Greenspan: Gen Xers pretty much suck at working

The Gen-Xers are going John Galt!

 

To play devil's advocate, the boomers are the only generation currently in the workplace that don't have small children. How many of those sick days are used to care for sick children who can't stay at school/daycare when sick?

Or, back when they did have small children, how many boomers had the benefit of a stay-at-home parent to tend to sick children? My dad only used one or two sick days per year because if my brother or I got sick, my mom was home to take us to the doctor. In today's dual-income families, that luxury doesn't exist.

 

Every Baby Boomer that I have ever known personally was part of a dual-income family.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1970, 43% of the woman were in the work force.

There was only one woman in all of my entire neighborhood that stayed home. And so did her husband, so there is no telling what they actually did for income.

 

Most of the boomer mom's I grew up with in the 70s and 80s stayed home until their kids got to an age where they could work.

 

Apparently, I grew up in a much lower class family than either Bubbler or Turtle.

 

1) Households headed by people 25-years-old or younger ARE producing less than Boomers and ARE likely to produce less than Boomers in their lifetime if production is defined as the amount of money coming into that household.

If the point of work is to provide money and goods for a household, then from a sheer numbers standpoint, my generation is doing worse in this regard. To make this assertion, you have to put the onus on the worker for not only the quantity and quality of what is produced, but also how it is valued. I could see how, from an economist's perspective, a blogger for Huffington Post is not producing anything because his or her work is not valued enough to merit pay nor merit the producer to demand payment.

2) Generational finger-pointing is now officially my most-loathed debate tool. Give me a stereotype, and I'll show you plenty that don't fit that mold. Linking all 16-year-olds as unproductive, smartphone-addicted sex fiends might make for an amusing Sunday feature in The New York Times, but it does little to address social or fiscal problems.

 

My dad was a public school teacher in a state routinely at the bottom of teacher pay, so that's unlikely. But two incomes weren't required to make ends meet when I was little.

 

Exactly.

Today's teenagers are getting lessons in this, too, seeing parents and friends' parents getting tossed.

 

Point taken. I just meant that you knew people who able to be stay-at-home moms. I never knew any families with stay-at-home moms. But then again, my mom was a single mother.

 

Two incomes were required to make ends meet in my family, it's just that my father earned both of them. He had his regular gig, then his weekend gig. And it was still tight. I recall vividly the argument between my parents -- who were in their mid-20s at the time -- over what was left over from his pay when all else was taken care of in a particular week. This sum? A quarter. He could get a cup of coffee on break every day on his regular gig with a quarter. She could buy some thread to sew some such thing. Of such stuff family legends are made!

 

My father's law partner likes to tell the story of going to my dad's parent's house in Buffalo.

Saved in the fridge were three peas.

Grandma & grandpa didn't throw away any food.

 

My dad died at 52 in 1980. The house he and my mom bought in 1976 had a low interest rate, but my dad declined to get mortgage insurance on it. Oops. After he died, the company he worked for really did not do right by my mother relative to his pension and other benefits. My mother hadn't worked in 25 years, save for a short stint helping with the census a few months earlier. She got a job, thanks to a friend who did her a favor, and walked into a boring office job that hardly paid anything. She didn't even know how to push the button to put a call on hold, much less take the call off hold.

Less than sixteen years later, she retired, moving into a new home after paying off the other. Her home for her retirement years was built by my brother-in-law, who worked weekends and weeknights on it for almost two years. He traded labor with people who did the brick for her and the this and the that, and he did wiring jobs for them, and so on. And my mother paid him for his work, and she bought everything that became the house.

Ten years later, she died at 75. The house, which was paid for the day she moved in, was later bought by one of my three sisters, the one whose husband built it. My mother also had more than $100,000 saved and earning good interest in a series of investments and certificates of deposit. Her thriftiness remains the stuff of legend in our family.