By Andrea Valgoi
There is a phrase we often hear when people talk about young people: “They don't want to work anymore.”
It is a simple, almost reassuring statement. Its advantage is that it immediately identifies both the problem and the person responsible.
If businesses struggle to find employees, if certain occupations are rejected, or if a young person leaves a job after only a few months, the explanation is ready: the culture of sacrifice has changed.
Younger generations are supposedly less willing to work hard, less patient and more demanding.
There may be some truth in this. Every generation changes, and so does its relationship with work.
The distinction matters because it forces us to shift our attention away from young people and towards the society we have built around them.
Above all, it challenges us to reconsider the meaning of an old and demanding word: dignity.
For a long time, we identified the problem of work with the absence of employment.
This was understandable. When there is no work, everything else comes second.
But there is another condition, one that is more difficult to describe: a person can have a job and still experience insecurity.
Someone may be employed yet unable to imagine owning a home. They may receive a salary while knowing that it will barely cover their expenses until the end of the month.
They may have a job and still be forced to postpone important life decisions because the future remains too uncertain.
This is where insecurity ceases to be merely a contractual issue and becomes an existential condition.
It is no longer simply a question of how long a contract lasts. It concerns the possibility of making plans.
A dignified job, therefore, is not simply a job that exists. It is work that enables a person to build something beyond the workplace itself.
Behind a salary, after all, there is more than purchasing power.
There is freedom.
The freedom to become independent, take responsibility, make plans, imagine starting a family and face unexpected difficulties without everything falling apart.
When a young person cannot see beyond the next six months, they lose more than economic security: they lose part of their ability to choose.
And a society in which an entire generation struggles to plan its future should question not only its economy, but also its understanding of freedom.
There is another small paradox that many young people know well.
To get a job, you need experience. But to gain experience, someone must first give you the opportunity to work.
Nobody is born competent. Every experienced professional once had a first day when someone else decided to place their trust in them.
Yet we expect young people to arrive already prepared, independent and productive, as though they should possess, at the very beginning, everything that the learning process is supposed to teach them.
Training requires time and patience. It means accepting mistakes, slowing down, explaining things and gradually entrusting people with responsibility.
But this is how a society passes on knowledge.
Training is not a favour that a company grants to a young person. It is one of the ways in which one generation passes on what it has learned to the next.
The question, then, is not only whether young people are ready to work.
It is also whether we are still willing to teach them.
Because work does more than transmit skills. It also conveys an understanding of who we are.
Our first job tells us something about our abilities. It helps us discover qualities we did not know we possessed and confronts us with our limitations.
It teaches us to work alongside people we have not chosen, honour commitments, take responsibility for mistakes and earn trust.
For this reason, the way we welcome a young person into the workplace matters far beyond productivity.
Dignity is not simply a matter of adequate pay, a fair contract, reasonable working hours and workplace safety, although all these are essential conditions.
There is also a less measurable dimension: being recognized.
People need to know that their contribution matters, that they are listened to, that they can be entrusted with responsibility and that they understand why they are doing something, not merely how to do it.
Especially at the beginning, a young person needs someone to place trust in them—trust without which it is difficult to become what they are not yet capable of being.
We can teach young people that their value as human beings depends on what they produce.
Or we can show them that work is important, but does not define the full value of a person.
We can tell them simply to follow instructions, or we can gradually entrust them with responsibility.
Perhaps dignity begins precisely here: with the feeling that we are not merely interchangeable.
Another characteristic often attributed to younger generations should also be understood from this perspective: their search for meaning in work.
Sometimes this is described as naivety.
“Work is work,” people say. “You work to make a living.”
And that is true. Not everyone can turn a passion into a profession.
There are jobs that are demanding, repetitive and necessary.
But searching for meaning does not mean expecting to be happy every Monday morning.
It means asking whether the thousands of hours devoted to work have any connection with the person we want to become.
What am I building?
Who benefits from what I do?
What kinds of relationships does my work create?
How much room does it leave for other aspects of my life?
Perhaps what is new is not that young people have invented these questions, but that they are less willing to postpone them.
And this may be an opportunity, because it also forces businesses to ask themselves a question:
Not only how much does a person produce, but what kind of person does someone become by working here?
Of course, none of this means removing effort and difficulty from work.
Growing and learning a profession require effort. Accepting criticism, starting again after a mistake and meeting deadlines are all part of personal development.
A society that promised young people a life without effort would be doing them a serious disservice.
But there is an enormous difference between teaching the value of effort and using the rhetoric of sacrifice to justify any working condition.
Starting at the bottom makes sense if it leads somewhere.
An apprenticeship makes sense if someone is genuinely teaching.
Flexibility makes sense if it does not mean that only one side must always be flexible.
Availability makes sense if it does not become an expectation that work should occupy every part of life.
Not everything that is difficult is educational, and not everything we ourselves endured must necessarily be endured by those who come after us.
Perhaps one of the most authentic forms of progress consists precisely in wanting the next generation to avoid some of the things that our own generation considered inevitable.
This shifts part of the responsibility towards those who provide and organize work.
A business must certainly create value, remain competitive and achieve results. A company that cannot survive will eventually cease to provide employment.
But a business is not merely an economic organization.
It is also a human community, a place where people spend an enormous part of their lives and learn something about how to live together.
For this reason, every business educates, to some extent.
It educates through the way it distributes power.
Through what it rewards.
Through what it tolerates.
Through the way it responds to mistakes.
Through the behaviour of those in authority when nobody is in a position to challenge them.
A young person entering a company does not merely learn a profession.
They learn a model of society.
If they see the strong crushing the weak, they learn something.
If they see people being humiliated for making mistakes, they learn something.
If they see that promises are not kept, they learn something.
But they also learn something when they see a manager taking responsibility for a mistake.
When someone devotes time to them without expecting an immediate benefit.
When merit is recognized.
When a person is respected even at a moment when they are less useful.
This is why work can be regarded as an extraordinary school of civic responsibility.
And perhaps this is precisely where the question of work meets the question of peace.
When we hear the word peace, we almost inevitably think of war.
Yet peace begins much earlier.
It begins with the quality of the relationships we build every day.
A peaceful society is not simply a society in which there is no fighting.
It is a society in which people feel that they have dignity, a voice and opportunities.
A society in which conflict does not erase recognition of the other person.
Frustration, exclusion, humiliation and the feeling that the future always belongs to someone else do not necessarily produce violence.
But they certainly do not produce social cohesion.
From this perspective, work occupies a particular position.
It is one of the few places where people of different ages, cultures, personalities, educational backgrounds and social conditions are called upon every day to build something together.
It is one of the places where we experience, in concrete terms, power and dependence, conflict and cooperation, authority and responsibility.
For this reason, a workplace can either build peace or undermine it.
It builds peace when it recognizes dignity before usefulness.
When conflict does not turn into contempt.
When competition does not eliminate solidarity.
When those with experience use it not to create distance, but to reduce it.
When those in positions of responsibility understand that guiding someone does not simply mean obtaining something from them, but also contributing to the person they will become.
Perhaps this is precisely what we risk losing when we reduce the debate about young people to their supposed unwillingness to work.
We will certainly continue to expect a great deal from young people, and rightly so.
We must ask them for commitment, responsibility, curiosity and a willingness to learn.
We must explain that no job is always rewarding, that competence takes time to develop and that some results come only after years.
But it would be unfair if the conversation ended there.
Because there is an equally demanding question that must be addressed to those who are already part of the working world:
What are we prepared to offer those who come after us?
A salary, or the possibility of building a life?
A task to perform, or a profession to learn?
A position to occupy, or a responsibility to earn?
Do we demand experience, or are we willing to help create it?
Do we expect trust, or do we know how to give it?
We ask young people to be patient, but do we still have the patience to teach?
Perhaps a genuine agreement between generations should begin here.
Not with the idea that adults must make everything easy for young people.
Nor with the opposite idea that young people must prove their worth by enduring everything that previous generations endured.
It should be a simpler agreement and, precisely for that reason, a more demanding one.
We pass on what we have learned; you try to take it further.
We ask you to be responsible; you ask us to be consistent.
We teach you how to work; you remind us why we work.
Perhaps the dignity of work is born precisely from this exchange.
And perhaps peace is born in the same way: when one generation no longer sees the next as a threat, a problem to be solved or a disappointment compared with what came before, but as someone to whom part of the future can be entrusted.
Because, ultimately, the task of one generation should not be to convince the next to become exactly like itself.
It should be to give the next generation the opportunity to go a little further.
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