Lessons for Millennials
By: Andrew Pilkington
Tags: Life Lessons, Millennials, Advice, Work, Loyalty

A Lesson for Millennials

Previous Lives and Empty Spaces

I was once a journeyman machine repairman, working in a facility that made auto parts for the Big Three, a manufacturing plant that no longer exists. I was a witness to its slow destruction, brought on by a demolition company that quite effectively erased it from where it had stood for almost a century. I watched from the last remaining building as they methodically went about knocking it down, carting away all the concrete and steel that had sheltered machinery and assembly lines for so long. It was more than a factory; I and my coworkers had peopled it.

If corporations are people, then we were them.

It was sad to see it come down. Depressing. It had become part of the family. My Mother-in-law worked there during the war years, my father-in-law after that war, for 30 years. I was employed there as well for 23 on-and-off-again year stretches of layoffs and rehires. Four times I hired in, persistent I was, naively believing that loyalty and dedication would serve me well, only to witness its eventual demise after all its product lines were moved to a foreign country. They said it wasn’t personal. It was a business decision, they were only protecting shareholder value, without revealing that they were the shareholders that they were looking out for, which I guess made it very personal to them.

Too bad, it failed. I hope they all lost their shirts! (They did…)

I was a cashier in a tiny party store (a convenience store by today’s words) during one of those long lay offs, working part-time, trying to make a few bucks to feed and shelter my family. It no longer exists, either. An empty corner lot in town, where it resides along with the other empty spaces of urban abandonment.

Also Gone? The pickle plant, my first job. I could not eat pickles for nearly a decade afterwards, the smell of dill and vinegar was too much to bear. Another empty space.

And there was a factory that was one of that communities’ original manufacturers, built at the dawn of its lumbering era (the trees, also long gone). Gone, and almost forgotten except for the smokestack that survives as a monument to a place that almost no one remembers.

These places are what has been called the rust belt of America, but in that city, there is no rust. It has all been efficiently erased, carted away from the landscape and all that remains are the brown fields. Brown, of course because nothing green grows there, or will, until the pollutants they left behind are absorbed, washed into the earth, then nature might take it back with its greenery.

I worked at a hospital in that community as well. That is still there, and most likely it will survive, as long as people keep getting sick or needing a place to die. They built another facility outside of the city, but it was too far away for its ER that was needed to accommodate GSW (gunshot wound) victims that arrived nightly for trauma and triage. When the factories left with all their jobs, enterprising people bent on surviving found illegal means to achieve it, in highly competitive enterprises, with resultant collateral damage.

That hospital, with its patchwork style buildings, an addition here, an annex there, will eventually become too old to rehabilitate and will become a victim of the wrecking ball and meet the same fate as the others and become open space, once again. Most of the housing surrounding it are gone now, so it stands alone.

Millennials are berated for their lack of loyalty and dedication to their jobs and employers, with frequent moves, averaging about every two years. Our mobile society has made it easy for them to not set down roots, and be able to move about freely, since so many of them are not following the tradition of marriage and starting families as soon as their parents had. They cannot afford to do so, crippled by college debt brought on by the pursuit of a college degree they were being told that without, they would not succeed, without being told they would be like indentured servants for the rest of their lives trying to repay student loans.

The whining I hear, is not from the millennials as Big Business and the political structures that support them suggest, but rather from the business community itself, crying real tears of how invested they are in them and this roving generation is hurting their business model. Yeah, it’s bullshit! They have invested nothing in them. The millennials have invested in themselves, only its called debt, having gotten the credentials on their own. I do not see business wishing to reimburse them, What little training they do provide is no where near what I would call an investment, as most learn on the job, for the job that they have, accumulating skills as they go so they have something more to offer the next employer.

And they know it. That’s why turn about has become fair play. An expanding economy means expanding opportunities, and the winner is whomever can give the best deal, until the next best deal comes along. Little fish in a big pond learn to swim fast or get eaten.

I have heard employers bemoan that they have difficulty with employee engagement. And there’s a reason for that: the educated workforce they so desire is cognizant of the fact that they are not serfs in their system and refuse to be treated as such. As companies attempt to reign in their employees through engagement that THEY want, the employees would rather be empowered to do what needs to be done , to get their jobs done THEIR way. Sure, companies like to set their own policies, from the top, and through the bureaucratic maze of their organization and have employees jump through hoops they have made for them.

No more! When you cannot perform your own job your own way, you have two choices: become engaged and do it their way; or, do it your own way and risk upsetting the organization plan, which upon inspection, results in an employee dissatisfaction, resulting in low morale, poor performance, or a steady revolving door of employees coming and going in attempt to find anyone complacent enough to be a pawn, a serf. Working your way up the ladder? It all depends on how much freedom one wishes to have or not have, as what is required is blind faith that the organization has your best interests at heart, which they do not. Their own interests and that of maximizing revenues.

My last job became my last job when they made clear where their loyalty and dedication to me ended. They held mass employee meetings announcing a “New Day had come”, out with the old, in with the new, with much fanfare as how together we would turn everything around and go forward with positive thoughts and emotions hence forth. It was festive, with a box lunch provided, telling us how if we could all become engaged in their new effort, how could we not succeed?

Four months later I was informed, not by management, but by another employee that my job was to be outsourced. Whoa…. But, they led me to believe I was important to them!

They lied. So, I went to HR and told them I was retiring. It was a lie. I was quitting. It was a rebuke. And I gave them no notice. To which they replied that in doing so, I could never work there again…really?

Mission Accomplished!

What did my kids learn from me about loyalty and dedication? If you can suffer through the ups and downs, you might be rewarded with long term prospects, but do not count on it. It’s a one-way street, and they will require it from you until you are no longer of any useful benefit to them. There’s a reason the hiring department went from being called Personnel to renaming itself Human Resources: because just like natural resources, business uses them up till they are gone and discards the shreds that remain.

Move on millennials, Time and Money wait for no one.

Take the money…and run!