This subreddit is full of anti-boomer perspectives, but in the sixties and seventies, young people were revolting against work and capitalism.
“The most promising development in the factories today is the emergence of young workers who smoke pot, fuck off on their jobs, drift into and out of factories, grow long or longish hair, demand more leisure time rather than more pay, steal, harass all authority figures, go on wildcat [strikes], and turn on* their fellow workers. Even more promising is the emergence of this human type in trade schools and high schools, the reservoir of the industrial working class to come. To the degree that workers, vocational students and high school students link their lifestyles to various aspects of the anarchic youth culture, to that degree will the proletariat be transformed from a force for the conservation of the established order into a force for revolution.”
-Murray Bookchin, “Listen, Marxist!”, 1969
(*The phrase “turn on” here is not meant neither as “double-cross” nor in the sexual sense, but is old-fashioned slang for radicals meaning “enlighten,” that is, “turn people on to the revolution.”)
“As the 1960s drew to a close, some of the more perceptive business observers were about to discover this distinction and were soon forced by pressure from below to discuss it publicly. While the October, 1969, Fortune stressed the preferred emphasis on wages as the issue in Richard Armstrong’s 'Labor 1970: Angry Aggressive, Acquisitive' (while admitting that the rank and file was in revolt 'against its own leadership, and in important ways against society itself’), the July, 1970 issue carried Judson Gooding’s 'Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line: Young auto workers find job disciplines harsh and uninspiring, and they vent their feelings through absenteeism, high turnover, shoddy work, and even sabotage. It’s time for a new look at who’s down on the line.
With the 1970s there has at last begun to dawn the realization that on the most fundamental issue, control of the work process, the unions and the workers are very much in opposition to each other. A St. Louis Teamster commented that traditional labor practice has as a rule involved 'giving up items involving workers’ control over the job in exchange for cash and fringe benefits.' Acknowledging the disciplinary function of the union, he elaborated on this time-honored bargaining: Companies have been willing to give up large amounts of money to the union in return for the union’s guarantee of no work stoppages.' Daniel Bell wrote in 1973 that the trade union movement has never challenged the organization of work itself, and summed up the issue thusly: 'The crucial point is that however much an improvement there may have been in wage rates, pension conditions, supervision, and the like, the conditions of work themselves — the control of pacing, the assignments, the design and layout of work — are still outside the control of the worker himself.'”
-John Zerzan, “Organized Labor versus the Revolt Against Work,” 1974.
(This entire article is actually pretty much just an entire report on the then-young boomer generation rejecting work, bosses and capitalism.)
And these are only two examples I could think of documenting this widespread phenomenon.
Bob Black, author of the “The Abolition of Work” was born in 1951 and is, of course, also a boomer.
The boomer generation, in its youth and early adulthood, found work deplorable. In Abbie Hoffman's book Woodstock Nation, 1969, he described young people (i.e., boomers) declaring work to be a “four-letter dirty word”. (Abbie Hoffman was not a boomer, but radicalized many in the 1960's and 70's. In his previous book Revolution for the Hell of It in 1968, he declared that “We must abolish work and all the drudgery it represents.”)
It really sucks that now so many have gotten so old-fashioned and conservative.
So any time any boomer you know brings up that “your generation doesn't want to work anymore!” show them that young workers in the sixties and seventies (in the US and beyond) were trying to destroy work and took no pride in it whatsoever!!!