Gen Z is Getting Fired — But Europe’s Job Crisis Runs Deeper

Euroweekly News ^ | 18 May 2025 | Tarek Salame

[nickcarraway]

Across Europe, the job market has been shifting, leading to an uncomfortable situation for the younger generation. Gen Z workers born between 1997 and 2012 enter jobs faster than any cohort before them, but they leave them faster and often not by choice. A recent study reveals that Gen Z employees are terminated at noticeably higher rates than older generations. However, a deeper and more systemic issue is breaking down between generations, expectations, and what is actually termed “professional” in 2025. And Europe is struggling with inflation, stagnant wages, and a post-pandemic reckoning that may be the perfect storm for this workplace mismatch brewing at the seams.

The numbers do not lie. A 2024 report by LinkedIn’s Workplace Insights shows that Gen Z workers are switching their jobs at a rate 134% higher than it was pre-pandemic. While you can ascertain that some are voluntary decisions for better pay and remote perks, another story is underneath. In a 2023 survey by ResumeBuilder, 1 in 8 managers admitted to firing Gen Z more frequently than other age groups. They cite communications, resistance to feedback, and lack of preparation for professional environments as the reasons for terminations.

In Spain, the European Commission’s youth employment statistics show that youth unemployment has dropped to 27%, which was 40% in the last decade, but job stability has not followed. Contracts have become shorter, firings are quicker due to more extended probationary periods, and even wages stay relatively low. In Germany and France, similar patterns have emerged in quick-in and quick-out employment cycles in the hospitality, retail, and even tech sectors. So what is happening? Is this a Gen Z issue or a growing workplace culture problem that is catching up to a generational shift?

Is Gen Z to blame? Let us clear one thing straight away: Gen Z is not allergic to hard work. If anything, they are more vocal than the previous generation regarding burnout, fairness, and purpose, which should have been implemented during the job market in the 2008 crash. On top of all that, the rising inflation, rents, and lifestyle are at an all-time high, so comparing the previous generation to this one is severely understated.

Take Europe’s major cities—Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. In 2006, a person earning €30,000 a year could reasonably expect to spend 20%- 25% of their income on rent, so in many cases, one week’s salary covered an entire month’s rent. And this leaves enough room for holidays, savings, and yes, even a social life.

Fast-forward to 2025. That €30,000 a year now barely scratches the surface of independent living. Rent nowadays will eat up 40%- 60% of income in many urban centres. Transport, groceries, and the infamous utilities were all affected by the pandemic-era inflation, along with the supply chain volatility that has outpaced wages. Essential things for people, such as healthcare and dental visits, are treated more as luxuries than rights.

In Spain, the average rent in cities like Barcelona or Madrid has surged over 70% since 2015. Meanwhile, entry-level salaries within sales, marketing, and education have stayed low, hovering between €18,000 and €26,000 gross. Another example is in the Netherlands, where students graduate with high debt and enter a market where landlords demand €1,200 for a studio and coffee costs €4.

So, when Gen Z sets certain boundaries, asks for remote options, or leaves jobs due to lower salaries because they are unable to accommodate the rent. It is not an entitlement that is in question, but economics. You cannot be quiet through a housing crisis, and healthcare and savings are eating away at your pay your rent, which takes away from your home pay.

For the older generations that were raised on stability, pensions, contracts, and affordable mortgages, it can be easy to view Gen Z’s current frustrations as dramatic gravity. But for the generation, it is more about survival dressed as professionalism.

Professionalism made vague The term “professionalism” has lost its gold standard, and what current version are we using? Many Gen Z workers have reported numerous negative feedback for actions that do not impact performance, such as informal language, quietness in meetings, dressing casually for Zoom, or questioning outdated systems (which companies nowadays support change). Ironic, is it not?

A Eurofound 2023 study focused on youth engagement and workplace satisfaction, and a staggering 40% of respondents within Southern Europe said that they felt micromanaged and misunderstood. This is not rebellion, but a generational reboot of what work is meant to be.

Younger workers are entering jobs in the wake of various overlapping crises: economic fatigue, mental health, climate change, and digital trust. For them, work is not their identity; it is transactional and often precarious. So yes, clarity is demanded, feedback is required, and meaning assured.

Europe’s problem is structural. Now let us zoom out a bit, in Europe, the economic recovery efforts post-COVID promised a greener, fairer future with a more digital transition, funds, subsidies, and mobility schemes. But as you know, lived reality shows an uneven truth:

Germany has a skill mismatch between ageing industries and young job seekers. Spain has the highest unemployment rate in the EU. France is battling protests over pensions while young workers fear they have none. The Netherlands has high burnout levels among people under 30, citing heavy workloads in overstretched sectors. So what now? Maybe we can begin to shift the issue from Gen Z to ask what if managers were trained in communication rather than compliance? Professionalism to be redefined to be collaboratively and not inherited? Companies embrace mentorship, and not a corporate cliche?

And more importantly, what if we measure success not by retention but by alignment? To align the employees with their employers? Because if they are getting fired more, tell us that the system is outdated, and the saying goes as follows: “This was never built for us”.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Society
KEYWORDS: employment; europe; genz; livingwage; minimumwage; workforce

[dfwgator]

The EU, with the ability for people to cross borders to work, is a huge factor.

[9YearLurker]

What? Take in millions of illegals and the demand for housing goes up? You don’t say!

[Tell It Right]

This article seems written as though it's intentionally making an apples to oranges comparison in order to make a point. It 1) compares housing costs differences between 2006 and 2025 without adjusting income for inflation, and 2) the 2025 housing cost is "urban" costs, something not done for 2006.

In 2006, a person earning €30,000 a year could reasonably expect to spend 20%- 25% of their income on rent, so in many cases, one week’s salary covered an entire month’s rent. And this leaves enough room for holidays, savings, and yes, even a social life. Fast-forward to 2025. That €30,000 a year now barely scratches the surface of independent living. Rent nowadays will eat up 40%- 60% of income in many urban centres

[RainMan]

Intellectual dishonesty. Citing income of $30K in 2006 and what it could buy, then saying you can’t live on that in 2025. Of course you cant. Who is paying Gen Z $30K/year. Even here in the US, $30K is less than minimum wage for a FT employee. Europe has experienced approx 60% cumulative inflation since 2006.

[ClearCase_guy]

Gen Z is next in line. No other options.
Gen Z was created by previous generations. The Internet. Smart Phones. Progressives (Obama). COVID. The 22-year-olds didn’t build all of that. They got stuck with all of that.

The world will need to make adjustments. If Gen Z is damaged goods, they are not going to become undamaged.

[BDParrish]

Are you saying that people in the city of Madrid do make enough to have a social life? I don’t see it. The author’s point is youngsters are not gonna keep working when they cannot live on what they make.

Freegards Tell It Right!
BrianD

[Tell It Right]

Are you saying that people in the city of Madrid do make enough to have a social life? I don’t see it.

I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is, if you (or the author) want to make a point and you want to give numbers, fine. But the numbers have to make logical sense and not be manipulative or I tune out.

[gitmo]

Even here in the US, $30K is less than minimum wage for a FT employee.

Minimum Wage in my state of North Carolina is $7.25 / hour. If you work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, that comes to $15,080.

[ClearCase_guy]

Yup. It has often been observed that minimum wage jobs are crap jobs. Traditionally, good for High School students, or something. No one buys a house or raises a family on a minimum wage job. It’s a temporary stage in life, and then you move on and make more money as you get experience.

The problem is that a lot of jobs — jobs that require a college degree — don’t pay a whole lot more than minimum wage. And they are often dead-end jobs. Get in at the ground floor and stay there. You end up with young adults with “real” jobs who cannot afford rent or a social life. And there is no way to move up from that. That’s it. That’s your life.

Who wants to live that way? Although the details are different, it’s a little like going back to 1840 and the textile mills or the mines — 16 hour days, 6 days a week, for almost no money, and if you get hurt, you can die in an alley. That’s the sort of stuff that created Karl Marx and the old idea that capitalism is bad and communism is good.

Well, the details today are certainly different, but young people sense a deep unfairness in the world around them. And they start thinking that capitalism is bad and communism is good. The solution, I think, is to find a way to create genuine opportunity for young adults so that they can work and live decent lives. So far, the world isn’t doing a good job of that. And AI is coming fast. That’s not going to help.

[rxh4n1]

“On top of all that, the rising inflation, rents, and lifestyle are at an all-time high, so comparing the previous generation to this one is severely understated.”

I guess these people weren’t around in the ‘70s, when I was starting out.

[crusher2013]

Excellent post and explanation.

Lots of older people, especially on this site have no idea how the ground has shifted under working people, especially young people.

They want to blame them for the problem, saying they just don’t work hard or smart enough. In some cases that is true.

But what is also true is that if you make it very difficult to succeed, many people will just give up and start listening to people like Bernie or AOC.

[Myrddin]

A gal that I've known for the last 20 years in Pocatello earned a degree in chemical engineering. She has been tending bar at Applebee's for most of that 20 years as well. She found my wife's line of work interesting (police/fire/ems dispatch) and gave it a try at Pocatello PD. She lasted about 2 weeks. It was too much. Dispatch requires the ability to multi-task and prioritize in real time with often difficult situations. Not her cup of tea. Her daughter works as a server at the same Applebee's.

Lots of the college kids from Idaho State University work at minimum wage jobs around town. When they graduate, most leave town because there are no jobs that match the degrees. The exception is the nursing and pharmacy grads.

I'm on the other end of the scale. As a "boomer", I've worked the last 48 years without an interruption in employment. At 68, I'm still knocking out complex software for my government customers. My real problem is that I'm priced out for new positions and my boss ran out of funds. Fortunately, I've been well positioned to retire for the last 5 years. It's happening June 8, 2025.

What am I doing in retirement? I'm writing web applications in the Rust language, wrapping them in a Docker container, deploying them to a kubernetes minikube using a Helm chart and skaffold. I've wanted to do that in something other than Java for the past few years. I'm going to make similar starting kubernetes pods with Python and Javascript as the principal application language inside. It all goes together very quickly using ChatGPT or grok3. I'll miss getting up each morning to perform productive labor for a paycheck.

[FLT-bird]

I’ve got a few ideas. Stop flooding European countries with 3rd worlders and housing won’t explode in price.

Stop sacrificing to Gaia and there will be more jobs, jobs will pay better and everything will cost less since energy is a key input into almost everything.

Also, if you quit letting in hordes of 3rd worlders to live on the public dole there would be more money for the public healthcare systems.

Look at all the things that can be made so much better for younger workers by applying a little common sense for a change.

[EQAndyBuzz]

These kids walk around calling me boomer and disrespecting me then they cry when I don’t “give” them a job. I don’t hire Gen Z nor do I hire from the Ivy League. I hire only the hungriest of applicants. I also don’t hire people with AI generated resumes. Shows me you are taking shortcuts. My interviews are no longer what you are doing and more “what value do you bring to my team and why should hire you?” The answers are everything from “I learned this in college” to I’m in a special class of individual.”

I also have two immediate write ups in performance. “That’s not my swim lane and “I’m working on it.”

[Myrddin]

My first day at my current employer was an eye opener. The code was being built in K&R C, no source code control, the UI was Motif, but it was also core dump city. A "delivery" to the customer was 30 people flying and making changes on site.

I pulled in the Purify product to diagnose the core dumps. Inside of 3 days, core dumps stopped happening. Inside of a week, the code was committed to RCS for source code control. I insisted on GNU Make in place of the version delivered with SunOS. Inside of 2 weeks, it was possible to do a top down build of the code with Make. A "from scratch" build took 10 hours on a SPARC 640 MP. Two months in, the K&R C was converted to fully ANSI prototype form including headers. At the 6 month point, we purchased a CD writer and produced an engineering release of the source code. Four people traveled with the CDROM containing the source. It was built on the customer site. The database admin converted the customer database code into the database and acceptance tests were run at the customer site. It was a decent turn-around for the project. The team size was reduced from 30 to 15 and remains around 8 persons at the current time.

I wasn't content just to get the K&R into fully ANSI C form. I was able to get a license for the UNIX version of PC-Lint called flexelint to find all the sloppiness in the code. That substantially reduced errors. On a subsequent project, the HP Basis Branch Analyzer was employed to record all of the execution paths successfully traversed and missed. Purify only helps with executed code. For that project the 300,000 lines of K&R code got the full ANSI makeover, flexelint and fix until clean, unit test until 91% of the code was successfully traversed. The last 9% required over the top exceptions like exhausting RAM and disk space.

In recent years I have adopted "cpplint" as my daily driver for C/C++ code. It works in UNIX/Linux/Windows. The UI makes it a pleasant tool. I use VS Code for most edit/debug activity.

I've replayed similar events for multiple projects over 40 years. It's time for this "boomer" to retire and do some fun stuff instead of fixing other people's stuff.