Millennials Should Be Highest Paid Adults In American History
I want to talk about this Atlantic article:
I love the question in the headline, and we’ll get to that, but first let’s take a look at what The Atlantic is telling us:
Millennials should, theoretically, be the highest-paid cohort of young adults in American history: They’re the most educated group of workers and have entered the labor market at a time of high and increasing productivity.
WE SHOULD BE THE HIGHEST-PAID. There’s a parallel universe out there where we’re all making more money. The Atlantic asks us to imagine that universe, and it is beautiful. (Also, the five minutes you take to imagine that parallel universe counts as your break. Get back to work and increase that productivity!)
What are we actually getting paid? For starters, we’re getting paid less money than what we would have earned 10 years ago, which is something I called attention to earlier this week:
It’s not lost on me that talia jane earned less as a customer support worker in 2016 than I did as a telemarketer in 2004, and she’s paying twice as much as I did in rent.
My figures weren’t even adjusted for inflation; I made $9 an hour plus commission as a telemarketer, which came out to roughly $11 an hour (before taxes); talia jane made “$8.15 an hour after taxes.”
According to The Atlantic—and the Center for American Progress study it references—my anecdata falls right in line with actual data. Today’s 30-year-olds make roughly a dollar less per hour than they would have earned a decade ago. (That figure is adjusted for inflation.)
We’re earning less than we would have earned 10 years ago. We’re earning the same as we would have earned thirty years ago, in the 1980s. Because we’re Millennials, I am obligated to remind you that thirty years represents the time jump Marty McFly made in Back to the Future.
It gets even better when you learn why the Center for American Progress based its study on 30-year-old Millennials:
Brendan Duke, the study’s author and the associate director for economic policy at CAP, says that he chose to focus on 30-year-olds because it’s an age when people are likely to be working, to have more stable careers, to have decided whether or not to complete college, and to be starting families.
In other words: they just acknowledged that our 20s are a lost decade.
Now, back to that question. Can Millennials undo what the recession did to their earnings? (And was it really “the recession,” or was it more like “corporations wanting to make sure profits increased no matter what, even though that’s not how capitalism works and even Goldman Sachs thinks there’s something wrong with this?”)
The short answer is “no.” The Atlantic and the Center for American Progress’s longer answer is that Millennials and lawmakers should work together so Millennials can form unions and get better paid leave policies, which are both things we need, but which aren’t the same thing as increased wages. (Unions can help people secure wage increases, but union negotiations don’t always work.)
Of course, some of us might prefer better paid leave policies to increased pay without paid leave, if we had the choice. So I’ll turn it over to you: what part of “the recession” would you like to undo, if you had the chance? Do you have any practical idea of how people (Millennials, lawmakers, whomever) could work together to undo it?
