Sorry Kemi, why should a young person like me take a job I’m overqualified for?

People have been slagging off the ‘workshy’ younger generation for a thousand years writes Amelia Jacobs, so perhaps the Tory leader - the latest to do so - might do us all a favour by finding ways to make our degrees pay in an entry jobs market compromised by AI

Kemi Badenoch’s most recent divisive notion posits that young people reject jobs they feel are “beneath them”. To that, I’d like to ask this: why is it once again falling on my generation to compromise on their ambition?

Badenoch has taken the thousand-year-old position of calling the young lazy. Aristotle went for “high-minded”, Seneca opted for “idle”. An 1884 edition of The Times went for the slightly more verbose “the rising generation grows soft… they will not endure labour as their fathers did”. I’m sure all probably received a response from a truculent 25-year-old freelancer.

Now, before I say anything else, I’d like to highlight that I’ve often advocated for a conscription-esque policy that says all people should do at least one hospitality, retail or otherwise customer-facing role. Not quite for reasons Badenoch suggests, but rather to know exactly how it feels to be shouted at over tepid soup. Whilst Badenoch might once have worked at McDonald's, her CV also now contains Associate Director at Coutts and Digital Editor of The Spectator – hardly a mouthpiece of the proletariat.

Badenoch said back in 2024 that she “became working class” with the job at Maccies. Firstly, that is not how it works, and secondly, the minute she got a degree, she high-tailed out of there quicker than you can say “two Big Macs, please”. You can’t cherry-pick examples from your own life and say it gives you the authority to tell others how to live theirs, even if you are the leader of the opposition.

I ask, nay, beg, the Badenoch to put herself in the position of young people straight out of university. They are not saying that jobs are “beneath” them; they’re just desperate to feel as though the three-year debt they’ve accrued won’t be a complete waste.

‘I ask, nay, beg, the Badenoch to put herself in the position of young people straight out of university, desperate to feel as though the three-year debt they’ve accrued won’t be a complete waste’ (House of Commons/UK Parliament/PA Wire)

Language is important and so linguistically positing that we’re a generation with a big superiority problem makes it a lot easier to justify benefit cuts than addressing the real problem. Entry-level jobs are under serious threat from AI. A lot of young people can’t even get their foot in the door. Since late 2022, we’ve seen a drop of around 30-33 per cent in job postings and an eight per cent decline in graduate hiring in the last year alone.

Finding work is tricky not only due to the contracting job market but in employers who find Gen Z workplace behaviours off-putting. Journalists and politicians alike gleefully besmirch “woke” requests for mental health days and work-life balance and then wonder why graduate employment rates are dropping. Fuelling culture wars adds to the problem.

Debates about young people “turning down jobs” overlook the fact that society itself created the idea that some work is “beneath” certain people. What looks like entitlement is often self-preservation. Badenoch is working through outdated hierarchies that no longer match today’s labour market, where a degree is less differentiating and low-wage jobs rarely provide stability.

The real issue isn’t that young people think they’re “too good” for certain jobs, but that society undervalues essential work and clings to contradictory expectations about what counts as respectable labour. I did almost a year of “big girl” job hunting, £60,000 of student debt glinting Damoclean above my head, and supported myself by working in a cafe. I didn’t choose to leave because I thought I was “above’ it, I just wanted the chance to apply the education I put myself so in the red for more directly.

So, Kemi: perhaps it’s time to look for solutions, rather than simply taking cheap swipes at those who are banging at the door.