"There are millennial entrepreneurs everywhere, from Perry in Silicon Valley to StirList creator Amber Pankonin in Omaha, Neb. and coffee shop owner Byron Knight in Jackson, Miss. But that’s not the only way we wield our influence. There are also community organizers like Nelini Stamp, 25, who advocates for working families in New York. There are fast food workers like 20-year-old Jevon Walker, who walked out of his job to demand $15 an hour just yesterday in Milwaukee, Wisc. There are countless twentysomethings who are working two jobs and pursuing their passion projects on the side. There are hordes of young people who work for Senators, and who organized and canvassed for the 2008 and 2012 elections and continue to be involved politically. None of these millennials seem to be filling their days taking selfies in their parents’ basement."

I name-check mad amounts of my favorite Millennials in this piece for TODAY.com.

theothernwa:

Finally got access to Joel Stein’s paywalled TIME cover story, “The Me-Me-Me Generation.” Glad he cleared up this misunderstanding about poor millennials so eloquently and non-racist-ly.

“It really didn’t bother me none. I’m in the same shape I was before the economy crashed; nothing’s changing around me. I think the whole economy thing was for people who actually had it, then lost it. But if you don’t have it, you can’t miss something you never had.”

Josie, 28, CVS pharmacist, single mom of 3, West Homestead, PA

Nobody was less surprised by the recession than 1) low-wage workers and 2) Rust Belters.

Most harrowing image of our road trip so far: this community garden in Braddock, PA, whose backdrop is one of the last active steel mills in the Pittsburgh area. The air was thick was sulfur.

"Those of us who came of age when the bubble burst, particularly the downwardly mobile “privileged poor,” have a tangible common experience, a renewed indignation. But too often, this indignation often has nowhere to go, and is enveloped in our frenetic lives of multiple jobs, demoralizing underemployment, or joblessness—the constant physical and emotional stress of keeping our heads above water…All those economic pressures have primed this era for an economic shift. Yet those same pressures limit our freedom to protest or push for policy changes. In other words, we’re pissed—but we’re paralyzed by the very forces we’re pissed about."

If you ever wondered what I meant by the “crash generation,” my piece in Salon (originally posted at Roosevelt) explains it.

More wine, snaxx, and realtalk about family policy…

…with me, this Tuesday, April 30th, 7 pm at the Roosevelt Institute, 570 Lexington Ave in NYC! 

I’m running a three-part salon series at Roosevelt called The Crash Generation, where I invite a smartypants expert for some realtalk about the economic issues most affecting young people. Up next, why Millennials should care about family policy.

Yes you, even if you don’t have kids! Amid all the obsessive Lean In and “Having It All” convos, Millennials often get ignored. What can we do to influence family policy before we couple up or have children? I’ll be interviewing the brilliant journalist and Demos fellow Sharon Lerner about Millennials, family, and the economy. Come hang for wine, food, and a substantive, no-pressure chat.

RSVP to Rachelle Olden at rolden@rooseveltinstitute.org.

Help me find broke-ass Millennials?

"Comparing salaries among colleagues has long been a taboo of workplace chatter, but that is changing as Millennials—individuals born in the 1980s and 1990s—join the labor force. Accustomed to documenting their lives in real time on social-media forums like Facebook and Twitter, they are bringing their embrace of self-disclosure into the office with them. And they’re using this information to negotiate raises at their current employer or higher salaries when moving to a new job."

SO INTO the idea of a massive salary #realtalk sea change ushered in by 20somethings. Jen Doll partly attributes this to Millennials’ penchant for crowdsourcing. (I think she was smirking, but it’s kinda true.)

Also—you knew this was coming—salary realtalk is a tangible way to lessen the blows of the recent decline of real wages. Young workers are always paid less, but transparency can prevent us from being straight-up exploited. 

"[A]s a wave of educated, middle-class Americans becomes focused on sewing non-sweatshop curtains and pureeing non-GMO baby food for their own families, they are increasingly uninterested in pursuing large-scale collective solutions to the very problems that drove them to become modern homesteaders in the first place. These droves of radical post-consumerist home-ec enthusiasts may believe that change begins in the home, but for them it also ends there. Matchar cites economist Juliet Schor’s prediction that the new economy will be a “synthesis of the pre- and post-modern,” affording every worker the ability to choose whether and when to work either in or outside the system. If educated middle-class workers aren’t rallying for better health care and paid sick days within the system, what hope do minimum-wage workers have? If wealthier moms are judging each other for shopping at Trader Joe’s, who’s holding down the fresh produce prices for lower-income families? It’s easy to see how the new domesticity, born of inequality and economic hardship and professional dissatisfaction, will only exacerbate those trends for workers further down the food chain, leaving them struggling to opt in to the economy at all."

Ann Friedman on a new book about “new domesticity” by Emily Matchar (who wrote that classic Salon piece about Mormon style bloggers).

Fake money

I’m in the midst of transcribing interviews from my trip to San Jose last week (more on that later). A 23-year-old SJSU student named Brooke said this to me:

The big crash happened in September [of 2008], my freshman year of college. At the time, the school had the Financial Times in the student union…So I read it, like, every day and I was just amazed at what was happening. How it was all falling down…

It threw me. I’m just like, everything is a joke. It’s weird—they have all these rules and you’re supposed to be financially smart, like don’t get credit cards or don’t rack up more debt than you can pay off. Nowadays I just don’t care. I’m like, why does it matter? It’s just fake money, anyway.

A premise of my book project is that the financial crash has imbued Millennials with a renewed sense of class consciousness. But it also smashed our sense of logic, or that anyone is looking out for us or doing things right (an idea Chris Hayes gets at in his book, Twilight of the Elites). In the words of Linda Ellerbee, the crash caused some of us to sneer, “Who’s in charge here?”