Bors Blog
Millenials Aren’t Lazy: They’re Fucked
This is a chapter from my new book, Life Begins At Incorporation, which I am releasing in light of TIME’s trolling ass cover story on lazy, entitled Millenials. I don’t live with my parents and will not “save us all.”
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“How come all we do is talk about money?” — Richie Rich
The Great Recession officially ended in 2009. How’s everybody doing? Did you need help uncorking the champagne?
Unless you are a one-percenter who followed an errant link on Twitter, you probably aren’t ordering Cristal for the table.
Our economy has been slowly gaining ground since we bottomed out in the 2008 job-pocalypse. That oughta be good for people, right? But, turns out 121 percent of income gains made in the recovery went to the top one percent of the country’s earners. I’m not sure how you can capture more than 100% of something. It sounds kind of greedy to me. An economist at Berkeley got to that number when figuring in the fact that incomes for most everyone else have dropped. Wages are down, household incomes are down, but don’t worry, these are the job creators we’re talking about. If you don’t have an employment scenario figured out just yet, wait a few minutes. I’m sure some rich guy needs someone to give his shoe-shine 121 percent of their effort.
Jobs, jobs, jobs! They’re everywhere. The problem with all this job-creation is the new jobs are all worse than our previous jobs, which, to be honest weren’t all that rad in the first place. Some jobs, they don’t even pay money, which is still a thing you need some of to live.
My mother spent the recession in multiple jobs, the most recent of which paid federal minimum wage. $7.25, baby! This is the reason why, when I hear well-paid pundits say that no one except high school kids work for minimum wage, I want to fly to their home, poop on their doorstep, and set it on fire.
Stories like my mom’s are the new normal. Barely scraping by and taking what you can get is the new normal. Having 500 people show up to apply for jobs at Walmart, who pursues a strategy of paying people such low wages that they qualify for government assistance, that’s the new normal. Let Uncle Sam pick up the check!
If the recession taught me anything, it was how to get my dislocated shoulder back in its socket without going to the hospital. (I couldn’t afford the hospital bill, so if you ever need a makeshift sling out of a flannel shirt, look no further.) But what that taught me was how to be scrappy and resourceful in the face of things that suck. I would have traded that life lesson for a secure career with benefits, but I’m trying to squeeze something positive out this mess.
Millennials, or Gen Y, or whatever magazines are calling the youngins these days, we’re the ones getting the brunt of it in this downturn.
Maligned as a bunch of shiftless, tech-addled children raised to think they’d all get trophies, Millennials are trying to build careers out of the ruins of a job market. Amid a group that’s supposed to be a bunch of entitled kids, all I see around me are young people juggling multiple jobs and unpaid internships while trying to blot their (trigger warning!) student debt from their minds.
Unpaid internships are a particular flaming hoop everyone has to jump through now to land even the most mundane gig. Somewhere along the line this practice went from offering a short, genuinely helpful experience to an experiment in the outer reaches of legal exploitation.
I know people who have worked two years without pay to land a salaried gig or who float from internship to internship while bartending, waiting for something to open up in the field in which they hold a degree.
As the years drag on, the more well-off survive the wage attrition. They are the only ones who can afford working for free.
It might not be as horrendous if the young and paycheckless were graduating with degrees from a public system that leaves students with minimal tuition bills. (Hello, Canada!) As it stands now, student debt has reached a staggering one trillion dollars. One TRILLION dollars! For learning things in schools and there are no good jobs and oh my god I stopped to pour myself a drink since I began typing this sentence.
Let’s review: we have lost a decade of economic activity. There are few stable jobs. The cost of education is so high there literally oughta be a law charging for-profit colleges with extortion. It is in this bleak landscape that people are asked to toil away their twenties in underpaid and unpaid positions that used to provide people a living.
Of course, if you’re rich, there’s a separate system. Arianna Huffington has made a name pursuing a debased work-for-free online media model at The Huffington Post. She eventually started auctioning off unpaid internships to the highest bidder–one went for $13,000. “Jumpstart your career in the blogosphere,” the listing read. Hey, she’s got what people want: a tiny pebble of a stepping-stone to an actual career.
That’s what happens when human work is devalued to zero cents an hour and people are willing to endlessly chase the carrot. Exploiters turn their exploiting up to 11.
When I was traveling around Afghanistan writing cartoons about the people I met, an editor at The Huffington Post emailed me about publishing my work on their site. They said I would receive “very prominent placement” and a “link back” to my website. No pay, of course, but a link. Exposure. The currency of the web economy is attention.
I gave ‘em a polite “nope.”
The HuffPo business model is one that works for exactly one person. When Arianna later merged with AOL for a cool $315 million, her unpaid contributors felt duped. There’s your 121 percent of economic gains right there.
You’re Fired
How serious is the Air Forces sexual assault epidemic? Yesterday, police in northern Virginia arrested the Air Forces chief of sexual-assault prevention for sexual assault.
Life Begins At Incorporation Tour Dates
Here are some tour dates for the coming week. After this I’m headed home before VanCAF at the end of the month. There will be sporadic touring throughout the summer and fall. I’m lining up some west coast dates and will be at CAKE and SPX, as well as hitting up DC, New York, and Boston before the year’s end.
May 7 – Canton, OH
Buzzbin Art & Music, 4-6:30pm
Facebook event
May 9 – Cleveland, OH
Visible Voice Books, 6-8pm
Facebook event
May 10 – Toronto
The Comic Book Lounge, 7-10pm
Facebook event
May 11-12 – TCAF
Sat. 9-5, Sun.11-5
tcaf.com
May 14 – Columbia, SC
Richland Library, 7-8:30pm
Facebook event
NSFW Work
I have some more work in the latest print edition of NSFWCorp, this time a giant two page center spread for “Alex Jones: Vampire Hunter.” I also did the art for this piece, a full page version of which appears in the magazine. NSFW is putting out some solid stuff and it’s only available to subscribers. I endorse!
Podcasts
I’m on the new Bitch Media Popaganda podcast, themed around “Words We Hate.” I talk about words I hate as well as political language choices in my comics.
While at the Stumptown Comics Fest I took part in a panel on being a freelancer with Katie Lane, Erika Moen, and Natalie Nourigat. It’s basically advice for those aspiring to leave their jobs and enter a world with no health care, constant deadlinesand fun! You can listen here.
Pittsburgh – Tonight!
I’ll be signing copies of my book this evening at the Toonseum in Pittsburgh from 5-7 pm. Stop by and say hi! (The new book is also available at Phantom Of The Attic, if you frequent that store.)
The Reviews Are In!
Bors brings his skill and expertise of narrative cartooning to the editorial world: like a well-honed anecdote or a stand-ups routine, Borss excellent comic timing gives his cartoons punch lines that kick in the gut as well as the funny bone… beautifully designed and persuasively incendiary.
This guy:
@mattborsYour book is the only book I’ve read 100% in one sitting; was spinning on hammock chair while reading and puked; still loved it!
Ryan Page (@rynpg) May 1, 2013
Columbus, OH signing this Friday
I’ll be at 83 Gallery in Columbus, OH, this Friday talking political cartoons and signing copies of Life Begins At Incorporation as part of “‘Smart Ass,’ an exhibition of satire, political disorientation, pop culture cesspools, and intellectual stimulation.”
The event is from 7-11pm at 476 S Front St. Come see me!
Stumptown
Portland: come see me this weekend at the Stumptown Comics Fest. I’ll be tabling at A05 with my new book!
Books!
Life Begins At Incorporation is here and the books look great.
2500 books, to be precise. They showed up at my storage space on Friday and today Operation: Mail Seven Hundred Goddamn Books is currently underway in my living room. Every copy to Kickstarter backers should be in the mail by Thursday, with pre-orders following shortly after that. Digital editions will be made available soon.
While you’re waiting for your copy of this fine publication, if you would like to point anyone to where they too can purchase this exciting new book, it is available right here on my website and will soon be able to get got at Powells, Amazon, and Comixology. Whispers trailing through teetering pillars of padded mailers throughout my apartment speak of wider distribution in the future.
Oh, and I have a stamp.
Barnacles
Jack Ohman ponders the intersection of journalism and editorial cartooning.
Like many Americans last night, I was up until about 3:00 AM watching the gripping coverage of the chase of the Boston Marathon bomber, who, at this writing, has been in custody about fifteen minutes. He was hiding in a boat. I stayed up to watch this not so much as a voyeuristic exercise, but because, in fact, I am a journalist of sorts.
What this job requires, like most other jobs, is a lot of research and reading time, and the actual execution of the cartoon is almost ancillary, a relief from the more stressful aspect of paying attention to the news in order to glean a phrase or image that I can turn into a cartoon.
