Pinched (9 page)

A large and long-standing body of research shows that physical health tends to deteriorate during unemployment, most likely
through a combination of fewer financial resources and a higher stress level. The most-recent research suggests that
poor health is prevalent among the young, and endures for a lifetime. Till Von Wachter, an economist at Columbia University, and Daniel Sullivan, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, recently looked at the mortality rates of men who had lost their jobs in Pennsylvania in the 1970s and ’80s. They found that particularly among men in their forties or fifties, mortality rates rose markedly soon after a layoff. But regardless of age, all men were left with an elevated risk of dying in each year following their episode of unemployment, for the rest of their lives. And so, the younger the worker, the more pronounced the effect on his lifespan: the lives of workers who had lost their job at thirty, Von Wachter and Sullivan found, were shorter than those of workers who had lost their job at fifty or fifty-five—and more than a year and a half shorter than the lives of workers who’d never lost their job at all.

J
OURNALISTS AND ACADEMICS
have thrown
various labels at
today’s young adults, hoping one might stick—Generation Y, Generation Next, the Net Generation, the Millennials, the Echo Boomers. Recently, the
New York Times
reporter Steven Greenhouse has aptly suggested Generation Recession, or simply Generation R. All of these efforts contain an unavoidable element of folly; the diversity of character within a generation is always infinitely larger than the gap between generations. Still, the cultural and economic environment in which each generation is incubated clearly matters. It is no coincidence that the members of Generation X—painted as cynical, apathetic slackers—first emerged into the workforce in the weak job market of the early to mid-1980s. Nor is it a coincidence that the early members of Generation Y—labeled as optimistic, rule-following achievers—came of age during the Internet boom of the late 1990s.

Many of today’s young adults seem temperamentally unprepared
for the circumstances in which they now find themselves. Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults with those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the aughts dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’ ” Twenge told me. “It’s a generation in which every kid has been told, ‘You can be anything you want. You’re special.’ ”

In her 2006 book,
Generation Me
, Twenge notes that self-esteem in children began rising sharply around 1980, and hasn’t stopped since. By 1999, according to one survey, 91 percent of teens described themselves as responsible, 74 percent as physically attractive, and 79 percent as very intelligent. (More than 40 percent of teens also expected that they would be earning $75,000 a year or more by age thirty; the median salary made by a thirty-year-old was $27,000 that year.) Twenge attributes the shift to broad changes in parenting styles and teaching methods, in response to the growing belief that children should always feel good about themselves, no matter what. As the years have passed, efforts to boost self-esteem—and to decouple it from performance—have become widespread.

These efforts have succeeded in making today’s youth more confident and individualistic. But that may not benefit them in adulthood, particularly in this economic environment. Twenge writes that “self-esteem without basis encourages laziness rather than hard work,” and that “the ability to persevere and keep going” is “a much better predictor of life outcomes than self-esteem.” She worries that many young people might be inclined to simply give up in this job market. “You’d think if people are more individualistic, they’d be more independent,” she told me. “But it’s not really true. There’s an
element of entitlement—they expect people to figure things out for them.”

Ron Alsop, a former reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
and the author of
The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace
, says a combination of entitlement and highly structured childhood has resulted in a lack of independence and entrepreneurialism in many twentysomethings. They’re used to checklists, he says, and “don’t excel at leadership or independent problem solving.” Alsop interviewed dozens of employers for his book, and concluded that unlike previous generations, Millennials, as a group, “need almost constant direction” in the workplace. “Many flounder without precise guidelines but thrive in structured situations that provide clearly defined rules.”

All of these characteristics are troubling, given a harsh economic environment that requires perseverance, adaptability, humility, and entrepreneurialism. Perhaps most worrisome, though, is the fatalism and lack of agency that both Twenge and Alsop discern in today’s young adults. Trained throughout childhood to disconnect performance from reward, and told repeatedly that they are destined for great things, many are quick to place blame elsewhere when something goes wrong, and inclined to believe that bad situations will sort themselves out—or will be sorted out by parents or other helpers.

In his 2009 commencement remarks, as the
New York Times
reported, University of Connecticut president Michael Hogan addressed the phenomenon of students’ turning down jobs, with no alternatives, because they didn’t feel the jobs were good enough. “My first word of advice is this,” he told the graduates. “Say yes. In fact, say yes as often as you can. Saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to new experiences, and new experiences will lead to knowledge and wisdom.
Yes
is for young people, and an attitude of yes is how you will be able to go forward in these uncertain times.”

Larry Druckenbrod, the university’s assistant director of career services, told me, “This is a group that’s done résumé building since
middle school. They’ve been told they’ve been preparing to go out and do great things after college. And now they’ve been dealt a 180.” For many, that’s led to “immobilization.” Druckenbrod said that about a third of the seniors he talked to were seriously looking for work; another third were planning to go to grad school. The final third, he said, were “not even engaging with the job market—these are the ones whose parents have already said, ‘Just come home and live with us.’ ”

According to a recent Pew survey, 10 percent of adults younger than thirty-five have moved back in with their parents as a result of the recession. But that’s merely an acceleration of a trend that has been under way for a generation or more. By the middle of the aughts, for instance, the percentage of twenty-six-year-olds living with their parents reached 20 percent, nearly double what it was in 1970. Well before the recession began, this generation of young adults was less likely to work, or at least work steadily, than other recent generations. Since 2000, the percentage of people ages sixteen to twenty-four participating in the labor force has been declining (from 66 percent to 56 percent across the decade). Increased college attendance explains only part of the shift; the rest is a puzzle. Lingering weakness in the job market since 2001 may be one cause. Twenge believes the propensity of this generation to pursue “dream” careers that are, for most people, unlikely to work out may also be partly responsible. (In 2004, a national survey found that about one out of eighteen college freshmen expected to make a living as an actor, musician, or artist.)

Whatever the reason, the fact that so many young adults weren’t firmly rooted in the workforce even before the crash is deeply worrying. It means that a very large number of young adults entered the recession already vulnerable to all the ills that joblessness produces over time. It means that for a sizable proportion of twenty- and thirtysomethings, the next few years will likely be toxic.

• • •

N
O YOUNG PEOPLE
were present at a seminar for the unemployed held on November 4, 2009, in Reading, Pennsylvania, a blue-collar city about sixty miles west of Philadelphia. The meeting was organized by a regional nonprofit, Joseph’s People, and held in the basement of the St. Catharine’s parish center. All thirty or so attendees, sitting around a U-shaped table, looked to be forty or older. But one middle-aged man, one of the first to introduce himself to the group, said he and his wife were there on behalf of their son, Errol. “He’s so disgusted that he didn’t want to come,” the man said. “He doesn’t know what to do, and we don’t either.”

I talked to Errol a few days later. He was twenty-eight and had a gentle, straightforward manner. He graduated from high school in 1999 and had lived with his parents since then. He worked in a machine shop for a couple of years after school, and had also held jobs at a battery factory, a sandpaper manufacturer, and a restaurant, where he was a cook. The restaurant closed in June 2008, and apart from a few days of work through temp agencies, he hadn’t had a job since.

He called in to a few temp agencies each week to let them know he was interested in working, and checked the newspaper for job listings every Sunday. Sometimes he went into CareerLink, the local unemployment office, to see if it had any new listings. He did work around the house, or in the small machine shop he’d set up in the garage, just to fill his days, and to try to keep his skills up.

“I was thinking about moving,” he said. “I’m just really not sure where. Other places where I traveled, I didn’t really see much of a difference with what there was here.” He still had a few thousand dollars in the bank, which he’d saved when he was working as a machinist, and was mostly living off that; he’d been trading penny stocks to try to replenish those savings.

I asked him what he foresaw for his working life. “As far as my job position,” he said, “I really don’t know what I want to do yet. I’m not sure.” When he was little, he wanted to be a mechanic, and he did enjoy the machine trade. But now there was hardly any work to
be had, and what there was paid about the same as Walmart. “I don’t think there’s any way that you can have a job that you can think you can retire off of,” he said. “I think everyone’s going to have to transfer to another job.” He said the only future he could really imagine for himself now was just moving from job to job, with no career to speak of. “That’s what I think,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

As the recession has ground on, the belief among some young workers that this period is just a speed bump—something that can be easily endured or perhaps even enjoyed—has become harder to sustain. The early posts on the tongue-in-cheek blog Stuff Unemployed People Like, begun by a twenty-six-year-old Internet company worker laid off in December 2008, betray flashes of exuberance (“#7 Buying Game Consoles with Unemployment Checks,” “#8 Pretending to Look for a Job,” “#15 Taking Friends Out ‘On the Government’ ”). Later entries are less frequent, flatter, and more sallow (“#143 Thrift Stores,” “#145 Cramming in Their Health Care,” “#146 Staring at Their Useless Diploma(s),” “#150 Wishing They’d Started Job Searching Sooner”).

Aubrey Howell, who’d tweeted about funemployment shortly after being laid off as the manager of a Nashville tea shop in 2009, and was featured in a
Los Angeles Times
story soon afterward, told me half a year later that she initially saw the layoff as an opportunity to clear her head, refocus, and “go after what I’m really passionate about”—music and graphic design. “I realize the gravity of my situation,” said Howell, twenty-nine. “I was just trying to stay positive.” But that was getting harder. “I’ve had to start selling things off,” she said—two guitars, her amps, a violin, a mandolin. To give her days some structure, she volunteered frequently at her church, and also did some free design work there, but she hadn’t found paid work, and when we talked, her unemployment benefits were about to run out. “I’ve definitely broadened the job search,” she said. She’d worked in marketing in her early twenties, in a good-paying job, but she’d felt it was a poor fit, and anyway that was some years ago. At this point, she said, “if Starbucks offered me a good job, I’d take it.”

Recently, the same career conservatism that Lisa Kahn found in prior generations who’d entered the job market during downturns has begun to appear in this one, too. Asked in 2010 to
rate the importance of various career priorities—high pay, intellectual stimulation, creative opportunities, the chance to make a difference in society, and more—Millennials put “job security” above everything else. And when offered a hypothetical choice between the prospect of a long-term job with a single company and the opportunity to change employers throughout their career, only a third chose the latter. Median job tenure rose among workers age twenty to thirty-four between January 2008 and January 2010, more so than among older workers.
Overall, job tenure increased to its highest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics starting tracking tenure in 1996.

These trends are dispiriting when you look at the type of work that young people—even those with college degrees—have been finding. Among college graduates aged twenty-five to thirty-four, according to the economist Michael Mandel, government employment grew the most between August 2009 and August 2010, followed by jobs in professional and technical services. But hotel and restaurant employment was third. Among sectors that are predominantly for-profit, hotel, restaurant, repair, maintenance, and personal-services jobs accounted for 28 percent of all new jobs obtained by four-year college graduates under the age of thirty-five.

Young adults with college and graduate degrees are doing much better than those without; for 2010 as a whole, the unemployment rate among sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds was 9.4 percent for four-year college graduates, 22.5 percent for those with only a high-school diploma, and 31.5 percent for high-school dropouts. The deepest pain, by far, is concentrated in the latter two groups. But that doesn’t mitigate the disappointment and gathering self-doubt of the former, many of whom now have the twin privileges of a bad job and heavy student debt to go along with their degree.