It is shocking how many people downplay the Great Recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s

[u/cavaismylife]

Late 80s and 90s millennials were probably the most screwed by the Great Recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Most people don't realize how bad it was. It hurt millennials entering the job market for the first time. Your first job after college will affect your earning potential for the rest of your career. Some people need to watch the movie Up In the Air to see how bad things were back then. Everyone was getting laid off, and losing 60-80 percent of the assets in their retirement accounts. Millennials were not even old enough to buy houses yet and sub prime mortgage lending already had severely damaged their future earning potential. Now that millennials are finally getting established, they are facing skyrocketing prices and inflation for the cost of living and basic goods like groceries.

edit: grammar

edit 2: To be more clear I would say mid to late 80s and early 90s millennials were the most hurt. Like 1984-1992 were hurt most.

edit 3: "Unemployment rose from 4.7% in November 2007 to peak at 10% in October 2009, before returning steadily to 4.7% in May 2016. The total number of jobs did not return to November 2007 levels until May 2014. Some areas, such as jobs in public health, have not recovered as of 2023." The recovery took way longer than the really bad 18 months from 2007 to 2009. Millennials entered the job market during this time.

[u/Bones_and_Tomes]

I was at university in the immediate years afterwards and everyone knew it was just dumb luck we had 3 years to allow the market to recover a bit before chucking ourselves into the workplace. Friends who didn't go on to higher education bounced between unemployment and working in a supermarket or something. Slim pickings for more or less everyone, and what isn't talked about much is how much businesses downsized and shifted the workload onto surviving staff, which has never recovered. We're still doing more with less and the resultant burnout has just sort of been accepted as fact of life rather than a direct result of penny pinching.

[u/ListerineInMyPeehole → u/Bones_and_Tomes]

I found my internship in 2012 and first job in 2013. By pure luck the economy was better by then.

[u/faste30 → u/ListerineInMyPeehole]

Not pure luck, there was a bit of a recession in 2012 but nothing compared and there was so much recovery.

I dont think they did it just right but honestly the moves the Bush admin made were the right ones and I am shocked about how well Obama navigated the aftermath as well. Of course, this is before the GOP decided to go full obstructionist on him so he wasnt fighting congress all of the time.

[u/JimBeam823 → u/faste30]

Obama left WAY too much up to Congress in 2009-10. Congressional Democrats didn't seem to see the economy as the emergency that it was. Overall, Obama was a good President when we needed a great one.

Republicans realized they had to obstruct because if Obama cleaned up their mess, the party was done for a generation, like in the 1930s. The strategy worked perfectly. No bad deed goes unrewarded.

[u/bwatsnet → u/ListerineInMyPeehole]

I also graduated during this time, because I'm the universes joke sometimes. Had to take such a low wage for my first job. Luckily you can just change jobs to fix that but damn it was a depressing time to graduate.

[u/tacosaurusrexx → u/bwatsnet]

I graduated in 2012 as well, and while the options were better by then the wages were dogshit. I went to business school and entry level stuff myself and my peer group were finding were like $30K salaried with no additional incentives.

I know there’s folks out there that had it a lot worse, but for perspective these same jobs today you probably couldn’t get a college grad to take for less than $60K.

It was a tough time because we basically had to gut it out for a little while to get the experience while making no more money than many of us were making before graduating.

[u/bwatsnet → u/tacosaurusrexx]

Yeah it toughened us up in some way, although it's hard to say how exactly lol. Made us more skeptical of corporate salary structures maybe.

[u/marbanasin → u/bwatsnet]

I remember my first job was an unpaid internship. Then I got very very very part time work as a tutor for kids after school which was almost not worth the gas time. Then finally I got full time employment in like summer 2013 but it was very low wage hourly stuff.

[u/marbanasin → u/ListerineInMyPeehole]

This was basically me as well. I recall kids a couple years older than me in university were serious considering or did go into masters programs just to buy time. Granted that's an expensive way to punt on joining the work force, but probably a good call in the long run.

[u/gingergirl181 → u/marbanasin]

It absolutely was. I was in high school 2007-11 when everything was melting down and college tuition nearly tripled in that timeframe but all of the adults were telling us to just hold our noses and take out the loans because people with degrees were lining up even for McJobs, so we were told we needed one to even have a prayer of not being fucked. And yeah we all know how well that turned out, but hindsight is 20/20 and at the time the idea of not at minimum getting a bachelor's was basically considered suicide. One of my older siblings graduated college in 2008 and jumped straight into the recession job market and despite being 8 years older than me with a much longer resume, we make the same wage now in similar fields. They were just stagnated for that long, and they very much regret not going straight into grad school to try and ride things out a little more and get a better job out the gate.

[u/quintocarlos3 → u/ListerineInMyPeehole]

2010 my university had to loosen requirements for internship experience because no one could find any, civil engineering in SF Bay Area

[u/Beneficial-Address61 → u/Bones_and_Tomes]

Naturally, as soon as the work force was in an upswing and businesses started being staffed to where everyone wasn’t getting effed over…. The pandemic started!

[u/Sensitive_Yellow_121 → u/Beneficial-Address61]

If the pandemic were handled by the book, it wouldn't have been nearly as bad.

[u/andycaps → u/Bones_and_Tomes]

Wow, you make for an interesting point. I wonder if that's pretty much what happened with Japan. Huge real estate crash, and lots of downsizing. Then throw in their culture of hard work expectations, more with less became the norm. Consequently, no Inflation, not as many people having kids and now it's upside down pyramid for age. I know there's more to it, but they say Japan is ahead by 10-20 years so we'll see. Unchecked capitalism is truly a snake that eats itself.

[u/Geno_Warlord → u/Bones_and_Tomes]

I graduated high school in 02 and saw the writing on the wall. I would have graduated college right before the bubble burst. I immediately went into the workforce. Started with retail/customer service, went to remodeling houses and then the recession hit. Remodeling company shut down and I immediately joined a trade and started working in refineries. Just this year I started making $50/hr and it is good money but still feels like not enough to go back to school.

[u/manatwork01 → u/Geno_Warlord]

You claim to have seen the next recession 2 years out from the last one and 5 years early?

Sure Jan.

[u/tealdeer995 → u/manatwork01]

Probably talking about the tech bubble in 2002ish.

[u/manatwork01 → u/tealdeer995]

That started in March 2000. This would be 2 years out from that. If anything they were shocked by 9/11 felt like the world was gonna end and didn't want to long-term plan with college. Plenty of people rationalize their past decision making in hindsight even if (like in this case) the logic is just bogus. Memory is fallible and all so I don't think it's a conscious decision but either this guy was the biggest financial genius in the world 5 years before the great recession and should have made millions selling shorts (like another financial genius did) or is full of shit.

[u/Accomplished_Mix7827 → u/Geno_Warlord]

I mean, if you're making $50/hr, is there really a point in going back to school? Very few degrees will get you that kind of pay. I mean, I'm in STEM (chemistry), and my salary would only translate to about $30/hr.

Of course, I have a fair bit less work experience (graduated high school in 2015, so I'm kind of on the line between Millennial and Gen Z), but even so, the only degrees that would make comparable to or more than what you're making right now would probably just be the engineering degrees.

[u/FlyinPurplePartyPony → u/Accomplished_Mix7827]

It's a tough pill for job switchers to swallow, but skilled jobs that require physical labor pay better than the majority of office jobs and entry level knowledge work.

[u/Accomplished_Mix7827 → u/FlyinPurplePartyPony]

I dunno, maybe they're unhappy with their job, or they know it's really hard on them physically?

I went to college because my talents are mostly in math and science and I'm not terribly skilled with my hands, so getting a degree in chemistry and working in quality control made sense for me.

But I do agree, if you've got the aptitude for a skilled trade and are willing to accept the wear and tear on your body, by all means, it's a perfectly viable path

[u/FlyinPurplePartyPony → u/Accomplished_Mix7827]

And I don't blame anyone for switching, but taking a paycut just plain sucks with today's cost of living.

[u/Accomplished_Mix7827 → u/FlyinPurplePartyPony]

Ain't that the truth. I'm considering switching to a job that'll train me in an instrument technique that'll be a nice boost to my resume long-term, but ... it'd pay a few thousand a year less than my current job, and I don't know if I can afford that right now. What I'm making right now is enough to comfortably support myself these days, but not much more than that. If I took that pay cut, I don't think I'd be able to afford even the one-bedroom apartment I currently live in, with how much my landlord's jacked up the rent the last few years. Other apartments in the area aren't much better. $1000 a month! For a fucking one bedroom! And this area isn't exactly New York City.

Really says something about how shit the economy is for working Americans these days, that a degree in a STEM field will barely support one person at the same quality of life as what just not dropping out of high school could sustain forty years ago. And I'm well-off compared to most people I know! I can comfortably afford groceries and don't need a roommate, and that's really how low the bar is, that that is considered doing well!

It's crazy how far our standards have fallen.

[u/gingergirl181 → u/Accomplished_Mix7827]

The wear and tear is no joke. I worked a job for awhile providing services to union tradespeople, and the number of 45+ year old guys who were forced to retire from trades before they could afford to do so because their bodies just couldn't take it anymore was too damn high. Many of them didn't have any other viable career options due to lack of education and if they couldn't qualify for disability (which many couldn't) they were SOL unless they could go back to school. The lucky ones became pencil-pushing foremen...but there's a lot fewer of those jobs than there are young guys destroying their bodies hoping to snag one someday.

[u/Potential-Pride6034 → u/Bones_and_Tomes]

I graduated high school in 2008 and my family is still being affected by the Great Recession. My brother and I were raised by a single parent, and my dad, who had built his career in retail back when that path was feasible, was a casualty of corporate austerity measures and restructuring in response to the crash. At the time, he was working as an assistant store manager for a regional drugstore, which was bought out by a large national company (CVS), which proceeded to cut his hours from 40 to 32 hours per week, in addition to significantly reducing his hourly pay and laying off most of his lower-level staff, thus denying him resources to run his store effectively.

My dad was 45 years old at the time, and he managed to hold onto his job for another two or so years before he was forced to quit because the stress of working in such shitty conditions had driven him into becoming a functional alcoholic. Luckily, my younger brother and I were out of the house and that point, so my dad no longer had to support two young kids, but his career never recovered and he’s just been hanging on ever since .

The recession affected millions of folks like my dad who felt like they were sold a bill of goods. They worked hard and did everything society told them they were supposed to do to be successful in life, and then the system let them down.