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Jamiel Law
The Atlantic
Generation C Has Nowhere to Turn
Recent history suggests young people could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended.
Story by Amanda Mull
April 13, 2020
When Ananay Arora looks off his balcony, he doesn’t see much these
days. From his high-rise apartment, which he shared with three
roommates before one of them moved back to Taiwan a few weeks ago, he
has a view of Arizona State University’s campus, where Arora is
currently a sophomore majoring in computer science. It’s usually full
of life, but like most colleges across the country, ASU canceled
in-person classes in mid-March. “Everyone’s gone home. Nothing is going
on,” he told me. “It’s kind of depressing.”
Like a lot of young people waiting out the coronavirus pandemic, Arora
is contemplating his future, which includes a prestigious internship at
Apple meant to begin in May. That’s why he stayed in his off-campus
apartment instead of heading back to live with his parents in India.
“If my internship happens and there’s a travel ban, I wouldn’t be able
to get back,” he said. It’s not just a summer job: In the tech
industry, being a good intern is by far the best way to get a coveted
job offer after graduation. “Getting an [internship] interview is
hard,” Arora explained. “If my internship gets completely canceled, I
don’t know if any company is going to interview me again.”
In the face of enormous uncertainty, Arora and his classmates Kaan
Aksoy and Devyash Lodha created ismyinternshipcancelled.com, which lets
students submit what they know about various companies’ plans and keep
track of which ones are still planning to bring on new people, and if
they are, whether those internships can be done remotely. Arora says
that in the few days since he and his friends launched the site, which
currently lists more than 300 companies, thousands of people have
visited.
For healthy young people like Arora—who seem much less likely to have
severe complications with COVID-19 than their elderly
counterparts—living through a months-long quarantine and the deep
economic recession likely to come after it will have consequences all
its own, most of which, for the moment, are unknowable. It’s hard to
imagine the future of this cohort in any detail, beyond the fact that
their lives will be, in at least some ways, profoundly different from
what they might have been. While writing about how the pandemic might
eventually end, my colleague Ed Yong posited that babies born in the
post-coronavirus era, who will never know life before whatever enduring
changes lie ahead, might be called Generation C.
But Generation C includes more than just babies. Kids, college
students, and those in their first post-graduation jobs are also
uniquely vulnerable to short-term catastrophe. Recent history tells us
that the people in this group could see their careers derailed,
finances shattered, and social lives upended. Predicting the future is
a fool’s errand even when the world isn’t weathering what looks to be
an epoch-defining calamity, but in the disasters of the past lie clues
that can begin to answer a question vital to the lives of millions of
Americans: What will become of Generation C?
Once people are let out into the world to rejoin their lives, the
pandemic will continue to harm them for years to come. “Epidemics are
really bad for economies,” says Elena Conis, a historian of medicine
and public health at UC Berkeley, laughing slightly at the
understatement. “We’re going to see a whole bunch of college graduates
and people finishing graduate programs this summer who are going to
really struggle to find work.” If you’re willing to risk your life to
mop hospital floors or fetch abandoned carts in grocery-store parking
lots, a paycheck, however meager, is certainly in your future.
For Americans who either can’t do those jobs or aren’t desperate enough
to try them, little relief is coming, relative to what other rich
nations are doing for their populations. In Denmark, the government is
paying up to 90 percent of employees’ salaries to keep businesses
afloat and ensure that people have jobs when the pandemic ends. In the
United Kingdom, the government will cover up to 80 percent of workers’
wages. In the United States, onetime relief checks of up to $1,200 per
person are coming in the months ahead for people who had certain income
and tax statuses in previous years, as well as expanded unemployment
insurance for those who have lost work. But that’s only if you can
successfully navigate the glutted, byzantine systems required to sign
up for unemployment benefits. No one seems to know how the protections
for gig workers are supposed to function or how small-business owners
should obtain the loans they were promised. In the meantime, rent is
still due.
These economic conditions are dangerous for nearly all Americans, but
older people are more likely to have stable professional lives and
finances to help cushion the blow. People just starting out now, and
those who will begin their adult lives in the years following the
pandemic, will be asked to walk a financial tightrope with no practice
and, for most, no safety net. Fewer of them will be able to turn to
their parents or other family members for significant help: Even in the
relative boom times of the past few years, 40 percent of Americans
didn’t have the cash on hand to weather a $400 emergency expense. With
the financial losses and medical debt millions of American families
will accrue over the course of the pandemic, even that modest
flexibility will likely be lost for many.
Because American life has changed so much in the past generation or
two, as Conis notes, it’s hard to draw neat comparisons between what’s
happening now and how polio or the Spanish flu affected the country’s
workers. Much more of the American labor force is college-educated than
in the past. The kinds of work Americans do have shifted away from
manufacturing and physical production and toward the service and
digital realms. Labor unions have been gutted and workplace protections
rolled back, exposing individuals to risks they might not have had to
worry about a generation ago, when it would have been harder, for
instance, for a company to convert a full-time worker into an
“independent contractor” to avoid providing health care or paid time
off. Resources are more concentrated among a slender share of the
ultra-wealthy than they have been in generations. “There are aspects of
history that repeat themselves, but what’s more true is that every
epidemic takes place in its own context,” Conis told me. “This is a
unique viral agent and a unique social and cultural context, and
economic context, too.”
To gauge what’s in store for job-seekers, it might be most useful to
look to a different, more recent kind of disaster: the 2008 financial
collapse. More than a decade later, its effects are widely understood
to have been catastrophic to the financial futures of those who were in
their teens and 20s when it hit. Not only did jobs dry up, but federal
relief dollars mostly went to large employers such as banks and
insurance companies instead of to workers themselves. Nearly 10 million
people lost their homes, and investors picked off dirt-cheap
foreclosures to flip them for wealthier buyers or turn them into
rentals, which has helped rising housing prices far outpace American
wage growth. Millennials, many of whom spent years twisting in the wind
when, under better circumstances, they would have been setting down the
professional and social foundations for stable lives, now have less
money in savings than previous generations did at the same age.
Relatively few of them have bought homes, married, or had children.
Just as the nation’s housing stock moved into the hands of fewer people
during the Great Recession, small and medium-size businesses might
suffer a similar fate after the pandemic, which could be a nightmare
for the country’s labor force. Local pharmacies, mom-and-pop
restaurants, and other small businesses have been struggling to stay
open for years, and now many of them could disappear, leaving people
with few choices but to get their lunches and prescriptions from giant
corporations. Amazon’s vast logistics network and labor pool have
already given the company a decided advantage over smaller or regional
retailers. With many local businesses closed or viewed as potential
vectors of disease, pandemic conditions have already funneled more
money to Amazon and its large-scale competitors, including Walmart and
Costco.
American restaurants, which employ millions, have been devastated by
quarantine restrictions, but national chains such as Papa John’s and
Little Caesars are running television ads touting the virus-murdering
temperatures of their commercial ovens, and some of them intend to hire
thousands of workers to meet increased demand. The private-equity
behemoth Bain Capital is making plans to gobble up desirable companies
weakened by the pandemic. The effect could be a quick consolidation of
capital, and the fewer companies that control the economy, the worse
the economy generally is for workers and consumers. Less competition
means lower wages, higher prices, and conglomerates with enough
political influence to stave off regulation that might force them to
improve wages, worker safety, or job security.
This outcome isn’t a foregone conclusion. America is still in the early
days of crisis response, and can still avoid some of the mistakes the
country made during the Great Recession. Unfortunately, the people in
power don’t seem to have the will to help workers or small businesses.
Even New York City, which relies heavily on hotels, bars, restaurants,
and tourists to keep its local economy humming, has provided few
resources to keep those businesses afloat and their workers paid until
people can once again meet for happy hour or line up to attend Comic
Con.
When an economic downturn hits and few professional opportunities
exist, one of modern America’s most reliable post-disaster patterns
begins to emerge: People go to school, whether to learn a trade or get
a doctorate. It can be tempting to hope that education will solve
problems of economics, and that people will simply gain enough skills
to get better jobs and earn more money. But as with virtually all
problems, grad school is not the answer to whatever the coronavirus
might do to your future.
Even so, Reggie Ferreira, a social-work professor and the director of
the Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy at Tulane University, told
me he expects there will be “definitely an increase” in people seeking
education post-quarantine, taking advantage of loan availability to
acquire expertise that might better position them to build a stable
life. Millennials did the same thing in the aftermath of the 2008
crash, taking out loans in record numbers to deal with the soaring cost
of things like law school. They couldn’t have known it at the time, but
those decisions have since worsened their economic strain, while not
significantly improving professional outcomes.
But that uptick in education for young Americans is probably a year or
two in the future, once it’s safe to venture into classrooms once
again; for right now, much of that pursuit is on hold. Ferreira said
that Tulane’s admissions for next year are down, part of a squeeze
being felt across higher education because of the coronavirus. Many
more incoming freshmen are considering taking a “gap year” before
beginning college than is typical in the United States, according to a
survey last month that also found that as many as 80 percent of
high-school students don’t feel confident that they’ll be able to
enroll in their first-choice school. Private universities may suddenly
be too expensive, and frequent plane rides to faraway colleges might
seem much riskier. Mass delays will affect things like school budgets
and admissions for years, but in ways that are difficult to predict. As
Conis, the historian, explained, there is no precedent for a
life-interrupting disaster of this scale in America’s current
educational and professional structures.
Ananay Arora, stuck in his apartment at Arizona State, is able to take
classes and work at his on-campus job from home, but he says that
everyone he knows is worried about how their grades will suffer,
including him. Schoolwork, it turns out, is hard to focus on during a
slow-rolling global disaster. Many types of classes don’t work
particularly well via videochat, such as chemistry and ecology, which
in normal times often ask students to participate in lab work or go out
into the natural world. Some of Arora’s work-study responsibilities
involve computer hardware that he just can’t access right now. “Unless
we figure something out, I don’t think we can stay working like this or
living like this for long,” he told me. “I just hope recruiters
understand the situation and cut us some slack, but I’m not sure they
will.”
The future toll for kids in earlier stages of education, who are also
part of Generation C, could be significant too. The value of school
isn’t just in reading textbooks and doing homework, but in learning how
to be a person: making friends and playing with classmates, celebrating
playground victories and learning to accept disappointment, developing
first crushes and experiencing first heartbreaks. For kids with
unstable home lives, going to school also offers affection and support
from trustworthy authority figures and friends, as well as hot meals or
a respite from abuse. A Zoom video call with 20 6-year-olds might sound
cute, but research has found that even in situations where distance
learning is well planned and well funded, it doesn’t produce nearly the
same results as in-person instruction. Now, given that systems have
been set up on the fly, parents are expected to both work and supervise
lessons, and many children are without home internet access or
computers, the outcomes are likely to be much worse.
“People with a resource base and finances and so forth, they’re
going to get through this a whole lot easier than the families who
don’t even have a computer for their children to attend school,” says
Steven Taylor, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia and
the author of The Psychology of Pandemics. Disasters, he told me, tend
to illuminate and magnify existing disadvantages that are more easily
ignored by those outside the affected communities during the course of
everyday life.
Disasters also make clear when disadvantages—polluted neighborhoods,
scarce local supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables, risky jobs—have
accumulated over a lifetime, leaving some people far more vulnerable to
catastrophe than others. In Michigan, the victims of COVID-19 are
disproportionately black people. In Chicago, black residents are dying
from the disease at a rate nearly six times that of their white
counterparts. In New York, the hardest-hit neighborhoods are where poor
and working-class people, many of them immigrants, live in greater
numbers. Children in those communities already have a harder time
accessing quality education and getting into college. Their future
prospects look dimmer, now that they’re faced with technical and social
obstacles and the trauma of watching family members and friends suffer
and die during a pandemic. Many people who ended up in SARS quarantine
in the early 2000s, Taylor noted, had symptoms of post-traumatic stress
disorder when they were released. Kids who survived Hurricane Katrina
experienced rates of PTSD similar to those of military veterans.
If disasters of the past have anything to teach us about the future,
it's that in moments of great despair, people’s understanding of what’s
possible shifts. For that to translate to real change, though, it’s
crucial that the reactions to the new world we live in be codified into
policy. Clues to post-pandemic policy shifts lie in the kinds of
political agitation that were already happening before the virus.
“Things that already had some support are more likely to take seed,
because those ideas had already been circulating, and there may already
be policy or program ideas that have been developed and were either
waiting in the wings or looking for traction,” Caela O’Connell, an
environmental anthropologist at the University of North Carolina,
explains.
This is where young people might finally be poised to take some
control. The 2008 financial crisis appears to have pushed many
Millennials leftward as its effects dashed their hopes of the stable,
successful future they had only just begun to create. When housing
prices soared, wages stagnated, and access to basic health care became
more scarce, many young people looked around at the richest nation in
the world and wondered who was enjoying all the riches. Policies such
as Medicare for All, debt cancellation, environmental protections,
wealth taxes, criminal-justice reform, jobs programs, and other broad
expansions of the social safety net have become rallying cries for
young people who experience American life as a rigged game. For current
high-school and college students, who were already broadly friendly to
these ideas, the pandemic’s quick, brutal explication of the ways
employment-based health care and loose labor laws have long hurt
working people might make for a formative disaster all its own.
“There’s a possibility, particularly with who you’re calling
Generation C, that their experience of the pandemic against a backdrop
of profoundly fragmented politics could lead to some very necessary
revolutionary change,” Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist at
the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me. In
particular, she notes a potential changing of the electoral guard. The
seeds of that change might have already been planted in the 2018
midterm elections, when young voters turned up in particularly high
numbers and helped elect a group of younger, more progressive
candidates both locally and nationally.
Younger people “aren’t saddled with Cold War imagery and rhetoric. It
doesn’t have the same power over our imaginations,” Schoch-Spana said.
That doesn't mean young people favor Soviet authoritarianism. It just
means a subset of young voters believes that some American
conservatives have cried wolf, deriding everything from public
libraries to free doctor visits as creeping socialism until the word
lost much of its power to scare.
If the broad support among young people for the leftist presidential
candidate Bernie Sanders is any indication, the one-two punch of the
Great Recession and the coronavirus pandemic—if handled poorly by those
in power—might be enough to create a future America with free health
care, a reformed justice system, and better labor protections for
working people. But winds of change rarely kick up debris of just one
type. The Great Recession opened the minds of wide swaths of young
Americans to left-leaning social programs, but its effects are also at
least partially responsible for the Tea Party and the Trump presidency.
The chaos of a pandemic opens the door for a stronger social safety
net, but also for expanded authoritarianism.
Beyond politics and policy, the structures that young people have built
on their own to endure the pandemic might change life after it, too.
Young Americans have responded to the disaster with a wave of
volunteerism, including Arora’s internship-information clearinghouse
and mutual-aid groups across the country that deliver groceries to
those in need. The impulse to help out in a crisis is a hallmark of
community resiliency, and this is likely the first opportunity many
people in Gen C have had to devote much time to serving others.
Learning firsthand about the value of sharing resources and caring for
your neighbors could help the next generation of adults reverse some of
the trends toward loneliness and alienation that have quietly
devastated millions of people in recent decades.
As strong as people’s reactions are in the middle of a crisis, though,
people tend to leave behind the traumatic lessons of a disaster as
quickly as they can. “Amnesia sets in until the next crisis,”
Schoch-Spana said. “Maybe this is different; maybe it’s big enough and
disruptive enough that it changes what we imagine it takes to be safe
in the world, so I don’t know. Who knows? We have to get on the other
side of the tunnel to find out.” Eventually, when America reemerges
into the light of day, the work of creating the future will begin in
earnest.
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