Why would young people love a country that seems not to love them? | Zoe Williams
Despite growing concerns over wage stagnation and insecure work, far fewer young people are members of unions,” were the journalist Kamal Ahmed’s actual words on the Today programme, describing the wage gap between the over-30s and the young. Frances O’Grady, the TUC leader, is heroically patient in trying to keep the commentariat on track: this is no crazy paradox, that at the very moment people need unions the most, they stop joining them. It is precisely because the young are ghettoed in low-wage sectors where unions aren’t recognised; it is because their work is insecure that they have no leverage; it is because their wages are stagnant that they can’t build up the savings cushion you’d need, if you wanted to make trouble on a zero-hours contract.
The tendency to look at all hardship through the wrong end of the telescope – why do people on low wages eat so badly? – is not new, but in analysing the conditions of the younger millennial, the debate has progressed from having its arse on backwards to being deliberately, comprehensively wrong.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JbAPKq
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