Baby boomers were not in their prime in the 70s.
Some of us were just graduating from high school.
I never had a job that had a pension plan.
I never voted myself a big pension, never knew I could.
I think some people have us confused with my parents generation.
They were the ones who could walk out of high school and get a job with a living wage. They didn’t even have to finish high school.
My parents are the ones who benefited from an economic boom. Their first house cost the same as their annual salary. My father retired at 50 with a full pension.
However, that generation also worked their asses off at jobs most of us wouldn’t work today.
When I was growing up I could go for months without seeing my father because of all the overtime he worked. Doubles, triples, swing shifts, and when he was home he was sleeping. Often he would get home after we were in bed and be out the next morning before we were up.
He was lucky, he worked in Data Processing, not on the assembly line. That was back when a computer room took up a whole floor and had the benefit of air conditioning.
Do you have any idea what it is to work on an assembly line?
You stand in one place for hours (with only two 10 minute breaks and a half hour lunch) doing the same thing over and over and over.
You might be the one picking up the spare tire (and not a doughnut, a heavy real spare tire) and put it in the trunk. Over and over and over, lifting for hours on end while standing on your feet. No heat in the winter, no AC in the summer. If you were asked to work overtime you didn’t dare turn it down because if you didn’t want to there were plenty of others who did.
Every few weeks or months you’d rotate with somebody else in the plant. So now you might be picking up a battery and putting it under the hood, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day standing in the same place.
Then when you got off work if could be a half mile walk just to get out of the plant, and another half mile or more walk to your car, if you were lucky enough to have one. Otherwise you could join the crowd at the bus stop and stand and wait for the bus, after standing at your job for the last 8 or 12 or 16 hours.
Or maybe you worked at the soap factory, standing shoulder to shoulder with the other workers, picking up bars of soap and putting them in boxes.
Or whatever mind numbing, back breaking, repetitive job you could find. And you were happy for it because it beat farming, or coal mining, or ditch digging, or whatever other suck ass job your parents had.
You think the boomers had it easy?
My first job we could be fired for walking in the door one minute late. One guy I worked with got fired for taking off the day his father had a heart attack. My boss told me that for every employee there he had 50 applications sitting in a drawer. You didn’t show up somebody else would and they didn’t give a damn what your excuse was. We didn’t even make minimum wage. One of my friends had a horrible burn on her arm from somebody laying a fry basket on it. She came in every day with that nasty burn (actually in violation of health code but to miss time meant losing your job).
And we were damn glad to have the job, any job, because at that time for most of us our parents only supplied the basics. You wanted nicer clothes, you bought them yourself. You wanted a record album, you bought it yourself.
Things that people today consider to be necessities we considered luxuries, and we had to buy the ourselves because our parents didn’t feel guilty about saying ‘no’.
I talked before about the sex discrimination I faced.
That was in an office.
Do you have any idea what baby boomer women faced in the factories and assembly lines? Half the men there wanting to drive you out because women were taking jobs away from men and the other half of the men hoping to get you alone so they could have sex with you. I never knew how bad they had it until I met a woman who had worked with my father. The constant threats, the constant cat calls and how my father stood up for them.
Who knew my racist, bigoted, sexist father would take three young black women under his wing and tell the men at the plant if they wanted to mess with them they had to go through him first? Sure shocked the hell out of me but I guess it shouldn’t have. He thought no women belonged in the plant, precisely because of the way the men acted. Once they were there he’d feel they deserved to be treated with respect. It was crude, rude and sexual harassment was not illegal then. This is what baby boomer women endured getting into the work force. If they had not put themselves out there to open those doors they would still be closed today.
I remember filling out a job application in the early 90s. Every company I listed as working for in the 80s not longer existed because of corporate raiding - except one that was rumored to be a front/money laundering company for the mob. Guess even the corporate raiders were afraid to go there. The guy interviewing me wondered aloud if I was bad luck.
Maybe the early baby boomers got to take advantage of the booming economy of the 50s and 60s but by the time the rest of us were coming along things were already being turned upside down. I expected to be like my father, get a good job at a good company and stay my 30+ years and retire on a nice pension.
By the time I was hitting the corporate world there were no pensions, and most companies weren’t going to last 30 years. Because I was part of the BOOM! there was lots of competition for what jobs were out there. When I got into computer programming most companies had fifty to several hundred programmers. By the time I got out computers had developed so much and money had gotten so tight that most companies were operating with less than a half dozen.
I saw so many of my co-workers lose their jobs, I was lucky because I always had a 6th sense about when the company I was working for was about to be bought out. I always got out in time and landed on my feet.
I don’t want to pick on anybody because I know no everybody of the same generation isn’t the same.
But what I hear so often anymore is 20 and 30 somethings complaining about not being able to get a job but there are jobs out there. They just consider the jobs to be beneath them, They don’t want to work fast food, well you have to start somewhere. They don’t want to stock grocery shelves, mop floors, wait tables, or clean up at a construction site. They want a cushy job at a nice salary to start- didn’t we all. Or they don’t want an embarrassing job, they don’t want their friends to see them doing menial work. I know people in their 20s and 30s complaining about how hard it is to find a job and then they get fired from every job they get because they cannot understand the concept of showing up on time, or that you actually have to do the work when you get there. Or they put in one application and think they will get the job and stop looking.
They want everything now, they have no concept of taking a shitty job because it might lead to a better job. Or that it’s easier to find a job once you already have one.
Oh, and y’all do know that the people who are collecting Social Security paid into it right? It’s their money, not some kind of government handout.
My father paid the maximum every year of his working life and then died before he had a chance to collect on it.
I’ve been paying into SS for 43 years, and the last 20 of them I have been paying 15%. If anybody thinks I should feel guilty for taking back what I have put in they can kiss my lily white ass.
