John Humphrys: Gen Z aren’t the workshy ‘snowflakes’ we think they are
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The invitation was irresistible to an old hack who has spent the best part of his professional life trying to topple people in power from their pedestals and usually failing. Would I care to spend a few hours talking to some typical members of Generation Z and then expose their idiosyncrasies and inadequacies – especially in the world of work? You bet I would!
After all, Zedders – youngsters born between 1997 and 2012 – may not yet wield much (if any) political power, but we oldies surely know enough of their lifestyles and aspirations and whingeing to feel just a tad nervous at the prospect.
Well… maybe.
I try to picture a wildlife expert presenting a programme in which he is describing them to his middle-aged audience as though they were an exotic species only recently discovered. ‘Perhaps the most extraordinary behaviour exhibited by these strange creatures,’ he might intone, ‘is their curious reluctance to communicate with each other in ways that we humans have developed over the millennia.
‘Instead of using their vocal cords and ears designed for what we would call speech, they appear to rely almost entirely on tiny gadgets, which they tap away at endlessly at a truly remarkable speed.’
And what, wonders my imaginary presenter, are they communicating? ‘A seemingly endless tirade of anger at the elders of their tribe who, it appears, have harvested the riches of their society and denied it to them, while forcing them to slave away at tasks that are harmful to what they mystifyingly describe as their “mental health”.’
I exaggerate. We have all encountered many Zedders – perhaps our own children or grandchildren – whom we know to be intelligent, thoughtful, delightful individuals. It is as a group that they may well make us wince. Especially when we compare our own upbringings with theirs.
I confess that I am guiltier than most in this respect. I was born into poverty – by which I mean a tiny terraced house with an outdoor lavatory, a ‘back’ kitchen with a stove and a sink in which we washed the dishes and ourselves. We ate and lived in the kitchen/living room, which was also where my self-employed father did much of his work – French-polishing furniture. It’s also where my mother cut and permed the neighbours’ hair. The smells from her perms and his polishing were horrible. But we needed the money.
I worked too. In school holidays I tramped the posh neighbourhoods pushing leaflets through letterboxes trying to get work for Dad. I also got up at 6.30am to deliver newspapers, made deliveries for the local chemist after school and grew food on the allotment. There was no time left for play.
OK, you can put away the hankies now.
That’s because our mother had given us kids something precious. She made us do homework and we all got into grammar schools. I hated mine – allegedly the best in Wales. It’s not nice being the only poor kid in your class. Or being beaten by a sadistic headmaster because the snow meant my papers were sometimes late arriving at my newsagent’s so I was late for school. He was not impressed when I told him we needed the money.
But when I left school (at 15), it helped me get a job at a tiny local newspaper two days later. My salary: one pound, seventeen shillings and six pence a week.
As for university? I had not a single friend or relative who even thought about applying. Our only connection with what was then the University of Wales, based in Cardiff, was to shout rude words at the students when they paraded through the city centre to celebrate Rag Week. We ridiculed the scarves they all wore, though I suspect there was a good deal of envy mixed in. This was a world that was effectively closed to the likes of us.
When I relayed all this to my group of Zedders I expected some furrowed brows. Possibly even sympathy. But what most interested them was what happened to me after I’d left school.
Within 10 years I was sent to New York to set up the BBC’s first TV newsroom there. And for two years, the biggest political story in the world was mine: Watergate. A journalist’s dream. But this wasn’t what interested my new young friends.
No, what really hit the mark was when I told them I had bought my first house when I was 22. Three bedrooms with a garden and garage in a village outside Cardiff. I was earning £1,000 a year by then and my bank manager happily gave me a mortgage and a glass of sherry. Pretty unremarkable in those days. But that’s not how the Zedders saw it.
‘Impossible!’ said one of them, Lucy Pughe-Morgan. Not so much my leaving school at 15 and getting a job etc… but buying a house! She wasn’t alone. The entire group shook their heads in wonder.
Lucy, who is 23, has three part-time jobs: in a café, in a pub and as a nanny. That’s the price of living in London. She calls it being ‘in limbo’ until she can find a stable career path. The idea of buying a house, or a small studio, at that age? Unthinkable. Every head in the room nodded at that too. Obviously they all had to rent, or find a friend with a sofa, or go back to Mum and Dad.
The average rent is now £1,278 a month, according to Rightmove. That’s outside the capital. Within Greater London it’s £2,627 a month. Most live in flatshares but they struggle to find anything for less than £800 a month each, they tell me. Add to that the cost of energy bills. Transport fares are high too: £3.40 a time on the Tube.
Alex Barbieri had been doing pretty well, earning reasonable money on a management consultancy graduate scheme. So he took a year’s lease on a flat. Then he was made redundant with virtually no notice, along with a number of other young colleagues. Now he’s struggling to find another job.
Annabel Holland, 21, is in her last year at Manchester University and juggles her studies with work as a part-time tutor. She wants to stay in the city when she graduates but doubts she’ll find a job paying enough: ‘Some people graduate from university and end up on Universal Credit pretty much almost immediately, which is kind of crazy.’
She has £60,000 of student debt and says she has no hope of ever paying it off. And she’s not alone. Abigail Buchanan, 27, from Suffolk, who studied English, says some of her friends graduated expecting never to repay it. Anyway it gets written off after 30 years, she adds. But 24-year-old student Iona Lowe doesn’t really think about the debt: ‘It’s just something I have that I don’t really see.’ Others say the same.
I refrain from pointing out that my parents, like others in my street, thought being in debt was the eighth deadly sin. The ‘tallyman’ – who went door to door offering various goods in return for small weekly payments – did not dare call at our house. He’d have been sent packing. And even when hire purchase became legal, a vacuum cleaner or washing machine seemed an impossible dream.
But education is the defining distinction between boomers and Gen Z. I reflected on Tony Blair’s announcement at the 1999 Labour Party conference that 50 per cent of school-leavers should be able to go to university. I thought it was bonkers but, 20 years later, that target was met. I had assumed that Gen Z, the beneficiaries of Blair’s benevolence, would be suitably grateful. Not so.
Lucy: ‘Getting a degree doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get a job, even though you’ve spent all of this money… You’ll come out and you’ll still basically be at square one.’
Iona never planned to return to university for postgraduate studies but felt she had no choice. Without it, she said, prospective employers wouldn’t even reply to you.
Lucy: ‘It’s not even a rejection, you just get ignored.’
Iona: ‘And you send out millions of emails.’
Mia Wallis, from Beverley in Yorkshire, is 24 and has worked long hours in hospitality since she was 17, including throughout her degree. ‘At university, I’d often feel jealous of my peers who could afford not to,’ she admits. ‘It’s a bit of a privilege to be “disenfranchised” from work.’ After graduating and completing an MA, she now works as a barista at Pret-a-Manger near her home town but commutes to London for casual shifts at a newspaper. Her dream is to become a reporter.
‘[Some of my older relatives] didn’t seem to grasp that I needed a master’s to break into the industry. And I’ve proven myself right because it’s only since doing it that I’ve had the opportunities [to get some shifts. Before that] I was getting nothing, I felt so blanked out by everything.
‘Even so, some of them think I’m irresponsible.’ There is much nodding around the table. ‘A lot [of boomers] have that viewpoint,’ Mia continues. ‘They think you’ve just wasted all your money and you don’t know how to prioritise things.’
Lucy suggests that this might be because her generation values ‘balance’ more than previous generations did. ‘[Working all the time is] not a fulfilling life and I think some people have realised this a lot more. There’s more to life than just your career and just making money. Family, connections, travelling…’
And what about job security? Abigail reflects ruefully on her parents telling her that if you got a job in a bank in the old days it was a job for life. You knew the exact day you’d be retiring on. Not so, today.
Mia admits that she ‘quite likes’ the notion of stability. ‘I’d like to know I’m not just going to wake up one day and not have a job… it makes me unsettled.’ The question is whether this is possible for her generation.
Alex points out that the lack of security makes it trickier to try out new career paths. ‘In the case of boomers, there was a lot more freedom in terms of potentially seeing an opportunity and moving to that. Whereas now, people are scared…’
‘Yeah, and I also think that people get scared of getting fired,’ agrees Iona. ‘Because they know that if they do anything wrong at work, there’s just like five million other people out there.’
Lucy shares the group’s irritation at the way many boomers react to people of her generation if they can’t get a job. ‘They say, “Why don’t you just apply for a job?” and I say, “Well I’ve applied for 50 and haven’t heard back from any of them.” It’s ironic that we’re called workshy by a generation that doesn’t give us any work.’
Ben Osuntokun, 26, has no worries around job security. He’s a probation officer and says he could stay in this role for the next 40 years if he wanted to; the joys of the public sector. The problem, he says, is he’s ‘hit the ceiling’ because if he wants a promotion he’ll have to work in management and that doesn’t appeal.
And money is also a problem: ‘I’ve maxed out my overdraft, I got a credit card that I can’t pay off, I barely afford rent each month,’ he continues. ‘I can’t take another job on the side because it’s in the public sector and the Government says if you hold one, you can’t hold a second… I haven’t had the heating on for the last couple of months, I’m freezing all the time, it’s cold. Loving the job doesn’t pay for my bills.’
So shouldn’t he spend less enjoying himself, I suggest? His answer is revealing. ‘Maybe I am spending too much but I’m working 50-60-hour weeks on a 35-hour contract and I think I’m fully entitled to enjoy myself sometimes. I do think it’s an entitlement… A big difference compared to previous generations, who were working for the sake of working. I don’t see the point in that at all.
‘I’m not here to make money. The money is used to do things that I want to do. I want to have a social life. I want to spend money on things that I enjoy. I like working but working isn’t my entire life.’
Annabel adds: ‘I think that having a balance makes you better at work… If I work, work, work, I get burnt out and I just get kind of sad and don’t want to do anything.’
The others agree. Lucy points out that a lot of her friends’ parents say ‘well just don’t go out’. A pint now costs £5.90; it used to be 50p. But there’s more to life than just ‘going to sleep, work, sleep, work’.
So does all this make them resentful? Not according to Abigail: ‘It’s not us against them at all.’ Iona agrees: ‘I don’t look at the boomers and think “I hate you”. I’m more like, I hate the situation that the world is in.’
If there is resentment in this group towards us boomers, it’s based on their sense that we don’t take them seriously when they complain about their lot. Mia puts it succinctly: ‘Don’t just say, “Get on with it.” Just understand, talk.’
Annabel adds, ‘I don’t think we’re angry enough.’ But she also makes a concession: Gen Z do ‘spend more time on their phones or hanging out with their friends and are almost distracted from what is going on’.
One thing that’s ‘going on’, I suggest, is that boomers suspect young people are obsessed with something that simply wasn’t even considered when I was their age: ‘mental health’.
They laugh at that. All of them. ‘That’s a real boomer thing to say,’ Lucy says. ‘You’ve just summed up your whole generation… You had mental health as well, you just didn’t have a label for it.’
I suggest the difference was that we did not assume that we had a right to be happy all the time – and we did not expect our employers to have a responsibility for this either. Being unhappy occasionally didn’t mean you had mental health ‘issues’ – just that you were human. And even when our relatives came back from truly horrendous experiences in two wars, most did not complain. My uncle was one of them. He was badly wounded but never talked about it.
The reaction from the group is unanimous. Abigail sums it up: ‘Can I ask what is wrong with complaining?’ Lucy: ‘Some people probably needed to. They had it all bottled up.’
So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe their generation has the right approach to ‘mental health’? Lucy accepts that there are ‘extreme cases where some people might say they’ve thought themselves into having a problem’. Iona adds: ‘And I think social media makes people more flaky… It’s like an echo chamber.’
I ask the group if they have any role models. There is a long silence. Then Lucy says: ‘I would normally immediately say one of my parents because, you know, I love them and I think they’ve worked very hard to be where they are… [But] if your role model is from another generation, everything we have just spoken about comes into play.’
Her mother, she says, is a stay-at-home parent, who has worked as a chef and a nanny, and her father was in the Army until last year. So does she want to be like them? ‘My mum worked very hard… My dad worked his way up [the Army ranks] on his own merit. He came from an underprivileged family. But they’ve had a very different life to what I’m about to experience.’
We have left the state of the planet until last. There is no disagreement. They all say that climate change is the greatest threat facing humanity. Ben blames those ‘who are in positions of power at corporations’. He says they should be stopped. And what, I ask, are they themselves prepared to do? Maybe stop flying? In a word: no.
‘I think it’s because people wouldn’t want a decrease in living standards,’ Annabel admits. Lucy blames us boomers for that: ‘Because you’re the ones who created this world we’re now coming into.’
And that’s true, isn’t it? It’s the boomers who created the internet. It’s the boomers (or at least some of them) who have made vast fortunes drawing them into a world that would have been unimaginable to people like me when we were young.
It’s the boomers who created an insane housing market. So are we really entitled – as I was tempted to do when I agreed to conduct this discussion – to lecture them on the way I led my own life when the world was such a different place?
And do I really want them to follow the lead of insanely ambitious youngsters like I was? When I had a young family and we were living in foreign countries I was perfectly happy to leave them for months at a time while I reported from all over the world pursuing my ambitions. Would I encourage my grandchildren to do the same? Absolutely not. Families matter.
I approached our discussion, I suppose, tempted by the notion of demonstrating that they really are the ‘snowflake generation’. I failed in that – and I’m glad that I did.
Of course we disagreed about many things. That’s as it should be – I spent half my youth arguing with my father.
Before we began the discussion I thought I knew what to expect from Generation Z. I expected them to be bright and likeable – and they were. But I also expected there to be a sense of entitlement, of self-pity, of defeatism, of mild contempt for the older generation. An arrogant confidence that they would make a better fist of running the world.
Of course there were glimpses of all that. But only glimpses. These were thoughtful young people, more than capable of seeing their own shortcomings but with a confidence that stopped well short of arrogance. And they were worried. Genuinely apprehensive about what the future holds for them. No doubt that’s justified.
But after getting to know them a little, I am rather less worried about a future in their hands.
Additional reporting by Abigail Buchanan
