I’m an old lady, a Boomer born in 1958. But it drives me crazy when I see my generation run down millennials.
Millennials get a bad rap: They’re lazy. They feel entitled. They ask too much.
The condemning Boomers have it all wrong. Millennials are a throw-back to the folks that brought us the weekend and the minimum wage. According to a 2016 Deloitte survey, 16.8 percent of Millennials want a good balance between career and family, while another 11 percent seek flexibility. How is that different than the demand for a 10-hour work day by Philadelphia’s Irish coal-heavers in 1835, which led to the United States’ first general strike? The 10-hour day continued to be a demand for nearly a century.
Millennials seek a living wage. How is that different than the Flint strikers of 1937, who got a 5 percent pay increase and the right to speak during their lunch break. (Yes, grown men were treated in ways I would never treat my kindergarten students.)
Which brings me the biggest criticism that’s lobbed at Millennials: They feel entitled. And they do: Entitled to respect.
You know who else felt they were due respect?
- Sojourner Truth
- The miners at 1920’s Battle of Matewan
- Rosa Parks
- The matchgirls who struck Bryant & May in London in 1888
- Betty Friedan
- The women’s strike against Ford Motor Co. for equal pay in Dagenham, England, in 1968
- The eastern Pennsylvania coal miners of the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1903
- The U.S. Postal Strike of 1970
- and the 1997 UPS Strike.
And, there may not have been bloodshed at the Women’s March, the 150-country climate strike led by Greta Thunberg, and Occupy Wall Street, but each of those protests — and their resulting movements — are changing America as much as the United Autoworkers and women’s movement did.
If you’re itching to criticize anyone for demanding respect and dignity, take a moment to remember how feeling worthy and seeking dignity got us where we are now.
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