As Kim Kardashian somewhat recently averred in a Variety interview: “Get your f****** ass up and work … It seems like nobody wants to work these days.” (And what do YOU do, Kim?) If you are one of the people who has been spouting this people-are-lazy myth, you have intellectually and morally joined the ranks of Kim Kardashian—which should give one very serious pause for thought.
The unemployment rate right now is 3.8 percent. So much for the myth.
Another thing: in 2021, ten million Americans retired—what gets called the Boomer Exodus. This was three million more than the market expected, likely due to pandemic chaos. According to CoolWorks, a job-hunting website:
Those retirements happened across all industries and at all job levels, from entry-level to senior positions. That massive number of vacated positions has flooded the labor market with new career opportunities and paths for promotion (which opens up lower level positions for new employees).
Then, 4.3 million people quit their jobs. But seeing as though there are only a couple million people who are unemployed, this means that many people left for other jobs. There are not 4.3 million unemployed people, like your blowhard uncle would have you believe.
According to Business Insider:
It's what Insider's Aki Ito calls The Great Reshuffle: An unprecedented labor market, coupled with a rethinking of what workers want out of both work and life, has led many to exit their positions or to seek out new ones. The market out there for workers is competitive, and many are finding higher salaries or better positions as they depart their old roles.
I found the following interesting. Besides being wrong, the people-don’t-want-to-work narrative is problematic. As stated on Linkedin:
Well, for starters, it perpetuates a toxic narrative that serves no one. It creates division, making it harder for transgenerational knowledge exchange to occur. If you have an older generation constantly denigrating and condemning younger generations, how eager do you think that younger generation will be to listen and learn? It's hard enough to transfer knowledge from our exiting workforce.
Bloomberg took a historical tack:
There was a recession in 1873 and there was a ‘vagabond scare,’ they called it at the time: People were hitting the road to avoid a working life and trying to sort of bum around the country,” [Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University] said. “Really what was happening is often these are migrant workers looking for work elsewhere, but in the public imagination at the time, there was this idea that there are people that just don’t want to work.
The people-are-lazy trope oftentimes comes from a sense of superiority. It seems there is a concomitant personality type. Racism is usually not far away. However, I don’t think this principally skews race. My observation is that it’s more a class issue. So, workers (any race) are dumb and lazy. Of course, race is always close at hand. Brown workers, it goes without saying, are definitely suspect within this viewpoint. But, this also applies to the White ones. It applies to “workers,” whom we culturally hold in low esteem.
