Published at 1:15 am. Updated at 6:00 am.
As strange as it may seem to the uninitiated, Réal Lalumière has always had a passion for metal brooches. He began his business by installing machines to make objects from metal wire in the basement of his house in Pointe-aux-Trembles. For five years he took no time off, no vacation, no weekend. A really hard-working entrepreneur.
All those efforts and sacrifices have finally paid off. Here he welcomes the La Presse journalist to his new factory, where he bends spit to make shopping baskets and refrigerator shelves.
There is no lack of work, no. But there is a shortage of young welders, yes.
Young people no longer want to work. You go to work for a week and then leave again. The others stay for three months, just long enough to qualify for unemployment insurance. It's the same everywhere in the industry.
Réal Lalumière, President of RL Wire Works Inc.
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La Presse of February 18, 1975: “Young people no longer want to work […] throughout the industry. »
Ah, the entrepreneur is not the first to complain about this. It is well known that young people no longer dare to go to work! Nothing to do with… with…
Uh. With who again?
Let us return briefly to Réal Lalumière.
The report was published in La Presse in February 1975. The famous young employees he speaks of were therefore born in 1955 if they were 20 years old at the time of publication.
This makes them real baby boomers.
The good thing about digitizing newspaper archives is that we can easily find some gems like this. Visit the Bibliothèque et Archives nationaux du Québec website, find the “Magazines and Newspapers” section and type a few words into the search engine. Like, “Young people don’t want to work anymore.”
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La Presse, April 6, 1963: “Young people no longer want to work. They want to be published quickly and become known even quicker. »
The idea came to us from Paul Fairie, a researcher at the University of Calgary. In the summer of 2022, he published a sidebar on his X account dedicated to the quote “Nobody wants to work anymore.” Each of the messages in the thread contains an excerpt published in a newspaper in which this formula appears, along with the publication date. The oldest excerpt comes from 1894.
In an interview with a New Zealand radio station last spring, Paul Fairie said he was fascinated by this phrase, which he often heard around him. “I started researching the archives. I found mentions and wasn't surprised. But what surprised me was how far back these mentions went! »
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La Presse, May 7, 1971: “Young people no longer even want to work like their elders. Speed and productivity are not the priority for them: they are looking for happiness in life,” explains Mr. Gélinas.
Paul Fairie – who, to our great regret, did not respond to our requests for an interview – did the same exercise on humor (“As early as 1933, clowns complained that people no longer laughed at their jokes as they used to”) or something like laziness in children ( “People accuse TikTok of being a bad influence on children, but we can find the same complaints in cycling, in jazz, in radio…”).
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Le Droit of October 17, 1973: “Young people want to leave work at five o'clock. They don't want to learn and the old people are dying one by one. »
He also confided how his research into the past reassured him about the present. “When you start finding these quotes, a strange feeling comes over you. Maybe we shouldn't say that no one wants to work anymore, but rather that no one ever actually wanted to work? »
Break it up, uncle
No offense to Réal Lalumière – and to everyone who shouted a big “Ha!” » Using the example from the start – nothing suggests that the young baby boomers were particularly lazy. Of course, says sociologist Jacques Hamel, professor emeritus at the University of Montreal, there is the image of hippies, of flower power, of a life freed from the shackles of work… “But if we scratch ourselves a little “If we do it.” With the slightest investigation we find that these were young people from privileged backgrounds who did not have to work and were supported by their parents. Others didn't have the luxury of being able to say they didn't want to work. »
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La Presse, November 27, 1973: “Young people no longer want to work on the farm like their parents. »
He recalls that the anthropologist Margaret Mead observed that in primitive societies change occurs so slowly that young people submit more naturally to the power of their elders. But in modern societies, where change occurs very quickly, young people are better able to challenge this power.
“The facts we rely on to make these comparisons are based on the society in which we evolved,” he says. But we forget to recognize that society has changed. »
In my time
John Protzko is a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He, too, has always been fascinated by older people's tendency to denigrate younger people.
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Le Quotidien of January 14, 1976: “We often hear that young people […] Young people have grown up in an environment in which authority has become less important. »
“And then,” he tells us in a telephone interview, “I noticed that the people who were complaining were also very… very talented people.” »
Gifted? That means?
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Le Devoir of July 18, 1977: “Young people no longer want to work. »
“These people had developed a very high level of excellence in what they were criticizing. For example: One day someone who reads a lot told me that his generation reads more than mine. And the first thought I had was that this person was one of the greatest readers I had ever met. How can this person, thought John Protzko, really judge how well “normal people” read?
“So we started looking into it, and this is the first thing we discovered: people today are particularly critical of young people when it comes to things that they themselves are good at. So if you were a very intelligent child, you tend to think that today's children are less intelligent. But if you were more average, you wouldn't think that young people today are so stupid. »
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Le Nouvelliste, April 8, 1981: “I have difficulty finding people who want to work. Young people don't want to work and older people can't stand the heat […] »
And that is the case with many comparisons. Reading enthusiasts note that young people are reading less, and those who have great respect for authority believe that today's young people are particularly selfish and rude.
“And we can think the same thing about people who say that young people don’t want to work anymore. This is something you hear from someone who is used to working hard. »
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La Presse from January 16, 1982: “Expenses have quadrupled or tripled, staff are not easy to find.” Young people no longer want to work. »
Like our spindle folder from 1975, for example?
Everyone likes me
The researchers also noticed another bias: the tendency to extrapolate one's own experiences to individuals across a generation. For example, a person who spent a lot of time burying their noses in books as a child will tend to assume that all children their age did the same thing.
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La Presse, May 22, 1985: “Young people no longer want to work, even with a minimum wage; First, you want executive salaries. »
(Excuse me? Weren't they all children of the 1980s who read La Presse cover to cover every day, dwelling on Foglia's column and Mats Näslund's scorecard? Are you sure about that? ?)
In fact, our brains use a shortcut to extend a personal experience to an entire group of people. In addition, according to the researcher, there is the phenomenon of “presentism”, according to which our brain wears blinders and constructs a vision of the past or future from the present.
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Le Soleil of September 12, 1998: “Young people no longer want to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
We therefore tend to project our “current self” into the past.
John Protzko, researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara
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La Presse, July 22, 2000: “We have the impression that young people no longer want to work for the minimum wage, but want to be paid $8 an hour when they are hired.” »
“The most widely held belief about memory is that memories are very precise and trustworthy,” says John Protzko. These memories would, in a sense, be a record of what happened and we could rewind to remember it. But that's not how it works. »
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Le Courrier de Saint-Hyacinthe of April 5, 2006: “It is not very complicated, today it seems that young people no longer want to work. You have to hire about ten people to have one person stay. The phenomenon not only affects us, but all companies. They show up and want to get $20 an hour when they leave. I think the coming economic situation may change something. »
The reality is more differentiated and, above all, the periods compared are different. “I think the most important message is that we have to be humble,” says John Protzko.
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The November 1, 2017 itinerary: “About a year ago I had a discussion with a member of the Quebec Liberal Party. He told me that young people these days don't want to work. […] »
A millennium ago, he says, elders would probably have complained that young people weren't helping with the firewood like they used to. But did they complain as much as the “old people” of today? “It may be that the phenomenon is increasing. It could also be that people today simply have more opportunities to make their voices heard…”
Around me
“More like this” or “less like this”, generational comparisons are tricky. But in recent years, according to sociologists, the society in which young people develop today is characterized by an inevitable social trend: individualization.
“Individualization is not “individualism” in the sense of egoism and navel-gazing,” explains sociologist Jacques Hamel. It describes a tendency to want to shape oneself and to escape all social constraints. » Starting with those imposed by the elders.
But to what extent is this a “new phenomenon”? “It has existed for at least 30, 35 years,” says the sociologist. Some even trace its roots to the May 68 social movements, says Jacques Hamel.
What is new, however, observes the retired sociologist, is that the gap between “young” and “old” is widening earlier. New university professors are baffled by the attitudes of their students, who, for example, question the study of certain authors in the name of moral rectitude, notes Jacques Hamel. How is it to be explained? “I like the work of the American sociologist Sherry Turkle. According to her, the digital world means that we are dealing with young people – not just students – who want to live without friction and without hassle. They see the university as an echo chamber because they are used to never being contradicted. This is one explanation among others, but I find it interesting. »