Earlier this week, the cranky and long-retired founder of Home Depot belched out his considered opinion about the state of today's youth—by which he apparently means anyone under the age of 70:
Nobody works, nobody gives a damn...."Just give it to me. Send me money. I don't want to work — I'm too lazy, I'm too fat, I'm too stupid."
There is, needless to say, no reason to take this even remotely seriously. Nonetheless, the Wall Street Journal sprang into action to declare a trend. "Where have all the go-getters gone?" it asks.
What follows is excruciating. They actually printed this, for example:
“The passion that we used to see in work is lower now, and you find it in fewer people—at least in the last two years,” says Sumithra Jagannath, president of ZED Digital, which makes digital ticket scanners. The company, based in Columbus, Ohio, recently moved about 20 remote engineering and marketing roles to Canada and India, where she said it’s easier to find talent who will go above and beyond.
Since the onset of the pandemic, several employees have asked for more pay when managers asked that they do more work, she says. “It was not like that before Covid at all,” she adds.
Employees asked for more pay when they were asked to do more work! How intolerable. So the company shipped their jobs overseas.
This is followed by a few more anecdotes, including one about an engineer who watched a TikTok that gave her the nerve to ask for a raise. So she did. And she got one! If the point of this story eludes you, join the crowd.
Another manager noticed that workers suddenly wanted to use more of their vacation time. How odd. What could possibly explain this after two years of being cooped up by a pandemic? Obviously they must be reassessing their entire work-life balance.
Then there are a few quickly googled surveys that are obviously junk. But you never see this:
Granted, this only goes through 2021 and both series are noisy. Still, it shows a steady rise in average hours worked over the past three decades for both managers (in all industries) and programmers. If you look at the same data for, say, retail or construction, you'll see no increase at all.
In other words, the kind of people the Journal is bitching about are precisely the people who have been working harder and harder over the years. They might want a little break or a vacation after the pandemic, and they might even want a raise after a year of 8% inflation. But this hardly means they're a bunch of lazy ingrates. The Journal should be ashamed for giving a platform to a few hastily telephoned people who apparently think so.
Don't worry, I'm sure the WSJ readers feel they are entitled to their vacations, but their underlings most certainly are not.
Kevin, if you haven't realized it yet, you may have some incipient cognitive impairment, but the TRUTH is that The Journal opinion pages are a pure expression of Rupert Murdoch's seething Id.
Way back when, it seemed amongst the high powered financial experts at UBS and Warren Buffett's offices, considered the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal to be what was known in daily periodicals as the cartoon section.
My buddy's mother makes $50 per hour working on the computer (Personal Computer). She hasn’t had a job for a long, yet this month she earned $11,500 by working just on her computer for 9 hours every day.
Read this article for more details.. https://payathome.blogspot.com/
Yes, but did she ask for a raise?
She hasn't watched the Tik Tok video yet.
"The Journal should be ashamed for giving a platform to a few hastily telephoned people who apparently think so." So goes the way of much American journalism.
WSJ is an old man yelling at a cloud.
An oldie but a goodie!
"My parents taught us to live our faith, and to treasure our families. We learned the dignity of work, and we were told that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough," Biden told the assembled crowd last night, linking faith to family and both of them to the dignity of work. He elaborated this later in the speech, saying, "That’s how you come to believe, to the very core of your being, that work is more than a paycheck. It’s dignity. It’s respect. It’s about whether or not you can look your children in the eye and say: We’re going to be all right."
Capitalist propagandists "ashamed" of their finest work? You jest, o f course.
That graph clearly shows that the shirkers are the managers. That is, the Saints of the Wall Street Journal crowd.
I've seen a variation of the "these entitled kids don't want to work" article every year for 20 years and suspect it goes back farther than that. These articles are flattering for older readers (who buy papers and magazines) who like to feel that their work ethic is so much greater than that of younger generations. These articles also play well with business owners who are always convinced their employees are ripping them off by insisting in things like paid vacation and overtime. But I've seen no evidence that there's any truth behind it.
Bernie Marcus is simply adding to Paul Fairie's Twitter thread about "Nobody wants to work anymore."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nobody-wants-to-work-anymore/
Old people have been complaining that young people are so much lazier than they were since Gilgamesh.
I've begun to attribute this to gradual loss of memory due to aging. Maybe a touch of dementia for some, also.
Anything less than the most craven submissiveness by workers is considered rebellion and laziness.
I used to read that rag religiously, today, it's a dumpster fire.
By the way, I qualify, by their standards. I was promised a promotion, had it pulled then was asked to lead a 9 person implementation team and an 8 person group. More people than the director of the department would be managing. I refused, and they're gonna put a Junior FkWit above me, took my office, and accused me of not wanting to manage (the irony being that I led the 9 person and had a direct report). My health also got F'd up in this.
So, we're forming a union. F THEM! Put that in your rag!
It's always the workers fault. With just a modicum of reflection managers may discover that it could be related to the middle class not making significant financial advances for the last 50 years, that COVID illuminated how little their health and life actually mean to employers. If employees feel cared for they will care about the work they do, otherwise screw it and who can blame them.
As at IBM: After every defeat, the C-suite pins medals on the generals and shoot 20% of the soldiers, they being obviously the cause of the defeat. Rinse and repeat.
The parasitic class has propagated a political economy based on maximizing market power by those with any leverage but is appalled labor inputs to the economy have adopted their values and methods. Median wage earners surplus savings in the 1960's had a similar affect. Emphasizing the parasitic class market power, the President and Congress stepped in to prevent a strike to improve the work life balance of railroad workers just like they did to end the concomitant growth of median wages to the economy's growth at the end of the 1970's. The state as a tool to enforce market dominance has become the most effective capital investment.
As I keep saying, if you are a white collar worker you may lose your job to a robot, but in the near future it's more likely the job will be taken by a human in India. People there will work harder for less pay - this is the relevant comparison for CEO's, not how hard people in the US worked before the pandemic or any time in the past.
People keep talking about how remote work will be more important in the future, but if your physical presence is not needed in the office why should companies pay for you to sustain your opulent US suburban lifestyle instead of hiring somebody in another country who will do more work (longer hours) for much lower pay?
Because with experience corporations have found that offshoring has it's drawbacks, particularly when it comes to high skill work. Also there are jobs that involve national security so they will never be offshored. It's not as cut and dried as you seem to assume.
A huge political mobilization to kick out a would-be dictator and his grifter family at the polls, plus another huge mobilization in the middle of a pandemic to oppose police brutality, doesn't count as "go-getting"?
I think it's fairly obvious the problem here is that WSJ simply doesn't like the getting that's being gone for.
The source for the Bernie Marcus Interview was the Financial Times:
https://www.ft.com/content/5680bb94-4fda-4bb5-887a-62ca1b4341fd
It's worth noting that Marcus owns that HD's success came at a cost:
> That can take its toll. Marcus launched Home Depot when he was already 49. Building a mid-life start-up was hard on his family and on his health. In his book, Marcus writes of Home Depot’s early years that “burnout was real, and we were sympathetic, but we also knew that if everyone busted their butt for the customer, the whole company would be successful”.
>
> Comparing himself with workaholic contemporaries and friends such as Jack Welch, the late chief executive of General Electric, and Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, he says “all of these people make sacrifices. They sacrifice time with their families. They sacrifice time with the community. They put their lives on the line into their businesses. But ultimately, the result is something that’s special and gives them a terrific return.” Despite a heart attack, five bypasses and a replacement aortic valve, Marcus writes he “would rather wear out than rust out”.
>
> It is harder for him to joke away what his children and grandchildren missed while he was busting his butt at Home Depot and later at the foundation. “Part of the reason that we wrote the book . . . was apologising to them for not being there for everything that they did,” he says.
So....
Me and my C-suite neglected our families, but that deficit was the price of our ambition and success...and you're a whining socialist if you screw over your family too.
correction: DON'T screw over
When I was a little kid in the 70s there were few news stories about the new generation not wanting to work. I assumed that it was true.
When I was a teenager in the 80s I heard the same stories, but thought it was odd because they were acting like this was a brand new phenomenon. Actually, I think even back then a few people would speak up and point out that every generation said this about the next one and it was never true.
In the 90s, when the same stories came out, I was immediately skeptical. Never hurts to double check if things actually were changing, but it sounded made up. Like every ancient civilization always insisting that there was an even more ancient time that was a Golden Age.
And the stories keep coming. Still, it is good that Kevin keeps showing his charts since things could change. But Kevin has convinced me that, so far, the made up stories are still just made up.
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Posted in 2023, quoting a narrator in 1859, discussing the 1770-90s. The more things change, the more they stay the same. which includes grumpy old men who will die with very little understanding of anything outside of their small personal bubble world.