Low Wage, Luxury Seeking
These are 18 to 25 year-old persons in a position to divert a significant portion of their earnings towards material luxuries. They typically have fewer than 2 years of post-high school education. Like their counterparts attending college, they are often employed as retail workers or in the hospitality industry, particularly food service as servers. This group tends to have more disposable income than college students, who often pay high tuition costs, take on a number of financial loans, and often move away from their parents. A lack of financial obligations leaves young people in this situation with a higher level of discretionary/disposable income, which they use to finance luxury goods. Thus, the term also carries a connotation of immaturity, the extension of youth, and nurtured adolescence, as in the movie Failure to Launch, where a man still lives with his parents despite being well into his 30s and owning a business. In the UK the expression 'two-bob billionaire' is used, in that whilst one feels wealthy and hardworking, one's status is in fact illusory.
The main challenge faced by gold-collar workers is the short-lived nature of their financial security. More often than not, these people marry and have children, and take on additional financial responsibilities such as mortgages and health insurance. With partial or no higher education, however, their job prospects could be viewed as narrow and fairly restricted.
Gold Collar often refers to entry level workers (or unskilled workers from middle-class families), in their twenties who want flex time hours, self control, independence, empowerment, to furnish their own offices, a signing bonus, full tuition reimbursement, flex benefits, to work as a team, casual Friday every day, to work from home, to have fun, and don't want to feel loyal to the company.
| “ | These people are going to be cash-rich 19-year-olds and cash-poor 30-year-olds... If you're making 22 grand a year and not paying for college, you can earn enough disposable income to have an apartment and a car. But it tops out there. Job security is not good, and you end up in the lower middle class and working poor. | ” |
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—Anthony Carnevale, National Center on Education and the Economy |
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Read more about this topic: Gold-collar Worker
Famous quotes containing the words luxury and/or seeking:
“Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“So was produced this tragedy
In a far tower of ivory
Where, O young men, late in the night
All you who drink light and stroke the air
Come back, seeking the night, and cry
To strict Rapunzel to let down her hair.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)