Are we in a generational war we are uncomfortable acknowledging?
Feel free to check me on statistics, but I believe more people are working over 60 than ever previously. Many of these people are working entry level jobs.
When I check statistics, persons born after 1970 have lost most by percentage of income than those born prior to 1970. When I check statistics, those born after 1985 or so are employed mainly due to dumb luck. When I check Fluther, there is a general consensus that younger people lack work ethic, and are entitled. Is this true, or purely a fiction of older people who are happy to hire older people and fire younger people.
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Maybe I’m to senile (or its just to late) for me to understand the question.
I’ll try though.
I think that older people MAY have a different work ethic because we entered the work force thinking we would work hard stay with and be loyal to a company our whole life, retire, get a gold watch and a comfortable pension.
The younger generation saw their parents get screwed and probably rightly don’t have that sense of loyalty to a company that they doubt will have any loyalty to them.
Older people are working those entry jobs not because it is their life ambition to be a Walmart greeter but because that pension never materialized and they were having to choose between eating and their blood pressure medication.
Having retired from corporate life, I no longer have to think in those terms, for which I am extremely grateful. However, in my past career, I always found that my competition was almost always within my own generation. Yet even in the worst economic times good contacts, fortunate timing contacts and the right job skills and experience were almost always the keys to always finding a good job, albeit some “gooder” than others.
Once upon a time, people aged out of the workforce, and made room for incoming workers.
They’re not doing that anymore. Usually not their fault, but the effect is the same.
So, younger people (myself among them – 1985, woot!) are stuck in the Catch-22 of “Sorry, we only want workers with several years’ experience.” How does one get experience? The closest thing to an answer I’ve heard is “try an unpaid internship”. Yeah. Because we don’t need money for food or a place to live or diapers for our kids, and can afford to take 3–5 years off to get the “experience” needed to have a paying job, so we can go from indentured servitude straight into wage slavery.
It’s especially heartening to know that if we actually do land a job, a good portion of those paltry wages will go toward a Social Security system that we will most likely never be able to draw from.
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