Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, apologized to millennials who are struggling to find good-paying jobs.

Speaking Friday at the 22nd Annual Wall Street Project Economic Summit, organized by Rev. Jesse Jackson, the California Democrat sympathized with millennials who were struggling to pay the bills, noting they sometimes had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. 

{mosads}“What they’re not saying is ‘you haven’t done it enough. It hasn’t worked well for us. We have gone to school. We have graduated. We have done everything that you told us to do only to find we can’t get a job,'” she said. “‘If we get a job it is not worth going to work every day because of the pay that’s offered to us, and we are disappointed at what we thought would be available to us when we come of age, when we graduate and we’re ready to start our careers.'”

“Millennials, I’m sorry about that, but one of the things I talk to the banks about is I want you to create a millennial project. I want you to tell me how you’re going to stop treating millennials the way you’ve treated us traditionally when you looked at our background and our credit records and how many jobs we’ve had and decided whether or not we were stable or not.”

Waters, a vocal critic of Wall Street who has openly feuded with President Trump and who took over the financial panel’s gavel this year, said she intends to use her position to have representatives from the nation’s largest banks testify. 

“We’re going to have the CEOs of all the major banks in our committee. We’re going to be asking them some questions, many of them don’t want to come, and many of them think that perhaps we’re going to be too hard on them,” she said. “They don’t really know. All they know is that I’m the new chair and I’ve got the gavel and they’ve got to come, and so when you come, you will find out.”

A survey from Ernst and Young found that millennials in 2018 had seen economic improvements in recent years, though few have confidence the economy will remain strong and many still lag behind where Gen Xers and Baby Boomers found themselves at younger ages.