hiring like its 1999
Written on 8/27/2003
Business 2.0 - Magazine Article - The Coming Job Boom
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No sentient adult could have made it through the past decade without developing a healthy distrust of forecasts like these. But the case for the worker gap differs from the usual economic entrail reading in one crucial regard: It’s based on demographics, a far more certain discipline. When Carnevale’s model, for instance, shows that within seven years 30 million people now in the workforce will be older than 55, that’s not a guess. It is virtually a certainty. “Any kind of demographic projection with respect to people who have already been born is notoriously accurate,” agrees former Treasury Secretary Summers.
Long (5 pages) article discussing the effects on the job market that will result from the baby boomers leaving the workforce: they claim there will not only be enough workers but they will not have the experience to step into those jobs. Not only will experience (or its lack) be an issue, but college enrollments in technology fields have been declining, giving hiring managers the vapors as they survey their aging cubicle dwellers.
The hiring managers interviewed have decided to take the counter-intuitive approach of investing in employees, making them happy, and helping them form some loyalty to the organization and their peers, in hopes of repelling the onslaught of HR poaching.
So on the one hand we have the commoditization of transient IT workers (who were car mechanics and handymen — tinkerers, in other words — a generation ago) and the prospect of a shortage of knowledge workers who understand an industry or organization.
Filed in: it could be called work.
I can’t read the article, since I’m neither a subscriber nor a newsstand purchaser, but that won’t stop me from spouting off. I hate to generalize about any social or demographic group, but here goes:
The Baby Boomers have been the most selfish, self-important, self-concerned, self-interested generation in history. They’re now in power, and they like it that way. I believe that, with the looming Social Security crisis that they will cause, and the improvements in health care, the Baby Boomers will cause (and because of their demographic, political, and economic power, also define) a reconsideration of what’s an appropriate retirement age, and will hang on to those good jobs for longer than any previous generation.
Age-discrimination lawsuits are a growth industry.
Well, gosh, don’t mince your words: tell us how you really feel.
Looking at what I consider three statements you make:
Perhaps this is because no one else has gotten the opportunity? I dunno, actually: is the generation currently coming of age all that different? Are we? You and I do live in two completely different regions, so we probably see these things profoundly differently.
Not much to say about this: the baby boomers’ coming of age was the most turbulent of any generation.
Is it fair to say they are causing the Social Security meltdown? By this and the rest of this statement, do you mean their reluctance to retire or inability to do so comfortably (damn that stock market crash, anyway) is causing them to stay in the workforce too long?
If I were to take the Boomers as a block and try to guess how they felt about some issues, it mystifies me why we don’t have shorter work weeks, longer vacations and single-payer healthcare. For all the rebellion about the gray flannel straitjackets their fathers wore, why haven’t fundamental issues like that been addressed? If this is the generation that has had the power to make real decisions about the American Way of Life ™, why are jobs less secure, why is unemployment so high (especially in high-tech, the “plastics” of the 80s and 90s), why is society so brittle?
Perhaps I’m agreeing with you on effect but not on cause . . . .
All I know is, I’ve been giving some thought to emigrating to some part of the world where civilization took root and flourished.
I suppose it would be fairer to say their hyper-reproductive parents caused the looming Social Security meltdown, but the Baby Boomers are the ones who have been fiddling for the last decade (since Clinton and Bush are both Boomers) rather than addressing problems that have been evident for a long time.
I meant that both their reluctance to retire and their inability to do so comfortably would lead them to force a major rewriting of retirement policies. To be fair, even in 1935, half of the state pension systems used 70 as their retirment age, but half used 65, so the Federal system went with 65. To quote the page linked above, “The studies showed that using age 65 produced a manageable system that could easily be made self-sustaining with only modest levels of payroll taxation.” (Also, despite the legend, Bismarck had nothing to do with it).
At that point, the median U.S. lifespan was 62. As of 1993, U.S. babies have a life expectancy of 72.2 years for boys and 79.1 years for girls.
The harsh realities are that no politician is going to successfully oppose the baby boomers, who will start turning 60 year after next, for at least the next 15-20 years. They will be courted like crazy by the AARP and similar groups (my parents have been getting AARP stuff for 6-7 years, even though my mother just turned 60 this year). Somebody is going to pay for their retirement, and I suspect that part of it will be in the form of higher Social Security taxes, and part will be by boomers staying employed (possibly as consultants and mentors, but still employed).
Re: emigrating to some part of the world where civilization took root and flourished: I thought you did that, and came up with Seattle? Maybe you just need one of those Microsoft jobs I hear so much about…
I’m certainly not qualified to give advice on depression, but I’m reminded of my high-school experience. Living in Cobb County, I was a freshman at a brand-new high school. The county policy was that no seniors went to a new school; it would be too traumatic. Juniors, on the other hand, were given a choice: stay at the old school, or move to the new.
By and large, the juniors who transferred didn’t like the new school.Talking to a teacher about it, he summed it up: Most of the students who wanted to transfer weren’t happy at their old school. Moving to the new school didn’t actually change the things that made them unhappy, since they were primarily internal, so now the were unhappy at a new school.
On the other hand, I have a friend who last year sold his house, and moved with his fiancee to Boulder. A few months later, the fiancee and he had split, but he’s really happy with all the outdoorsy things and athletic people in Boulder.
Hmm, methinks you’re stretching a bit. I don’t know that the Boomers parents were all that fecund . . . perhaps more of them had children but I don’t know that they had larger families as a rule. Education is the most successful form of birth control known, and the post-war/GI bill parents were educated as no previous generation.
Though I will agree with you on the notion of fiddling while the Social Security trust fund burns: guilty as charged. But I guess that only matters if a. the payments into it become punitive and b. if you were really counting on that as part of your retirement. Folks our age are not, I assume.
Of course, if there were anything like real leadership, as opposed to lawyers and lobbyists, we might have a reasonable social insurance system that covered a basic level of medical care for all and this would all be a non-issue. But that would take intestinal fortitude that seems to be in short supply inside the Beltway.