I’m the kind of millennial that would be in a conservative joke about millennials. That’s if they could stop misquoting Tyler Durden by calling us all snowflakes long enough to make actual jokes. I’m 25, bisexual, genderfluid, live in a crumbling house with two other queer people and a cat, and make my living writing shit on the internet for money. I don’t make a lot doing this, have zero job security, zero benefits, and can lose jobs as fast I get them. I depend on a revolving door of start ups, mysterious funding from weird companies, contacts who need help or want to throw an opportunity my way, and the work just being there.
Sometimes it’s just not. Sometimes I’m an arbitrary restructure away from getting the axe. My lifestyle would probably be enough to give a responsible person that gives a shit about anything, four coronaries a week.
You might be wondering why anyone would elect to do this.
“As if you didn’t already know, my point is that companies are terrible to their employees. They treat them like fucking race horses they can ride until they’re broken and can use for glue later.”
It wasn’t until I ended up sandwiched between a very kind, but somehow also very threatening, old married soviet escapee couple in a park last summer that I really understood not just what I felt, but what has happened on a larger scale.
Shout out to Ivan and Mrs. Ivan (Yeah, they didn’t tell me their names, but did tell me that they have a bunch of passports ready to use in different countries depending on the political climate) for clearing some shit up for me.
Growing up, I watched all the adults in my life be treated like absolute shit by their bosses. And as an adult, I watched all of my friends get treated like shit by their bosses and the companies they worked for. I also experienced a lot of that myself. My understanding of the entire situation was very reductive and non-big-picture. I never really thought about the structural implications or what was going on. I just went “Bosses, companies, and corporate America is shitty, so I’m not gonna do that. I don’t care if I’m broke and no one respects me ever. Not doing it.”
Here’s some things that have happened to a few of my friends, that probably sound exactly like shit you have experienced or heard of.
A friend of mine worked for a company that can barely keep employees for more than a few months. There’s no management, no structure, no standards, and no sanity. They don’t train people. They hire about a quarter of the people they need to handle the workload they have, and then torture them for not working fast enough or doing it well enough. In a span of a few weeks, all of their staff in my friend’s department left except two or three people.
So, how did management respond to the mass exodus?
They rounded up the remaining employees and showed them a PowerPoint about how millennials are shitty people and they need to do a better job.
I’m not even fucking with you!
Ok, one more example before we get back to the Ivans’.
Another friend of mine works for a major credit card company. Thousands of people all over the country and world call in every day to ask questions and scream at the customer service people after they’ve tanked their credit by charging a year’s worth of Buffalo Wild Wings trips in 2009 and never making a payment.
At any rate, in my friend’s department, there’s supposed to be about 20 people taking calls. Because of the way they run shit, there’s five.
If you been keeping up on my articles (thanks buddy), you’ll know that it sucks so bad to work there that one of the hypothetical 20 people got fired for faking seizures in order to get to leave work.
Imagine, you sit in an office 40+ hours a week being screamed at by maniacs, one after the other after the other after the other after the other after the other after the….
Three-fourths of their entire department has burned out, and with every other dramatic exit, it gets worse and worse. It would be a hard enough job with the right amount of staff, which is probably barely enough.
Instead of doing anything to correct it, this corporation’s plan is to let the department slowly bleed out until they can dissolve it entirely in 6 months. Meanwhile, they talked about sending the five remaining miserable, fried, and borderline suicidal people in the department to stress management seminars— to help them just fucking take it better, but never got around to it.
As if you didn’t already know, my point is that companies are terrible to their employees. They treat them like fucking race horses they can ride until they’re broken and can use for glue later. When you work for a company, you’re barely even a number. You’re less than a fucking number, and they don’t give a shit what happens to you. They don’t want to give you benefits, retirement, or even remotely consider your humanity.
An older man I know worked as a lawyer for the same firm for decades, only to be fired right before retirement because they probably wanted to replace him with a team of unpaid interns.
It’s a fucking boot on a human face, forever.
I assumed that that was always how it was to an extent. I knew that my grandparents lived off my grandfather’s retirement money, and a lot of old people did that shit, but I didn’t know that company culture actually used to treat employees in an entirely different way. Enter the Ivans’.
I had about an hour and a half conversation with this old married ex-Soviet couple. When I told them I was thinking of moving to Berlin and living in a van (because let’s face it, so is every avocado fuck with a bad haircut they’re growing out), they said, “Maybe we will be seeing you in Berlin,” which made me feel threatened and also turned on, and also maybe like I was a character in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
When they asked me what I did for a living, I told them I was a freelance writer— so I could work for myself on my own terms and choose my clients. They told me I was right to do so. Ivan told me about how he worked for a large international company for years, and about how they treated him well; took care of him. He told me about his benefits and promotions, and how they rewarded years of loyal service and dedication and sincere effort with bonuses, raises, and security.
Ivan said that almost never happens today. He said that companies work young people until they die if they let them, and give them almost nothing, and even if I make less, I am smart to work mostly for myself.
I’d had an hour long political debate with this hardened, probably shady Soviet escapee with a duffel bag full of passports, during which we did not actually agree on much, but were just able to enjoy arguing with a stranger. To hear this man express the same concerns that so many people my age have, and to agree with me on this particular thing, was wild. Ever since, I have made a point to ask older people about the company culture where they worked before they retired, and it’s often fucking mind blowing.
What they had to work with, and what we have now is two entirely different universes.
Now that I’ve gone anecdotal, let’s get some not-me perspective. Whether or not companies are torturing their employees isn’t even a question anymore. The value of human life and happiness is so low in America that The Washington Post isn’t writing articles like “My Dog, Isn’t It Fucked Up That The Biggest Companies On Earth Are Torturing Their Employees?”
Instead, the question is “Can A Company Innovate Without Working Its Employees To Death?”
I don’t know, they fucking managed it until like 1980, in those good old days y’all love so much, so probably.
Back then they only tortured people around the world doing slave labor, who were getting their fingers sliced off building radios; not people in suits. It was the golden age of America. Every woman had a jello mold full of fish in her fridge and Lysol in her vagina.
Now instead of investing in the lives of their employees, to motivate them and enable them to do the best job possible, companies take out large life insurance policies on their most lucrative employees, which they often keep long after the employee leaves, waiting to make bank off of their death. Then they remove all of the funding and manpower their employees would need to accomplish tasks, and torture them for not being able to magically do their jobs with zero support.
Millennials are often criticized for being lazy job hopping fucks that don’t give a shit, but here’s a novel idea. Maybe if the jobs were tolerable, paid enough to live on, and people were rewarded for their effort, rather than it being demanded of them without any sort of return invested in them, damn kids wouldn’t walk out to buy cigarettes on their lunch break and never come back.
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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.
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