“When I was young.” A broken record that starts playing every time you read a headline like this morning’s Courier. “‘Night shifts and Saturdays at work? No thanks’: Stellantis is hiring in Turin, but the (few) young workers are holding out.” News that arrives a few days after another that had shocked the ‘workers of the past’ (not all, fortunately): “Madonna di Campiglio, the chef offers up to 2,200 euros a month but can’t find staff: ‘Today the kids want to do the bare minimum'”.

And so on with stories of waking up at dawn and various vicissitudes to reach the workplace, grueling shifts, free apprenticeships, treatments bordering on exploitation told today with pride, pinning a personal medal of valor to the chest. Spoiler: sacrifices are also made by those under 30 – but let’s say 40 -, children of the precarious workers of the new millennium, often forced into cohabitation due to skyrocketing rents and a cost of living totally disconnected from the reality of wages, forced to hold on to ridiculous contracts – when they exist -, at the mercy of unprecedented job and life insecurity.

Work like an intensive farm

Lazy people are there today like yesterday, but pointing the finger at the new generations, propagating an almost DNA-based negligence, is certainly easier than an examination of conscience that many should do, starting from those who offer the job.

What should make us reflect, however, is precisely the reaction of young people to a stalemate that has been going on for too long. If these kids start to ‘raise their heads’, it’s because there’s not much to be gained by keeping them down (also read it in a literal sense). Taking everything that comes your way in order to work is no longer the priority, but above all the priority is starting to be something else besides work. We arrived at supermarkets open 24 hours a day and shopping centers that close just a couple of days a year with this intensive farming mentality, which has ended up permeating society from top to bottom. In many industries, workers have become broilers.

The normalization of work as the only common thread of existence, to which one can sacrifice oneself full time – obviously excluding those professions which by nature cannot do without weekend and night shifts – is perhaps reaching saturation. And is it the fault of the kids who try to have another ambition?

So, while other European countries are experimenting with the short week, we – with salaries stuck for thirty years – are playing buck-passing.