Young workers, of course, are not the only ones who bought into a vision for the way their lives were supposed to turn out. So did boomers. Just weeks before Brenda Lock, 52, learned that she was to be laid off, she told one of the executives at the telecom company where she’d worked for the past 12 years, “I’ll be here for the next 14½ years if you’ll have me.” She had always assumed that they would want her. “The only way I thought I would ever be let go is to be fired because I did something stupid,” she says. According to Vancouver-based career coach Alanna Fero, a sense of entitlement is just as common among boomers, who entered the workforce before tech support was outsourced to India, and receptionists still opened the mail. They reasoned that if they were good employees and saved accordingly, retirement would look something like a Freedom 55 Financial advertisement, complete with cocktails and little umbrellas. More than any other group, says Fero, “it’s people in their 40s, 50s and 60s who are saying, ‘I worked this hard. I want what my predecessors had at my age.’ ” And not getting it feels like a raw deal.
What may have catalyzed the battle between the oldest and youngest members of the workforce is that shared sense of entitlement. But if younger workers have had to throw that entitlement out the door, so perhaps should older workers. One novel—and controversial—idea that has emerged in the wake of the recession is a proposal forwarded by Boston University economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff in a recent New York Times online round table: if older workers are less attractive to rehire because of the high salaries they’re paid, why not pay workers less as they age? Though the concept of rewarding more experienced workers with higher salaries has long been ingrained in the minds of employers, Kotlikoff argues that pay should instead be commensurate with productivity. And since most workers peak at 40, he says pay should gradually decline after that. Not only would commanding a lower salary make it easier for older laid-off workers to get hired, he says it would make it more worthwhile for firms to keep them around in the first place.
On the other side, millennials are already reconsidering the assumptions that defined their generation. According to Toronto Youth Opportunities coordinator Khadija Ellis, young people are realizing that the Internet is no substitute for a “face-to-face meeting.” Pillai says one of the most valuable things he has learned from the employment program he attended is “how to cold call”—a far cry from the kind of social networking to which he is accustomed. For Lock, in some ways, losing her job was what she needed “to get booted in the butt to get out the door and do something different.” Instead of trying for another job in telecom, she’s retraining to become a library technician. More than the books, she says she’s excited about the technology. And, she adds, with a tone that evokes a fickle millennial, “You have to be happy, otherwise it’s just drudgery.”
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*Text revised from original; the original wording suggested that Marianne Neill blamed double-dipping for the fact some teachers were living in poverty. We regret the error. Ms. Neill responds here.
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