A few days ago, scrolling through TikTok, I came across a video that particularly struck me. Over the years I have often tried to respond to the rhetoric of “young people no longer want to work” with articles that showed how, behind the difficulty of many companies in finding staff, there is often precariousness and starvation wages. But that video, which received over 43 thousand “likes”, forced me to think deeper.

But let’s start from the video: a girl listens to a job offer – “40 hours a week, company car, thirteenth and fourteenth salary”. Anyone born before Gen Z would say: well, put it that way, it seems like an excellent offer (even if we don’t talk about salary). But no: the girl, in the video, runs away, suggesting that it is an offer to stay away from.

@sofiatorreggianii

One word: escape

♬ original sound – 𝓝𝓲𝓬𝓸𝓵ó 💎

One word: escape

♬ original sound – 𝓝𝓲𝓬𝓸𝓵ó 💎

The offer that doesn’t convince

At that point I opened the comments section, convinced I would find other people as confused as me. And in fact there are quite a few who ask “I don’t understand what the problem is”, “no sorry, is it bad?”. But there are many more comments from those who explain why that proposal is not at all attractive. Many, for example, point out that the thirteenth and fourteenth salary are not a “benefit”, but simply a different way of dividing the annual salary. And so far everything is correct: the fact remains that the offer, however, does not mention benefits. Since not all contracts provide for the fourteenth salary, I don’t think there is anything strange in explaining during the hiring phase how the annual salary will be divided. A bit like when it is explained how many days of holiday or leave you will have per year: it is nothing given for free, but it is a detail to be communicated and, unfortunately, also something that cannot be taken for granted, since there are many “grey” contracts that do not provide the minimum legal requirements.

Many, then, rail against the offer of the company car. “It sounds cool, but if you resign you’ll be left without a car,” writes one girl. Of course, if I resign I lose the company car; but also the salary, paid holidays, thirteenth, fourteenth and everything else: how could it be otherwise? And in fact someone points out that if they don’t give you the company car you have to buy it out of your own pocket anyway and someone else, less diplomatic, asks ironically “come on? Did you want it as a gift?”.

Enough of this story that today’s young people don’t want to work

40 hours a week: a generational frontier

“What you see written in the video is bare minimum”, writes another boy. Yet, looking even just at the hourly offer – a full time 40 hours -, we know that there are many people throughout Italy who work part-time and who would do anything to be able to work more and, consequently, earn more. And in fact one commentator writes “maybe 40 hours a week”. But not everyone agrees: “It’s not clear why we work 40 hours like in 1918. The miners did 40 hours a hundred years ago,” writes one user. “I serve the capitalists”, ventures another, who is joined by a third: “If I have to work 40 hours plus commuting time and lunch breaks, then I go straight to prison”.

Comments that fit into a precise framework: the fear of the rigidity of full-time work. If for previous generations a 40-hour per week contract meant security and independence, for many young people today full time seems like a constraint: a fixed, repetitive and inflexible schedule, which limits the freedom to organize one’s life and reinvent oneself. Stability is no longer seen as a goal, but as a possible cage. And then there is another fringe of users: those who consider the offer so good as to be unrealistic. “Everything is too good to be true, in fact it won’t be. You’re right, escape”, reads one comment. “Then you wake up all sweaty” writes another, suggesting that it is just a dream.

What young people are really looking for

The question therefore arises spontaneously: what are young people today really looking for in a job? What do they expect? On the one hand, it is difficult not to recognize that many expectations appear disconnected from the current economic reality: Italy remains a country with low productivity, with wages that have been stagnant for decades and an entrepreneurial fabric made up largely of small and medium-sized businesses that struggle to sustain higher costs. But then, dismissing the positions of these young people as a simple “desire to do zero” would be an equally serious mistake. Because what are seen as demands today could be, tomorrow, the minimum conditions to make work desirable again.

Young people enter the market with a different perspective: they have seen parents working 40 or more hours a week without real income progression (and with considerable stress and burnout), they have internalized the idea that stability is not guaranteed – and Covid certainly hasn’t helped with this – and that loyalty to the company is not necessarily reciprocated. In this context, it is understandable that they put time, well-being and quality of life at the centre. The issue of the 40 hour week, then, is emblematic: in several European countries shorter working weeks have already been experimented for years without drops in productivity. It’s not science fiction, but a possible direction.

Towards a work revolution?

The real short circuit is not in the comments under the video, but perhaps in the fact that today, in the world of work, questions and answers no longer coincide. Companies continue to offer packages designed for an “old-fashioned” worker who accepts full schedules, continuous flexibility and a total centrality of work in their life. But more and more young people simply no longer want to be that worker. At the same time, young people are looking for time, well-being and margins of autonomy that many companies are not willing to offer. It’s not a question of right or wrong, but of expectations that are no longer met. And as long as this gap is dismissed as laziness or naivety, rather than as a sign of change, the risk is that we will remain stuck watching viral videos that tell much more than meets the eye.

Perhaps the real question is not whether young people have too high demands, but whether the Italian world of work can afford to ignore them. Because behind that TikTok there isn’t just a viral joke: there is the increasingly widespread idea that working doesn’t have to mean sacrificing everything else. And if this idea really catches on, it won’t just be a problem for companies. It will be, for better or worse, a revolution.