Beat The Gen Y Blues

Jobs are hard to find and property is expensive but there are ways for young people to get ahead.

- Vita Palestrant

Secure long-term employment with benefits, rising wages, affordable homes and the introduction of super gave many baby boomers the means to own a home and accumulate wealth. But in just one generation things are starting to fray.

There’s no shortage of headlines reflecting it: “Under employment of young people is the highest it’s been in 40 years”; “Millennials are the most unhappy about work and life in the world”; and “Fall in home ownership threatens to sink Australia’s retirement system.” It’s news to everyone – except millennials.

Associate professor Sarah Kaine, at the Centre for Business and Social Innovation at UTS, says a number of trends have come together to create a more insecure work life. “You’ve got the platform economy, the gig economy, peer-to-peer sharing, whatever you want to call it, that has a particular type of work attached to it which is flexible but also precarious.

“Then you have portfolio workers who are at the top end of the labour market, who go about providing themselves with some security despite what looks like an insecure form of work. Then there are the recent graduates who will take unpaid internships. So there’s a conflation of trends and the result of all of them is, at least temporarily, a more insecure employment relationship.