[athenot]

> Weary of long days earning minimum wage, he quit his job in a pizzeria in June. He wants new employment but won’t take a gig he’ll hate. So for now, the Pittsburgh native and father to young children is living with his mother and training to become an emergency medical technician, hoping to get on the ladder toward a better life.

Perplexing? The opening of this article gives a pretty straightforward answer: people in that demographic aren't buying the narrative that a minimum-wage job will necessarily come with growth opportunities. So instead of getting pigeon-holed, they are trying to jump into a career with better growth opportunities. Sometimes that requires leaving immediate money on the table.

[move-on-by]

> All are missing out on a hot labor market and crucial years on the job, ones traditionally filled with the promotions and raises that build the foundation for a career

I agree with you. These jobs might have one day been filled with promotions and raises - but have now been turned into efficiency centers. Automation has drastically increased, required skills and training significantly reduced. There is no path up the chain from these types of jobs. In the absolutely best case, they can't be automated even further out of a job.

[dleslie]

The angle here is that minimum wage does not offer sufficient flexibility and access to satisfactory growth opportunities. That's a _feature_ for employers, who do not desire turn-over and training costs, and an _anti-feature_ for employees, who desire a better life.

[supertrope]

I don’t think employers cackle at the thought of employees being wage slaves. They are unwilling or think its impossible to offer a living wage so high turnover (e.g. 140% per annum) is just a cost they accept.

[dleslie]

They aren't cackling like saturday morning cartoon villains; they're applying a rational choice to minimize operation costs.

This is less true the closer their personal connection to their employees is, I suspect; but many minimum wage employers have a bureaucratic buffer/barrier between the minimum wage employees and those making the decisions about operational costs.

[barrow-rider]

This is called Middle Management, and exists entirely to buffer high level decision makers from day-to-day workers.

[msla]

Of course it's perplexing:

"Do well in school or you'll end up in a minimum-wage job!"

"Oh, you're too good for a minimum-wage job, are ya? Lazy, entitled Millennial."

See? Perplexing for everyone who said both of those things.

More seriously, it might be perplexing if you assume the "shame" of living with one's parents past the age of eighteen is greater than the negative impact of getting looped into the minimum-wage cycle with no clear way to escape. This further assumes that multi-generational households are... bad... in some indefinable way which doesn't apply to a lot of the rest of the world.

[meko]

Yep, after working in food and other service for five years after a hard-fought graduation, I'm trying to fight my way into software. Thankfully I'm supported by family or this wouldn't be possible.

Service industry is thankless and harsh, and to top it off low-paying. It's dehumanizing.

[jimbokun]

But why are women in the same age range employed at a higher rate than before the recession, but not the men?

[Buldak]

The article does mention, "They hemorrhaged high-paying jobs after technology and globalization hit manufacturing and mining." Many jobs staffed predominantly by men (as opposed to jobs like nursing, say, staffed predominantly by women) never recovered after the recession.

[ananonymouse]

It's exactly this.

I'm a member of this group.

I was told growing up by first-generation college graduates that any degree was better than no degree. I had persistent doubts, but was told by those same parents year after year before and during college that "You may not want it now, but you won't regret having it in the future."

So not knowing better and not being told any better by the university I attended, I got a history degree and tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. When I graduated in 2012, I was reluctant to leave the town that I grew up in (where there were no jobs, being essentially only a university town) and could only find service sector work. The same baby boomers that told me to put myself in debt to secure a degree now told me that any job was better than no job at all.

I eventually was able to get a job at a call center after being a temp (twice) at the same corporation. Yet within a year, I hit a hard income cap. In this job that I had worked so hard to secure, I could only pay off my debt over more than a decade throwing all my disposible income at it. And the job was soul-crushing. All my coworkers were warm-bodies that life had shat upon; my bosses were all sociopathic and incompetent PMPs that could barely open Outlook and constantly took the credit for any and all off-paper work that I did. For some reason, I started drinking heavily.

I was fortunate enough to be able to support my wife while she learned how to code and through fate, diligence, and diversity metrics, she was able to secure an IT job. She convinced me to quit soon afterwards and try to follow in her footsteps, but with apparently less favorable odds. Who wants to hire an unemployed self-taught 30-year-old white male with an unstable work history in an entry-level role?

And now, if looking down the barrel of economic obsolescence wasn't enough, I have to deal with baby-boomers, who by their own admission waltzed with ease into careers, constantly looking down on me for not gladly and immediately selling what remains of my youth to pernicious corporations whose five-year plans inevitably include either automating my position or shuttering because of the brick & mortar apocalypse.

Yes, it's a very perplexing hole, this lack of participation.

Our pipedream at this point is for me to be a stay-at-home dad and develop FOSS software when I'm not caregiving or doing home economy, with the eventual goal of buying a farm somewhere where we can both be doing what we really want (i.e. living as ethically as we possibly can in a dystopian hellscape far, far away from the gods of the Marketplace). I don't think this feeling is in the minority.

[meko]

Your experience mirrors mine so closely it brings tears to my eyes. Even the year we graduated. It's so hard to to feel bitter about it all and slide into self loathing. I'm trying to break into software and trying to take classes to learn the ropes but the classes all consume ludicrous amounts of time and I have little time for side projects or self teaching outside of it. Meanwhile my peers and others in dev have all been doing it for years and years, very few understand where I'm coming from. "Just build something!" I wish I could but I don't know how.

[dsajames]

I don't know who gave that advice, but I'm ten years older than you and was frequently told that a history degree would get me little.

[nradov]

Most of us have had to relocate to find decent jobs. If you chose to stay in the same town then that's on you.