Is Gen-Z 'Entitled'? Why Short-Term Work Culture Demands Upfront Pay

What is entitlement? What does it mean to be entitled today, and five, ten or 50 years in the future? The short-termism that proliferates across many industries and workplaces makes it difficult to plan when governing paradigms shift according to quarterly reports or the undefined demands of disengaged shareholders.

This tactic rather than a visionary, or at least promissory, strategy makes it hard for those of us entering the workforce - though many Gen-Z are not yet even adults - to desire anything less than our financial compensation. Simply, we want to be paid up front and then we will show you what we can do. We grew up amid rising Islamophobia, the rise of multi-polar middle powers like the UAE and its peers, and finally a pandemic right as the first wave of us were finishing school and going after our dream jobs and careers.

These factors bring us to the present, and the accusation of entitlement I hope to challenge.

In my experience, it was developing an affinity for the meritocracy of school and thriving in that system while developing, as Liam Neeson in Taken would say, a particular set of skills. Data shows this has been business, STEM and technical degrees, especially in small countries like the UAE where institutions developed in parallel. Even as fossil fuels are phased out, the engineers and technical experts will still have reliable employment because there has been leadership, which argues that the oil won't last, whether as a product or at all, and we should plan for ten, 50 and 100 years down the line.

Bringing this idea back to solid ground, there's this prevailing lack of that faith from prospective employers. I've been a contractor in some capacity most of my professional life and it has made me a less caring and interested person when it comes to my managers and employers, because I don't even know if I'll be there in a month's time.

It is something we all experience, but professionally as the paradigm shifted it is very much the case that bad companies and employers don't keep up. Those little laurels that our parents and grandparents might have grown up with, dinner with the boss, gold watch after ten years, forget about being able to take paid time off.

Is this a safe space? If I can rant for a second, most of our parents are Gen-X in the corporate world and still going through this stuff, and having to weather the shifts despite the fact that they came up believing in trust, merit and hard work, when it is those qualities that, in the eyes of many, are wasteful when you could be more entrepreneurial, mercenary or simply selfish.

The response has gone hand-in-hand with Gen-Z broadly shifting away from digital when it comes to relationships and community - the pandemic taught us that work can be online, it doesn't need an office and just people and an AV uplink, but everything else is about trust and the ability to look someone in the eye. Managers, employers, and executives retreated behind their computer screens, dismissed everything as“just business”, and washed their hands of any responsibility to be loyal in return.

It is human nature that we want to care about people, remember things about them and show off. Just the same, we want to be cared about - and one cannot exist without the other. So when people say I'm entitled for wanting a certain kind of job to do a certain kind of work, I ask: to what end would I do the good work? Not me, but the collective we, who was taught one thing and is experiencing another.

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