expectations for work, womanhood, and parenting seem to have no ceiling.
There are a couple of positive economic stories for Millennial women. The first is that we’re working outside of the home more often than women of previous generations, and for women, work outside of the home is correlated with a slew of positive outcomes for ourselves and those around us: better mental health, a more stable financial life, and a greater ability to leave an abusive partner or an unhappy relationship. Our husbands treat their female coworkers and subordinates more fairly, our daughters do better in school, and our sons are more egalitarian and do more in their own homes once they grow up. For much of this, we have Boomer women to thank. They entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, at a time when the workplace was obscenely hostile to female employees (it’s still far from perfect, but things have improved). To be clear, low-income women and women of color have long worked outside the home. But women en masse began to enter the workforce as the Boomers were coming of age.
Right away, wage disparities were a problem. Feminists began drawing attention to the gender wage gap in the 1960s and ’70s, and slowly, through the 1970s and ’80s, the gap started getting smaller.
While the pay gap gets a tiny bit better every few years, it’s not decreasing nearly as quickly as, say, women are entering the workforce or doing the same jobs as men. Public policy think tank Third Way found that the pay gap actually widens as women progress in their careers: women start out at a deficit, only making about 90 percent of what men earn, and that gap grows to 82 percent by the time women are in their late thirties and early forties. The numbers are especially bad for black and Hispanic women. The Washington Center for Equitable Growth found that the average black woman makes just 64 cents to a white man’s dollar, and the gap is even larger when you look at yearly earnings: a black woman earns, on average, 61 percent of what a white man earns in a year. Part of that has to do with the kinds of jobs black women are funneled into as compared with the jobs white men have access to. But even when you control for those variables—job, industry, education, age, and family structure—more than half of the gap remains unaccounted for. A black woman of the same age and education level working the same job in the same industry is still only making 80 cents to a white man’s dollar. Those missing 20 cents are a straight-up identity tax.
Socioeconomic factors affect the wage gap as well. High-income women face wage disparities, but they have seen their wage gap narrow pretty significantly as their wages have increased. Poor women, though, have seen virtually no change in their real wages since the 1970s. Poverty, like wealth, is inherited. For the many Millennials who grew up poor, the future doesn’t look much brighter, no matter how hard they work.
The gender and race pay gap is also due to occupational segregation: black women (and Hispanic women and to a lesser extent, women generally) are pushed into lower-wage jobs. According to the economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, this process of occupational sorting is the single largest driver of the gender wage gap. A separate data analysis from Third Way found that of the thirty best-paying occupations in the country, twenty-six were male-dominated. Among the thirty lowest-paid occupations? Twenty-three were majority-female.
Wage gap skeptics argue that this is about “choice,” and that women simply prefer, for example, care work, while men are more likely to do physically arduous and even dangerous labor. But that’s not quite true. Researchers Asaf Levanon of the University of Haifa in Israel, Paul Allison of the University of Pennsylvania, and Paula England, who was at Stanford at the time, conducted one of the largest and most comprehensive studies of gender segregation, spanning fifty years and across occupations, and found that the feminization of an industry—the extent to which it is seen as “women’s work”—decreases its prestige, and by extension its pay. When recreation jobs (camp counselor, park worker) started going to more women than men, pay dropped by 57 percentage points. The inverse also occurs: when men flooded into computer programming, dominating what was once a heavily female occupation, wages grew by 21 percent. When women take over any given role from men, it begins to be seen as lower-status, less valuable, and unworthy of competitive compensation, regardless of whether the day-to-day tasks remain the same. “It’s not that women are always picking lesser things in terms of skill and importance,” Paula England told the New York Times. “It’s just that the employers are deciding to pay it less.”
Occupational segregation—women in certain feminized jobs, men in different masculinized ones—rapidly decreased in the 1970s and ’80s, as women swarmed into what were once predominantly male occupations, like law and medicine. But that leveled off in the 1990s and 2000s.
And so here’s the mixed news about Millennial women’s professional futures: many of the job categories that are growing the fastest are in female-dominated fields. Good, right? More work for women! The bad news is that precisely because these fields are female-dominated, they are also accorded lower status, lower pay, less job security, and fewer benefits.
Also: men won’t do them, and that’s a huge problem. Even the relatively more progressive men of the Millennial generation still very much tie work to masculinity and are hesitant to take jobs that read as female: nurse, teacher, childcare or eldercare worker, home health aide. “Much of men’s resistance to pink-collar jobs is tied up in the culture of masculinity,” wrote Claire Cain Miller for the New York Times. “Women are assumed to be empathetic and caring; men are supposed to be strong, tough and able to support a family.” The fastest-growing industries in America are in education and health care, jobs that are male-dominated at the top but include a vast network of low-level “women’s work.” Women make up more than three-quarters of America’s public school teachers; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women account for nearly 75 percent of health care practitioners and nearly 90 percent of home health workers. But even though entry-level health care jobs that require some training but not a college degree offer better pay and job security than similar manufacturing jobs, men aren’t taking them. The minority of men who do take them are more likely to be men of color. This suggests that gender segregation of jobs isn’t going away anytime soon. And that means that low pay for women generally, and black and Hispanic women in particular, will persist for Millennials and for the generations after us.
This isn’t just a female problem. Though the gender wage gap is at least decreasing, albeit glacially, the racial wage gap is actually growing. The median black employee makes 28.5 percent less than the median white employee, which is actually worse than it was in 1979, when a black worker made 20 percent less than a white one. It’s grown for Hispanics, too, who made 19 percent less in 1979, and now make 30 percent less. Broadly speaking, wages have gone up across the board, but they’ve gone up more than twice as much for white workers than for black or Hispanic ones. And when you look at real wages, they’ve actually gone down for the poorest black and Hispanic employees, while poor whites have seen their wages grow at least a little. The 2020 recession has already done the most damage to young people of color, suggesting that this downturn will only exacerbate the racial wage gap.
In other words, it straight-up pays to be male, it pays to be white, and it pays the most to be a white male. White men benefit financially from both occupational segregation—being tracked into masculinized higher-status and higher-paid jobs—and from discrimination within fields, getting about a 10 percent pay bump from each factor, a team of economists found in a working paper published by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. All that adds up to a pay premium of more than 22 percent overall.
Everyone else loses out in about the order you’d expect, but the proportions vary: looking only at occupational segregation and within-occupation penalties, white women lose out by a bit under 10 percent, mostly due to within-occupation penalties; black men lose out by more than 10 percent, but mostly because of occupational segregation; and black women are penalized by closer to 20 percent, due to a heavy heaping of both, but a little extra on the occupational segregation side. In 1968, when all the Boomers had been born, their generation was more than 80 percent white. By contrast, nearly 40 percent of Millennials are racial or ethnic minorities. As a racially diverse generation with more women in the workforce, these wage discrimination statistics do not bode well for Millennials. In short: wage discrimination makes our racially diverse generation a poorer one.
Behind Bars and Out of Work
While women have been steadily entering the workforce for decades, men have been dropping out. That’s partly due to the loss of traditionally masculine low-skilled work like manufacturing, which we heard a lot about in the aftermath of the 2016 election. The bottoming-out of the blue-collar economy, some pundits argued, led to widespread economic anxiety that pushed white voters to rally behind Trump. Those pundits were wrong about voters’ motivations; multiple studies found racism and racial resentment were more significant factors than money. It is true, however, that even when the economy was allegedly booming, stunning numbers of working-age men were unemployed or underemployed. One well-known factor that has put so many men out of work is the decline in traditionally male jobs. A lesser-known one: the fact that we’ve taken millions of men out of the workforce and put them behind bars.
Ray is one of the scores of Millennial men of color caught up in an aggressive and unforgiving criminal justice system. Ray grew up in New Orleans, before Hurricane Katrina turned him and his family into some of the nation’s early climate refugees. Nearly everything they had was gone after the storm, and there was no promise that if they rebuilt they wouldn’t be wiped out again. So despite the fact that Ray had a budding career in the New Orleans film industry, he and his mother decided to resettle in Houston, Texas, when he was nineteen.
Ray was a pretty straitlaced kid. He sometimes drank with his friends, but he didn’t use drugs, and he had never so much as smoked a joint. His parents both worked hard and were strict with their children. But Ray also made the choice to commit a serious, although nonviolent, crime for which penalties are extremely steep.
So when the cops burst through his front door with their guns drawn, he was surprised—not that he had gotten caught, necessarily, but that they were treating him like a dangerous and violent menace to society. He tried to be as compliant as possible, worried that he or his mother could easily be shot.
That was just the beginning of a process that seemed designed to send a single message: you are no longer a person. “You’re shuffling from cell to cell like cattle,” Ray says, “because they don’t really see you as human at that point. The cells get more and more crowded as you move along. And then they get uncrowded, and crowded again, and you get to booking and it’s cold and it’s nothing but concrete around, and you don’t know what the person next to you did or if they’re mentally stable. At this point all you want is a bed.”
Ray’s mom was his biggest advocate, but Texas’s cash bail system was brutal. Because he was new to the state, he says, they upped his bail from $10,000 to $30,000, even though he had a spotless record. His mother had to come up with $3,000 in cash. They spent thousands not only on lawyers but on all of the other little indignities that add up in a justice system that makes you pay for part of your own prosecution and surveillance and demeans you in the process. “I didn’t do drugs but I had to take drug tests, and pay out of pocket for those,” Ray says. “It was humiliating. You have to stand in a bathroom in front of a mirror with your privates out, while somebody is evaluating whether your urine stream is legitimate.”
Ray initially tried to fight the charge, but he was worn down by a system that incentivizes plea deals. Told he could be facing more than a decade in prison even as a first-time offender, he agreed to a plea that would let him out and put him on probation. It was framed as a second chance, but in reality, Ray says, “the court at that point looked at me and said he’s a predator, we can’t save him, just go ahead and give him a plea deal. We’ll let him walk, but he’s not going to be able to shake this.”
And he hasn’t.
“Since I’ve been discharged and completed my sentence, I’ve applied for jobs and they love me—I ace the interview and they say, ‘You’ve got the job, just fill out the paperwork and we’ll complete the background check.’ And it’s like, background check, shit,” Ray says. “That’s game over for me in lots of instances. And it’s heartbreaking. I know I could offer a lot to that company. But they don’t want to take a chance on me.”
This is exacerbated, Ray says, by the fact that he’s black. “When you’re a white person and you get locked up, they try to find ways to salvage you, to make you whole again,” Ray says. “When you’re black and you’ve been through the criminal justice system, they toss you to the side like refuse. They say you messed up, you’re not economically viable, and we’re going to make sure everyone knows that you’re not hirable because you did this thing. You’re treated as a second-class citizen.”
The formerly incarcerated often face totally legal discrimination. Even when discrimination based on previous arrests or incarceration isn’t legal, it still happens. As a result, the Prison Policy Initiative found that people who have spent time behind bars face an unemployment rate of 27 percent. They are ten times as likely as the general population to be homeless. And in eleven states, people with certain felony convictions lose their right to vote indefinitely, which means that there’s no traditional political avenue through which to advocate for their interests. They are rendered, by the state, something close to nonpersons.
That Millennial hustle? “I can’t even be an Uber driver because of my conviction, which would have been a nice little side hustle,” Ray says. “Most of these little side hustles people do, like Postmates, I wouldn’t be above doing that, but now I’m limited because they can’t vet me.” He’s done hard manual labor, but quickly realized he was going to destroy his body, and that it just wasn’t a sustainable lifelong option. Now, he has a decent job at a call center, but he’s still making less than he would be if he didn’t have this conviction hanging over him. And he knows that when employers hire people with records, they often see them differently—as if those who committed a crime in the past should have to settle for less in perpetuity, should be grateful for whatever they can get. “If employers were forced to pay a higher wage, maybe I could make a decent living,” Ray says. “That’s the only way it’s going to happen. It’s not going to be me getting a job that pays me that on its own volition. It’s like, ‘You need to go get one of those minimum wage jobs where all the felons and human refuse have to go to work.’ ”
Emily Galvin-Almanza is an older Millennial and the co-founder and executive director of Partners for Justice; she also serves as senior legal counsel at The Justice Collaborative, a prison reform advocacy group. She has seen firsthand the devasting impact of mass incarceration on her generation (and on those older and younger), including ruinous debts that often saddle criminal defendants—even, in some states, if they’re found not guilty. “You could owe sixty thousand dollars for the cost of being jailed pre-trial and represented by a public defender,” Emily says. “I’ve seen people financially ruined. I’ve seen people unable to find work. People need a lot of help talking about a prior incident. If employers will even interview you, you have to be very good at talking about your priors—here’s what happened and here’s how I’ve changed.”
And then there’s prison itself, which takes a physical and psychological toll. “The health consequences are massive,” she says. “Prison health care is astonishingly bad. I mean this on a physical and a mental health level. Let’s say you are receiving mental health medication and you have a stable combination—and it’s hard to find a combination of medications that works for most people. You go to prison and they’re going to put you on the meds they want, or sometimes no meds, or sometimes bad meds.” That can do lifelong damage. And while it’s common, Emily says it’s not the worst she’s seen. “I know a woman who gave birth in prison and instead of providing her with the C-section she needed, they broke her hip,” Emily says. “She delivered through a broken pelvis while shackled.”
Many, if not most, of the women giving birth in prisons today—often without comprehensive care, let alone choice in the delivery room—are Millennials. Statistics here are hard to come by, but Millennials just may be the most incarcerated generation in America (although Gen Xers took a big hit, too). Even though incarceration rates have gone down in the last decade or so, the United States still imprisons more people than any other country in the history of the world, both in terms of raw numbers and in terms of proportion of the population. Most of these people are under thirty-five. A disproportionate number of them are black and brown.
Millennials are also heavily policed. A 2011 study published in the journal Pediatrics found that nearly one in three young people—today’s Millennials—said they had been arrested before their twenty-third birthday. While the imprisonment rate has fallen dramatically for black Millennial men, it was so high to start that even its current rate—4.7 percent—remains outrageous. And even today’s lower incarceration rates are 500 percent higher than they were forty years ago.
Boomers, of course, did not escape incarceration. One need only look at the enforcement of Jim Crow laws, the history of the civil rights movement, and the entirety of American existence to understand that black people have always been heavily policed on American soil. The Fugitive Slave Act gave law enforcement formal permission to track down black people seeking basic freedom and fleeing for their lives. In the New York Times’s 1619 Project, Supreme Court litigator and Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson wrote that in 1664, Maryland effectively sentenced all resident black people to hard labor for life, enslavement that “would be sustained by the threat of brutal punishment.” And while the Thirteenth Amendment is read as ending slavery, it also “made an exception for those convicted of crimes,” Stevenson wrote. “After emancipation, black people, once seen as less than fully human ‘slaves,’ were seen as less than fully human ‘criminals.’ ” In place of slavery came “Black Codes” regulating free African Americans, “making the criminal-justice system central to new strategies of racial control.” This is also the argument legal scholar Michelle Alexander makes in her book The New Jim Crow: There is a straight line from slavery to what she calls the “racial caste system” of Jim Crow to the modern-day prison system. The kind of widespread policing, military-style tactics, and high rates of incarceration that Millennials of color across the country have endured are a continuation of this brutality.
Jeffery Robinson is the deputy legal director and director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality at the ACLU. Growing up in the 1960s in Memphis, Tennessee, he says, “the lessons I was learning as a child were the same lessons my father learned as a child and his father learned as a child. And that was: Be very, very careful. White people will kill you for no reason whatsoever. Our lives are at risk. If you ever encounter a police officer, here are the things you do not to get killed.” Jeff remembers being eleven years old and watching the National Guard roll down the street, .50-caliber machine guns perched on the backs of their jeeps—it was 1968, and African Americans had been protesting on behalf of sanitation workers, and faced violence and arrest for their efforts. “My dad took me to the court hearings, and I saw these lawyers representing people who have been arrested,” Jeff says. “Some of them were people I had been raised to respect and look up to: teachers, ministers. I saw these lawyers and I thought, Oh my God, that looks so cool.”
He graduated from Harvard Law in 1981 and watched the war on drugs and the rising tide of incarceration from a front-row seat: he spent most of his career as a criminal defense lawyer. In the ’80s and ’90s, he said, “they were giving forty-, fifty-year sentences like it was ice cream and cake. The judges thought they were doing the right thing, the prosecutors thought they were doing the right thing, and defense lawyers were saying, ‘This is insane. This is going to destroy this person’s family. This is out of line with the seriousness of the conduct.’ ”
In other words, Jeff says, it’s not true that we were collectively blind to the harms of mass incarceration as it was scaling up. Some people—many of them Boomers—were in fact sounding the alarm. But their warnings went unheeded.
That meant Millennials were brought up in a nation in which widespread jailing, particularly of black and brown people, was the norm. “If you look at that famous statistic that one in three black men between eighteen and thirty-five will be incarcerated in his lifetime, that statistic is nationwide,” Emily says. “So if you’re looking at a community like Compton or the Bronx, you’re looking at a community where those numbers are actually much higher. If you’re a young man growing up in one of those hyperpoliced, hypersurveilled neighborhoods, you’re living in a world where most, if not all, of the adult men you know have had experience with the criminal legal system or have been put in the cage at some point in their life, where the likelihood of that happening for you feels inevitable, and where that feeling of inevitably feels even more significant given the way that police interact with young people in these communities.”
This is a recipe for criminalization of children, distrust, and trauma.
“For young people, every day when you leave the house, there are officers who you know, who have fucked with you every single day from the time you were maybe ten or eleven years old,” Emily continues. “Growing up in the world where cops are stopping you, searching you, making fun of you, punishing you if you talk back, threatening you, arresting you for no reason, on a daily basis, it creates a very different perspective on authority, on the system, on who it’s there to protect. You have a whole generation of people who have grown up with no belief in the whole ‘serve and protect’ claim, but who do know that the cages are there waiting as a trap.”
Many Millennials also carry the trauma of having a parent behind bars—even as they face that possibility themselves. From 1991, the late-middle of the Millennial birth boom, to 2007, when the youngest Millennials were just entering middle school, the number of American kids with a mother in prison more than doubled. According to the Center for American Progress, one in four black Millennial children, and one in three of those born in the nineties, grew up with a family member behind bars (for white Millennials, it was closer to one in ten). Incarceration affected black Baby Boomers, too, 26.4 percent of whom said they also had a family member incarcerated at some point in their lives. But more often than not, these Boomers were adults (fewer than 15 percent of black children had a family member in jail in the 1950s and 1960s, when Boomers were born).
This makes for a generation of wounded and destabilized kids growing up in homes that have been torn apart. Families where a parent is or has been incarcerated are less likely to have other markers of financial stability and social mobility, the things that enable them to participate in the broader economy, plan for the future, and maybe even get ahead: buy a car, open a bank account, own a home. And that’s not compared to the population generally; it’s compared to families who are similarly situated in terms of socioeconomics, neighborhood, health status, demographics, and behavioral characteristics.
Young children who have a father sent to prison are more likely to be depressed and to act out than kids who don’t. Kids with an incarcerated parent are six times more likely to be incarcerated down the line. Their education suffers, and they grow up poorer. For significant numbers of Millennials, and especially Millennials of color, these challenges shaped their lives.
So why did this happen? A lot of people point to for-profit prisons as one major factor fueling mass incarceration. And that’s partly right—turning incarceration into a profitable industry, with shareholders who wanted to see industry expansion every quarter, was a predictable recipe for rank abuse and a massively expanded prison system. But for-profit prisons, odious as they are, remain a relatively small percentage of corrections institutions nationwide. The push for mass incarceration has been less about money and more about power. And power, in the United States, has always been tied to a system of racial hierarchy that puts white people on top, sows fear of racial minorities, and promises that white safety is contingent on black subjugation and confinement. “You have a generation of politicians who could use ‘tough on crime’ as a really reliable political theme,” Emily Galvin-Almanza explains. “Scaring people into feeling unsafe and then telling them you can make them safe is one of the most effective ways to get into power.”
Now that we’re older and have a little more power, Millennials are taking up the charge to end private prisons, shift the focus to treatment and rehabilitation, and fight crime using community solutions rather than primarily punitive systems. In late May 2020, a police officer pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, cutting off Floyd’s ability to breathe and eventually killing him while onlookers objected and recorded. Video of Floyd’s death sparked a national outcry. Protesters, most of them under forty, took to the streets and braved extreme police violence to say enough. And this was not the first battle in a war against abusive policing and incarceration that has seen important, if incremental, successes. That statistic Emily cited, that one in three black men would go to jail? That was from 2001, near the peak of America’s incarceration of black men. Since then, and to the credit of prison reform advocates, it’s fallen by 20 percent. Still, Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, told the Washington Post that even low estimates still put one in four black men in jail at some point in their lives. Jeff Robinson raised his young nephew, and when the boy turned thirteen, Jeff recalls a painful conversation. “I’m telling him some of the same things my father told me: If the cops come up to you, make sure your hands are out of your pockets. Say ‘Yes, sir, no, sir.’ Ask if you can reach for your identification. Don’t make any sudden movements. And I’m sitting here telling him this stuff, and inside I’m going, This is fucking pitiful.”
The systems that incarcerated so many, it turns out, were far easier to build than they are to dismantle. But Millennials are working on it, brick by brick.
Making the Mess of the Millennium
The scourge of mass incarceration may seem unconnected to Millennials’ culture of overwork, or to the rank inequality and financial precariousness that shape our decision-making. But all three can be tied to one person: the first Boomer-elected president, Ronald Reagan.
While Boomers split their votes between Reagan and Carter in 1980, they went overwhelmingly for Reagan by 1984, the first presidential election in which the whole generation was eligible to vote. And the youngest Boomers voted for Reagan in larger numbers than did older ones. Many Boomers do not think this was an error: they still tell Pew pollsters that Reagan was the best president of their lifetimes. True, they are an incredibly polarized generation, split down the middle between conservatives and liberals. (Nearly as many Boomers said Democrat Bill Clinton was their favorite president.) But the conservatives have usually come out on top, as they did with Reagan.
Here’s what Reagan did: famously promising “trickle-down economics,” he enriched the top, slashing tax rates for the wealthiest Americans and tipping the lives of everyone else into instability. While top marginal income tax rates exceeded 90 percent in the 1950s and ’60s (and decreased to 70 percent in the 1970s), Reagan slashed them through the 1980s: by the end of his time in office, the rate for the highest earners was just 28 percent. His political heirs, George W. Bush and Donald Trump—both Baby Boomers themselves, and both elected by Baby Boomers—have done the same, while tax havens further allow companies to squirrel away hundreds of billions of dollars. In his many books and articles on the subject, Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz draws a straight line from the Reagan tax cuts to the extreme wealth inequality that now plagues America—a gap that is only growing for Millennials, due to wealth-hoarding at the tip-top and stagnating wages.
At the same time, politicians have refused to raise the federal minimum wage, which has also contributed to stagnating wages and the shameful fact that an American worker can have a full-time job and still live in poverty. And while a great many Boomers were born into families that grew incrementally more affluent thanks to a glut of fairly paid blue-collar jobs and the strong unions that ensured decent pay, predictable schedules, and basic safety standards, conservative Boomer adults have gutted union power. In 1983, the Economic Policy Institute found, nearly a quarter of workers were in unions. Today, it’s barely over one in ten. That same Boomer-inherited hyperindividualism that eventually manifested as Millennial rise ’n’ grind hustle culture began, when Millennials were children, to dismantle the collective bargaining power of unions and their ability to find strength in numbers. Now, most American workers are on their own, with disastrous results.
That a lot of potential workers are behind bars or on parole can also be traced to Boomer fave Reagan. Boomers (and disproportionately black Boomers) were impacted by mass incarceration, too, while white Boomers were the political force that fueled it. Let’s be clear: Boomers did not invent racism or the policing and punishment of black people; in America, that predated them by approximately three hundred years. But the majority-white Boomer generation maintained, and in many devastating ways exacerbated, the centuries-long project of criminalizing black people and placing them in bondage. Prison populations began increasing in the 1970s after President Richard Nixon launched his war on drugs, but they truly took off in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Reagan set the forces in motion, nearly doubling the prison population during his tenure in the White House, and those numbers grew exponentially, including under Clinton and George W. Bush (to be fair, incarceration rates started to go down, very slowly, under Boomer president Barack Obama).
Finally, the federal and state governments have been frustratingly inconsistent when it comes to enforcing the civil rights legislation that enabled many Boomers to get a little piece of the American pie. That legislation wasn’t Boomer-made—their parents and those a few years older can mostly take credit for it—but Boomers were entrusted with the enforcement of civil rights rules outlawing discrimination based on race or gender in jobs, housing, and education. There have certainly been some valiant efforts. Overall, though, Boomers have eviscerated, rather than expanded, the basic protections that sought to make sure all Americans had a fair shake at work, in school, and in finding a place to live.
Millennials are living with the consequences.