Shafting the young.

Re: "Root of the labour crisis: We lied to millennials and Gen Z when we said they could be anything," Comment, May 24.

In 1981, one year before the first millennials were born, CEO pay was about 30 times that of the average worker. By 2000, CEO pay in the U.S. was 386 times the average worker's. Today, in Canada, it is 243 times as much, an all-time high.

There are specific reasons for this, which we will get into below, but first it must be said that the Comment in question, rather than suggesting that CEOs part with a smidgen of the trillions of dollars they have handed themselves since 1981 at workers' expense, suggests that millennials and Gen Z'ers get a job washing dishes.

The fact is, young people today, as countless aspiring artists, thinkers, and doers have for 100 years, do take jobs washing dishes, waiting tables, driving Ubers, and working in warehouses. These jobs used to pay enough money to live in a cheap apartment and devote untold hours of effort to honing one's craft. Now one must work three junk jobs or wind up living on the street.

Leaving aside that affordable apartments are a distant memory, a ruthless financial predator by the name of Jack Welsh became CEO of GE in 1981. By the time he retired in 2001, not only had he thoroughly destroyed the storied manufacturing company GE had once been, but his management style, which became the rage and still is among a psychopathic business class known as neoliberals, had destroyed entire regional economies that before the Jack Welsh years enjoyed widespread prosperity and wholesome community life.

For an informed history of how multinational corporations ruined the prospects of young workers starting in 1981, pick up a copy of The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America – and How to Undo His Legacy, by David Gelles. It describes in detail how downsizing, rightsizing, and offshoring to exploit ruthlessly low-paid workers half a world away, and most importantly how the financialization of corporations, transformed the most efficient wealth-creation engine in history into the most dramatic episode of plunder the world economy has ever seen.

Stock buybacks, mergers and acquisitions, selling off corporations' assets, loading them up with debt and abandoning them to creditors fighting to salvage something fungible from their remnants replaced making products and performing useful work.

On-the-job training and investment in educating young workers for jobs no longer done onshore dried up, and education itself became a profit center for purveyors of debt, the gift of a so-called "financial services" sector to itself that never stops giving and drives young people into poverty for the temerity of seeking an education.

Government stopped investing in healthcare and other socially necessary work, subsidizing multinational extractors of resource rent and monopoly rents instead. Blaming young people who had no hand in all this for the predicament this banditry created is a stunningly insulting exercise in victim blaming.

There are many reasons why young and old workers alike want nothing to do with the ruthless dehumanization that passes for management in today's corporate C-Suites, not the least of which is the patronizing condescension dripping from smug, belittling voices like the one expressed in the Comment referenced above.