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Adults in their late 20s, early 30s have it worse than the previous generation: study

Coffee house barista looking bored (Getty Images)
Coffee house barista looking bored (Getty Images)

Debt delinquency amongst millennials was up 12 per cent in the second quarter of this year. Youth unemployment hit 13.3 per cent in July with 28,400 jobs lost across Canada. The housing markets are out of control and millennials are still living in their parents’ basements. But if there’s any solace to be had in poverty-focused charity Oxfam’s new report on global youth, it’s that we’re all in this together. No really, millennials are feeling the squeeze worldwide.

“There’s a huge swath of people all across the planet in that age bracket that are poor and poorer than the people in the same age of the generation before them,” says Kelly Bowden, manager of campaigns for Oxfam Canada. “(But) there is no one who is escaping the impact of the inequality gap – whether you’re teenagers, millennials or baby boomers, it’s affecting every one.”

Millennials, she says, just happen to be having a harder time bouncing back from the economic downturn.

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The report cites a study last year by Dr. Paul Kershaw, an associate professor at UBC’s school of population and public health, which found that “the typical 25-34 year old earns $4,200 less today for full-time work than three decades earlier.”

Alone, that deficit is probably manageable, but when contrasted with the endless string of bad news for today’s millennials, it compounds.

“Student debt is higher than it has been for the past five years and it’s getting increasingly larger in this country,” says Bowden pointing out that it can be debilitating for young Canadians struggling to start their post-education lives, especially when they chased that education in the first place to earn more. “I think there’s a combination of factors that play in this – the general stagnation in wages… minimum wages aren’t rising as rapidly in the past 25 years and wages in general are smaller.”

But not everyone agrees there’s a struggle.

There have been plenty of headlines about millennial entitlement and a July poll by the Angus Reid Institute found that one in three Canadians believe that millennials living with their parents is bad for society and young people are “soft”.

Sure, you can find droves of evidence supporting each side’s views. But amidst all the name-calling and polls showing entitlement or generations of mismanagement and the policies the report says have “enabled an outrageously large portion of the world’s wealth to accrue to the very top of the income spectrum (delivering) a difficult present and uncertain future to a huge majority of today’s youth,” there is some action.

In January 2016, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet announced a program to allow 165,000 students to attend 30 universities for free – the byproduct of the so-called “Penguin Revolution” a decade prior where somewhere between 600,000 and one million students went on strike at over 250 schools.

In Kenya, where approximately 80 per cent of the country’s 2.3 million unemployed were youth between the ages of 15 and 34, the 2012 Access to Government Procurement Opportunities (AGPO) was created so that group, plus women and people with disabilities, could tap into 30 per cent of government tenders. And at home, in Canada, Prime Minister Trudeau appointed himself the country’s first federal Minister for Youth with plans to build his “Youth Council” by Oct. 7 and boost interaction between policymakers and young people.

“We’ve seen positive impacts creating spaces where young people can be more engaged in policies and political decision-making processes,” says Bowden. “And making sure there are good economic policies in place that are good for young people but also just good for everyone in terms of closing the gap between the rich and the poor – we have a positive hope for what that can look like.”