At this point, it’s become pretty easy to get tired of the phrase “nobody wants to work anymore.”
After all, not only is is just as true as it always was that most people need to do that to live, but also that doing so still doesn’t come with a guarantee that they’ll be able to make ends meet.
So for a lot of workers, that statement can often be translated to “nobody wants to work for me anymore.”
That said, it would be a mistake to think that the business owners and Kardashians who parrot this line do so to universal condemnation.
As we can see in the discussion that formed after one dad posted a polarizing letter from his daughter’s former boss, there’s never just one way to judge a work ethic or how the “real world” works.
In a tweet that no longer seems to exist, a New Zealand dad posted a letter that his teenage daughter received during her first day working at a local retailer.
He also mentioned that she had recently quit this job and noted that the store who hired her made a habit of hiring 16-year-olds so they could pay them significantly less than the region’s minimum wage.
As he saw it, that made the list of “rules” she received in this letter all the more galling.
As we can see, it starts off with the old adage that life isn’t fair and that we just have to deal with it.
And while they tend to carry the theme that nothing is handed to you and you have to earn everything you get in life, it also didn’t take many commenters long to notice that these aren’t rules so much as screeds about how this person perceives modern youth.
As one user said after this list was reposted to Reddit, “While a few of the notions might have merit in a certain setting, a workplace is not that setting and these definitely aren’t rules.”
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For critics of this list, they said more about the bitterness of the person saying them and how pleasant it would be to work for him than anything about his employees.
As one person said , “Give a sad person little power and this happens.”
Others made fun of the typos in the letter, saying that it doesn’t help one’s argument about instilling a good work ethic to not spend a little time proofreading that argument.
Still others couldn’t help but notice how differently we’re being taught to regard “burger flipping” depending on the point the people lecturing us are trying to make.
In the words of one user, “The B side to ‘flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity’ is the boomer classic hit ‘straighten up and fly right or else you’ll be flipping burgers when you grow up.'”
That said, there were some who thought there was value in what this person was trying to impart about the real world and how we should expect to face it.
As one person put it , “Am I officially old that I don’t mind this being posted? Kids need to understand life outside of high school is difficult. Every kid should have to dig a ditch at least once to understand hard work. If anything, it should make them work harder to avoid never having to do it again.”
Others suggested that the letter was a blanket response to the caliber of teenager the store had employed up to that point.
But at the same time, you get what you pay for.
h/t: Reddit | SupermanPrimeOneMill
