Editor's Note: Jill Filipovic is a New York-based journalist and author of the book "OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind." Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this comment are solely his. See more opinion pieces at cnne.com/opinion
(CNN) - The coronavirus pandemic has devastated the American economy. But one group has been particularly hard hit: millennials who are already struggling.
From February to May this year, nearly 5 million millennials lost their jobs, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. Older people were not unscathed, but their job loss figures are not as dire. And these latest losses come just over a decade after millennials were the generation hardest hit by the Great Recession of 2008-2009. As young adults just beginning our working years, we were first in line when companies had to downsize; many of us go months or years without work. That created an earnings penalty that we haven't yet recovered from, and probably never will.
For millennials like myself, the only hope for real change is electing people who are part of our generation, but have largely been excluded from an American political process that does not represent us. Older millennials turn 39 this year, if you use the Pew Research Center definition (anyone born 1981-1997), or 38, if you use the Census Bureau's definition (anyone born 1982-2000), and however, there is no millennial in the United States Senate. The same was not true of the "Baby Boomers," many of whom were cast in their 30s, including Russ Feingold, John E. Sununu, Don Nickles, and Rick Santorum. Joe Biden, a member of "Silent Generation," was 30 when he became a senator. While millennials did make some headway in the House in the 2018 primaries, they are still surprisingly underrepresented: Millennials, who make up 22% of the US population, now outnumber “Baby Boomers,” and they went from 1% of the members of the Chamber to 6%.
Tellingly, those millennial members of Congress have had significant influence, prioritizing the kind of ambitious progressive legislation that matters most to young people. They have taken on our most pressing problems: high health care costs (we paid twice as much for health care as boomers when they were young adults), shameful lack of childcare, skyrocketing student debt, lack of affordable housing, our global warming and the increasingly uninhabitable planet and now our job losses caused by the coronavirus.
While these proposals have yet to become policy, they are at least having an impact, even on the oldest leaders of the Democratic Party. But that's part of the problem: Our leaders view millennials as kids with good ideas, not equals ready to take our fair share of power. If we want the future to be brighter, let us choose the people who have a greater interest in it.
The life story of millennials goes something like this: “We are the largest adult generation in America, the best educated and the most diverse,” according to Pew.
But we are also the first generation to be downwardly mobile, destined to do worse than our parents and grandparents.
Race is also an important factor here. Systemic racial discrimination in employment, housing, and freedom cut the avenues for black and brown families to find stability and build wealth. The results of these inequalities - poverty, lack of opportunity, low wages, few savings, and low homeownership rates - are now magnified in the most diverse millennials.
As working-class wages plummeted, millennials needed to go to college just to stay or enter the middle class. But parents of color had less wealth to capitalize on, making black millennials even more likely to go into debt on student loans than their white counterparts (who are mired in an educational debt hole). When black and brown millennials graduated, racial pay discrimination meant they earned less than whites, even with the same credentials and doing the same job. And other expenses were higher: the average house today costs twice what it did in 1970.
Rents have also skyrocketed since the boomers were young, and black and brown renters pay more in rent for similar homes in similar neighborhoods. In other words, millennials generally have more debt, have higher basic costs of living, and make less money than previous generations, and blacks are disproportionately affected.
And now coronavirus.
The job loss figures are extreme and especially devastating for black workers. But there are also more subtle reverbs to come out, and they may not be as easy to quantify. While working from home to childcare is a challenge for all parents, that burden is not shared equally. Anecdotes abound about women quitting or retiring from work because despite believing they were in egalitarian relationships, moms are doing so much more than dads, and it turns out that doing it all is impossible. Researchers and surveyors are slowly beginning to quantify these burdens, and the results are not exactly the stuff of feminist dreams.
According to pre-coronavirus data analyzed by the Council on Contemporary Families, when fathers work from home, women end up doing more housework and children spend twice as much time with their mothers who work from home than with their dads there situation. Unsurprisingly, once the coronavirus struck, teleworking mothers reported higher levels of anxiety, loneliness, and depression compared to what working mothers reported before the pandemic. Dads do better: Their anxiety levels actually dropped when they switched to working from home. According to economists at the International Monetary Fund, women have suffered the brunt of the financial damage from coronavirus and the blows threaten to roll back decades of progress toward gender equality.
This problem falls heavily on millennials, who are the parents of most of America's young children. And it falls especially on women, who accounted for more than half of the job losses this spring.
This does not bode well for the future of millennials, so our political parties must support sending more politicians from this demographic (and younger than us) to Washington.
As we head into an election where millennials and Gen Z make up the largest number of potential voters, politicians must tell us, and Gen Z facing similar fates, what exactly they are going to do to improve our lives. prospects and offset some of the damage caused by the policies created by the boomers. It is millennials who have paid the price for the leaders of the baby boomers and the politicians elected by the baby boomers destroying the funding of public higher education, failing to respond adequately to the threat of climate change and raising the health care costs. Voters and those in power should listen to elected millennials, like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and youth movements, including Black Lives Matter and Sunrise, that are fighting climate change.
They have proposed and supported legislation that would address some of the millennials 'greatest challenges: the Green New Deal to combat climate change, the redirection of money from police and prisons to education and health, and the' One Society Fair ”that aims to keep rental costs in check and fully address poverty in America.
Millennials have spent our entire lives hearing the cliché that we are "the future." Well, we are not that young anymore and the older generations haven't done much to improve and brighten our future. The coronavirus chaos, while devastating, has also become clearer: our suffering is preventable. We are an isolated nation and suffering from bad political decisions, not bad luck. And it is time for those in charge to hand over the reins and let the young people be saved.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez