Same-Old, Getting Old

The Baby Boom Generation – of which I must admit I am a card-carrying member – is hitting a whole lot of walls, and the crash is not very pretty. Decimated by the housing collapse (where so many had “invested”), retirement savings destroyed in the financial collapse and desecrated in the labor market, Boomers are now facing pressures to reduce Medicare and contract Social Security benefits in a world where food prices, medical care, gasoline and pharmaceuticals are skyrocketing. Retirement is no longer an option for millions of Boomers, the ones who have been lucky enough to hold on to their jobs. For those even older that the Boomer generation, like the Los Angeles woman pictured above, life can be severely difficult without resources; her 57-year-old Boomer generation son stands by her side as well… also homeless.

The lingering of older workers also has a secondary negative effect on our economy: normally older workers retiring would open job opportunities for the next generation of workers, but in this tight economy, where retirement is not an option for so many, the door is equally closed to new workers on the other side of the age spectrum. President Obama said it best in his 2011 State of the Union address: “The world has changed.” But those words hold painful truths for so many.

“Baby Boomers like Hall are more likely than previous generations to keep working, or at least looking for work, as they get older. Since hitting a low of 29 percent in the 1990s, the labor force participation rate for older workers (those who are 55 and up) has risen to 40 percent today. The increase is partly due to employers offering stingier retirement plans than they once did.” Huffington Post, March 24^th.

If you’ve got a job and you are an older worker, you are likely to cling to that employment regardless of how nasty or repressive the workload has become, and we know that workers who remain on the job often pick up the load of those who have been laid off, without a concomitant increase in pay. Employers are now firing workers for very minor issues and using specialized firms to fight against any ensuing unemployment insurance claims, so folks tolerate what used to considered an abusive workplace much more easily these days.

And if you are an older worker who has lost that job, the world is particularly harsh: “The unemployment rate for older workers is lower than for their younger counterparts, but older workers' unemployment spells last longer. The average jobless person aged 55 and over during 2011 spent a full year unemployed, compared with 39 weeks for the broader workforce. Older workers are more than twice as likely as their younger counterparts to be unemployed for 99 weeks or longer, according to the Congressional Research Service. In February, nearly 2 million of America's 12.8 million jobless had been out of work that long.

“How does a person wind up in such a bad spot? It's not clear from the data. Education, surprisingly, doesn't provide guaranteed protection. The CRS found that unemployed workers with advanced degrees were no less likely than high school dropouts to become 99ers... From the perspective of workers themselves, age discrimination is the obvious explanation.” Huffington Post.

So our under-educated younger generations – reeling from tuition hikes and a deteriorating public education environment – are going to have to place their decreasingly-skilled lives on the line to pay for their prior generations’ deficits and may well have to look after aging parents and grandparents when retirement plans and government safety nets fall short… assuming they can even find work in an opportunity-impaired job market, which increasingly offers equally-limited-skilled labor from overseas at vastly lower rates of pay. We seem to be setting ourselves up for an even bigger fall in the not-too-distant future, one that won’t succumb to an easy fix. It will take decades to make up for the destruction we have inflicted on ourselves with nothing but short-sighted deficit-reduction decisions, leaving our infrastructure, educational system and scientific research capacities seriously damaged as the rest of the world rushes in to fill the void.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it pains me greatly to watch our nation slowly strangle itself to death with illogical decisions and misplaced priorities.