Economists Agree That the Nightmare of Hiring Generation Z Is Real

As a millennial who graduated into the Great Recession job market and, in the span of 2007-2011 cited in the article, went from datacenter worker to delivering pizzas to government contract to 15 months unemployment, the scarring effect is absolutely real and still hinders my potential today.

Knowing younger folks are going through similar shit again incenses me. Two entire generations of young workers effectively f*ked out of early career and wage growth due to bad policies, lax regulations, and strong shareholder incentives compared to other economies, yet people are still balking at the prospect of anything other than further weakening of the status quo to enrich the old and the wealthy at the expense of the young and the poor.

Reprehensible. Those in power are failing the youth of today and tomorrow by engaging in petty squabbling and naked partisanship instead of practicing good governance. What we need are worker protections that prevent layoffs from profitable firms, regulations that promote job growth instead of shareholder value, wages that grow the middle class from the bottom up instead of top-down, job programs and guarantees for the unemployed, and immigration policies that promote domestic hiring first and naturalization instead of precarity for foreign experts brought in to private enterprises.

> central bankers, and labor market analysts signal that this appears to be a uniquely American challenge.

I wouldn't say it's an uniquely American challenge. In Europe many Gen Z fail to land a job or stay at that job. Many still live with their parents and don't plan to leave or have a job

Sources mentioned in the article.

[1] Powell's remarks: https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCprescon...

[2] The kids are alright?: https://secure.ubs.com/global/en/wealthmanagement/insights/c...

Remote work is a detriment to almost every junior employee.

maybe a good thing because gen Z will send all your code to ChatGPT.

/s

"learn to code."

> Goldman Sachs economist Pierfrancesco Mei wrote on Thursday that “finding a job takes longer in a low-turnover labor market.” He argued that “job reallocation,” or the pace at which new jobs are created and existing ones destroyed, has been on the decline since the late 1990s… Almost all job changes between existing jobs is taking place as “churn,” driving “almost all the variation in turnover since the Great Recession.” Goldman found that as of 2025, churn was well below its pre-pandemic levels, a “broad-based” pattern across industries and states, and this “mostly fall[s] on younger workers.” In 2019, it took a young unemployed worker about 10 weeks to find a new job in a low-churn state, now that’s 12 weeks on average.