According to a recent study reported by the NY Post, millennials – the avocado-munching and man-bun wearing targets of the conservative media – claim that age discrimination in the workplace affects them more adversely than their older peers:
More than half — 52 percent — of American workers aged 18 to 34 say they have witnessed or experienced ageism in their jobs, according to Glassdoor’s 2019 Diversity and Inclusion Survey released last month.
That’s compared to 39 percent of workers 55 and older who say the same, the online survey of more than 1,100 American workers found.
This may initially seem surprising: firstly, millennials legally cannot face age discrimination as the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act only protects workers over 40; secondly, aren’t millennials supposedly the most privileged and frivolous generation?
Ghast Lee (sickchirpse.com) believes that the lives of millennials are a great deal easier than previous generations. After all, they have access to an unlimited plethora of knowledge via the Internet, instantaneous solutions to every problem and an overall better quality of life than their predecessors.
But do they really? Millennials were born into a lived-in world, receiving the scrappy leftovers from a more optimistic past (rebuilding and looking ahead to future following WW2’s destruction) , the members of which (I’m looking at you, baby boomers) damaged the world. They are now facing the onslaught of a human-caused climate emergency, which threatens their very present and future.
Before I get too political (I am a member of Gen. Z after all, I have no choice but to be politically active), perhaps we should take millennials’ ageism claims seriously, and renounce these trivial generational labels once and for all – in the end, we are all human.
If you want to read more about millennials, click here.
