Why You Shouldn't Completely Despair at Being a Part of 'Generation Fucked'

A weekly column about how young people are totally fucked lol.

Good news, unscrupulous employers! If you don't want to go the whole hog and deal with the cost of introducing the National Living Wage in April by sacking people, you can just cut overtime and weekend pay-rates!

And you'll be in good company. This week, recruitment group Manpower released a report saying a number of employers are planning to take that route in order to suck up the crushing burden of paying their employees something a little closer to a wage they can actually live on.

Compounding that bleak state of affairs, it looks like there's very little stopping bosses employing people on the crappiest terms they deem appropriate. Unions and MPs warned this week that a million workers will soon rely on zero hours contracts for their main job, and this is because companies are taking advantage of insecurity in the job market. In other words: you probably need your job more than you hate it.

The group most likely to be victims of this kind of exploitation are – you guessed it! – young adults, who accounted for two-thirds of the increase. Women are also more likely than men to have jobs without guaranteed minimum hours. Hope you enjoyed International Women's Day, ladies, because normal levels of patriarchal oppression have now resumed!

If this information hasn't quite sated your desire for misery, you might want to head on over to the Guardian, which this week published a whole special report called "Millenials: the Trials of Generation Y" about how your life is ruined, ruined, ruined, fucking ruined.

It's a proper piece of reporting and worth checking out, but to boil down some key points: young people are £900 worse off than a decade ago, while retirees' incomes have risen £5,500 in the same period. The inequality between generations is now "unprecedented", but young people are still paying for the pensions of the old. In particular, young single people are getting poorer thanks to "stagnating disposable income and onerous living costs". Fortunately nobody has yet made a graph infographic with the x-axis marked "likelihood you are poor" and the y-axis marked "likelihood nobody loves you".

It's getting a bit depressing, being journalistically bound to consider the misfortune that my generation's parents brought us into this world in the wrong decade. But hey, maybe things aren't so bad, right guys? Here are some reasons not to completely despair just yet:

For starters the UCL rent strikers are having a public demonstration next Thursday. And they seem to be inspiring people to take action elsewhere, with a Goldsmiths Cut the Rent Campaign getting off the ground (although no strike just yet).

For those of you whose personal housing crisis is taking place somewhere other than student digs, Sunday sees a march against a proposed Housing Bill that would kill off council housing forever. According to the blurb for the march, "The Bill condemns millions to a lifetime of insecure, expensive private renting. Everyone deserves a decent home: but landlords, developers and the rich will be the only ones to benefit from this bill. We must Kill the Bill!"

And on Saturday, cleaning workers are protesting outside Topshop's flagship store to demand a living wage. They point out that the shop's parent company made £202 million in profit last year, while some of them are still on poverty wages.

This column has noted the various ways employers are trying to avoid paying their workers the new National Living Wage (and let's not forget that it doesn't apply to under 25-year-olds). I guess that shows what happens when you wait for politicians to hand you social justice on a plate. If there's no societal pressure, then this kind of thing can easily become a gimmick to reel out at the dispatch box, rather than something that'll make our lives less terrible. Fortunately, there are people refusing to lay down. Here's hoping that Generation Fucked can turn into Generation Fuck You.

@SimonChilds13

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