Should job-hogging over-50s all resign?
Too few jobs. Rising unemployment, especially for young people. Here's a radical solution, says commentator on office and workplace life, Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times (born 1959).
Wasting time on the internet recently I came upon a nasty statistic. In the next 10 years, there will be 1.2bn young people looking for work and only 300m jobs to go around.
Next to this stark stat was an invitation to write an essay on what you would do to solve the problem.
My essay is quite short and can be summarised in one word.
Resign.
This inescapable, awkward truth has been rammed home to me in the past few months as I keep meeting bright people in their 20s and 30s desperate for a job in journalism - and for mine in particular.
I fob them off with platitudes but the real reason they can't do my job is that I'm doing it myself.
The same is true for almost all professions. The young can't advance because everywhere they find my complacent generation is in situ. Thus the only way of solving the problem is to make everyone of a certain age, say over 50, walk the plank.
Before I go any further, I ought to make one thing clear. This is not a resignation letter - I intend to hang on for dear life. It is just that I can't resist pointing out the obvious, even though it is not in my interests to do so.
The choice boils down to whether it's better for people to have a decade at the beginning or at the end of their careers where they are demoralised and underemployed. The answer is easy: surely it is better to be more active at the beginning.
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Almost all the people earning grotesque amounts are aged over 50”
To have people idle at a time when they are full of energy and their grey-cell count is at a maximum is a shocking waste.
And in any case, my generation has had it very good for much too long. We bought houses when they were still just about affordable. We had free education and pensions. It's all been jolly nice, and I've enjoyed it a lot. Now is the time to start to pay.
Shifting from old to young would bring down wages and would also solve the executive pay problem in one shot. Almost all the people earning grotesque amounts are over 50 - getting rid of them would mean CEO pay would come thumping down.
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I have tried this idea out on various contemporaries and they all say it's rubbish. They mutter about the "lump of labour fallacy" with a panicky look in their eyes. Then they say think about the loss of experience.
I reply that experience can be overrated; in any case, I'm not advocating giving huge jobs to children, but to those in their 40s, who have 15 or 20 years' experience, which is surely just as good as 30 or even 40.
Skeleton in a tie The job for life is dead
Then they protest that the people at the top are there because they are good, and getting rid of good people is stupid.
This is true up to a point, but there are surely younger people who are good too. Anyway, I might bend the rules to let some ageing superstars - of whom there are very, very few - stay on.
I'm not saying I like the idea. I'm just saying I believe it.
And I'm submitting this as my essay for the prize. I see that the winner gets $10,000. I hope I don't win. Although if I do, I'll need the money.
However that one doesn't sell news; written this way it does. One of the things I have been just totally floored with, is the idea that young people today want it given to them. There's a sense of entitlement they carry. On the net, I've run into it time and again. In return they tend to view the boomer generation as the source of all their troubles. It's an attitude of 'someone stole my lunch money'. It is well displayed in this article.
I've heard the complaints of 'we don't have it so well' and 'there are no jobs for us' and 'cost of living is far more for us than you'. It's a gimme type attitude and I shouldn't have to work for it.
Now I tend to side with the younger generation on many things but this attitude of gimme is pushing me the other way.
What's changed is that the combination of government and corporation has sunk the economy. Nobody wants to breathe a word of that in an election year yet those statistics you can get hold of, refer you to a time similar to the Great Depression.
What should be done here isn't that old folk should lose their jobs for the young. Instead what should happen is the standard 40 hour work week needs to drop lower. Right now in the US, most of the businesses are dodging paying benefits to their workers. Cost of health insurance and benefits are too much, when you can get workers for the cheap in a bad economy. So every one is hiring part time and bunches of them, so that no one person qualifies as a full time worker and therefor eligible for benefits.
The 40 hour work week was a direct result of unions having to fight tooth and nail to get it. Tooth and nail as people died. There is no reason it has to be a 40 hour work week. Times have changed, laws haven't.
At the present, businesses and corporations are taking advantage of a bad economy. US productivity rates are the highest they have ever been. Meaning that fewer people working are doing more. But they are not getting paid for that extra effort. The US work force has been losing money in the terms of value over the last 20 years. Inflation has eat into the earning value while most of the extras from profit have been diverted to the senior management types.
You want change for more jobs? Change the work week hourly requirement.