Older workers often say they'd turn up early, stay late, never call in sick and never complain. Younger workers say that 'loyalty' got their parents burned out, underpaid and replaced anyway — and they're not repeating the mistake. So who's right: the generation that grafted, or the generation that refuses to?
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your commentmy dad worked 50 years and the day he retired he didn't know what to do with himself and was dead within two. the job WAS him. that's not a work ethic to admire, that's a man who was never taught he was allowed to exist
45 years, never took a sick day I didn't earn, first in and last out. And you know what loyalty got me? A handshake, a clock, and 'we're letting you go' at 58. So before you call the young ones lazy, ask if they just learned the lesson WE paid for.
Finally someone says it. My generation didn't work hard because we were morally superior. We worked hard because one wage bought a HOUSE. Their hard work buys a flat-share and a season of dread. The deal changed, not the people.
I'm 26 and I work HARD. I just won't kill myself for a company that would replace me in a week. That's not laziness, that's not making my dad's mistake. He gave them everything and got a gold watch and a heart attack.
Maybe the truth is this: our generation worked too hard for too little and called it virtue, theirs works carefully for fairness and calls it sense. Both gave something up. Neither got it free. And we'd understand each other a lot faster if we just admitted that.
I employ 40 people. The 'nobody wants to work' thing is half true and half nonsense. Pay properly and treat people like humans and they graft like anything. The places crying 'lazy youth' are usually paying 2009 wages in 2026.
That's a cheap shot. My 'broken pension' raised four kids who never went hungry, owned my home, and let me look every man in the eye. You measure my life in the bank balance. I measure it in the people at my table.
There's a difference between 'I won't be exploited' and 'I won't restock the shelf unless I'm in the mood.' Both exist now and lumping them together does the genuinely hard-working young ones a real disservice.
Both my parents worked themselves into the ground 'for us.' I barely saw them. I'd have traded the second income for a dad at one football match. Hard work has a price and it's usually paid by the kids, quietly.
Read that and had to put the phone down. That's my fear for my own husband exactly. He doesn't have hobbies, he has 'the job.' I'm scared of the silence retirement is going to bring into this house.
72 and I'll defend my generation. We took pride in a job done right, even sweeping a floor. That pride wasn't about the boss, it was about US. I worry the young have lost the dignity of doing a small thing properly, and that's a loss for THEM, not their employer.
Came here to defend the young and you've all done it for me. I'm 68 and I now think 'nobody wants to work anymore' really means 'nobody will accept being treated badly anymore' — and honestly, good. We should have refused sooner.
the 'hard work always pays off' generation is sitting in cold houses on broken pensions, which is the single best argument AGAINST their own philosophy and they cannot see it
The young aren't lazy, they're just honest about a bargain we pretended was sacred. We called it loyalty. They call it a transaction. They're not wrong, it just hurts to hear in plain words.
My grandad, that comment IS my grandad. And he's right that pride in your work feels good. He's wrong that we lost it. We just refuse to call being underpaid 'pride.' We take pride at home now, where it can't be stolen.
I'm 60 and I retrained at 57 into something completely new. Hardest two years of my life. So spare me 'old dogs can't learn' AND 'young people won't graft' — both are excuses. Effort is a choice at every single age.
I've managed staff for 30 years and the laziest people I ever employed were Boomers coasting to retirement, and the hardest grafters were teenagers with something to prove. 'Work ethic' was never a generation. It's a personality, in every decade.
Every generation thinks it invented hard work and the next one ruined it. Find me one era where the old didn't call the young lazy. Cavemen probably grumbled the young ones couldn't hunt like the old days. It's the oldest complaint there is.
Counterpoint: I run a trade. I literally cannot get an 18 year old to turn up two days in a row, on good money, with training paid for. It's not all wages. Something in the showing-up muscle has genuinely weakened and pretending otherwise helps no one.
Thank you. I'm 63, also a tradesman, and I'm tired of being told it's all about pay. I OFFER apprenticeships. They ghost me. Real respect to the ones who show, but the no-shows are real and they're not all victims.
Is it wrong to choose not to have children just because you don't want to?
110 comments
Netflix's 'Adolescence' shows a teenage boy becoming a killer — did the show actually get modern boyhood right, or did it miss the point entirely?
109 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
109 comments
Is judging someone by their height as shallow as judging by their weight?
108 comments