Mike Hosking: Muffin Break boss Natalie Brennan is right - millennials do lack drive

Muffin Break general manager Natalie Brennan has apologised for her comments about millennials.

COMMENT: Mrs Muffin Break (aka general manager Natalie Brennan) deserves recognition for one, making a good point, but two, in this day and age, having the fortitude to actually utter it out loud.

For we live increasingly in a time where anything moderately conservative, sensible, or dare I use the phrase 'old fashioned', is most likely shot down and lampooned, largely using social media.

The Muffin Break boss' advice, if you happen to have missed it, involves the upset that young people aren't showing the sort of get up and go, or the sort of initiative they once did in securing themselves work. And in doing so, getting their foot in the door and enabling themselves to seek out a world of opportunity and success.

The claim is millennials are entitled, and they're entitled because of social media. It is true, and it is true not just of the kids who won't bang on a door and offer up a couple of free hours labour to prove themselves. It's also true to the next lot up, the 20-something-year-olds, the ones with a job, often with a bit of paper showing they passed a couple of exams.

The entitlement is bewildering, ask any employer. The days of stick-ability, determination, or professionalism are out the door and on the OE. And they left many years ago.

Millennials want promotions, flexible hours, pay rises, holidays, and workplace reform in a fashion that is about 15 years beyond their station.

They exist (not all of them, but a disturbingly large number nevertheless) in a world that is a one-way street. All the benefits need to come their way - and in return, you're lucky if they show up for work.

I see it in my kids. They've all got work, but it's work on their terms, at their place of choice, at roughly the hours that suit them. And they're lucky, there is so much work they can choose from. It's a job hunter's market.

Don't like it, move on. There is another job next door, round the corner, down the street.

And, to be honest, as a fan of the free market, who can blame them? All they know is a booming, employment economy where work is a phone call away.

I see it in the workplace. Graduates who waltz in, think they're Christiane Amanpour, and wonder why things aren't moving faster for them. Then they've been there five minutes and it's off on the OE, maybe a dabble in PR, a government-corporate parrot job.

The same equation is applying: why hang around and graft when there's something new and shiny calling your name?

It is why we can't get people to plant trees, pick fruit, work in tourism, or build houses. Very few have a plan, dream, vision, or target.

The world is now affronted at doing a trial for nothing.

In my time in the workforce, that's 37 years, a free trial has gone from an aspiration to be proud of, to show your worth, and mettle, to a reason to ring the union, go on strike, start a Givealittle page, and fire off some social media bile.

We live in a world of excuses not drive, of lethargy and not direction and graft.
More is the pity.