People are being booted out of their jobs at 50

I'm watching CNN and they are talking about a study that shows if you are 50 and up you are very likely to get kicked out of your job and be replaced by a younger person who are capable of being available 24/7 as well as more accepting of cheaper salary. Besides that, if you are over 50 and got booted, it is almost impossible for you to find another job.During this time of skyrocketing healthcare cost, this lack of respect for our elders is putting an even greater strain on people that have been working all their lives and contributing to society.I don't mean to degrade the atrocities that the nazis committed, but I am certainly seeing signs of certain aspects that existed in nazi germany here. Profit, or how much labor time at the cheapest cost, you can pump out of people seems to be more important than the people themselves. People are being penalized for simply being older.CNN also said that there are laws in place to protect people over the age of 40 from being fired because of their age. However, companies have found loopholes that allow them to do exactly that.

As us baby boomers start retiring the smaller workforce coming up behind us is not going to be able to sustain the production we need to keep our economy growing. Companies all over the world are going to have to come up with ways to keep us boomers working longer and to bring more people into the workforce. Business Week had a great article back in January called "Global Aging" (you probably need to register to read this but registration is free).Companies that work at loosing their older employees are just going to end up begging them to come back.This message has been edited by Asgara, 05-07-2005 02:26 PM

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Asgara
"Embrace the pain, spank your inner moppet, whatever....but get over it"select * from USERS where CLUE > 0http://asgarasworld.bravepages.com
http://perditionsgate.bravepages.com

at some point, people are going to have to work longer, I don't know what the average retiring age is, but lets say its 65. That was fine when many people only lived to be about 70-75, but as the average life span keeps pushing that? Is a 65 year old retiring age even realistic when people start living to be 90-100 years old?I have 3 of my original grandparents still alive, all over 75 and all in realtively good phisical condition, and I had a great grandmother that passed away last year who was 103!Im not making any claims about what should happen to retiring age, but I do know that as an 18 yr old now, I don't see myself being able to retire till im somewhere in my 80's, if at all. My only hope is that when social security flops (either on its own or from politicians messing with it) that someone will come up with a decent plan to replace it.

One problem for you might be that, as the retirement age increases, there will be fewer and fewer jobs for people aged 18, who naturally lack some of the skills that their 60-year-old competitors have learned over a lifetime of work.Increasing the retirement age will not necessarily solve the problem, it might just shift the unemployment faced by people aged 50+ onto the youngest age group (who already tend to have low wages and bad job prospects).One solution would be to create more jobs, per se, for both older and younger people.Mick

One of the issues in that link I put up earlier, was the decrease in the workforce as the boomers retire. The current birth rate isn't going to replace the boomers.~current production is being created/performed by 100 people now
~30 of them are going to be retiring
~20 new workers being added to the workforce¹This leaves us with a worker deficit of 10 people. Who is going to perform the jobs?Company's are going to have to start offering better perks to keep their workforce from retiring and to lure younger workers into their career fields.1. better medical coverage
2. better education benefits
3. flex time
4. work from home optionsThe government is going to have to offer better medical and education/training to not only keep older workers in the workforce but to prepare younger workers for the workforce.
 
 
 
 
 
1. numbers totally pulled out of my ass

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Asgara
"Embrace the pain, spank your inner moppet, whatever....but get over it"select * from USERS where CLUE > 0http://asgarasworld.bravepages.com
http://perditionsgate.bravepages.com

I suspect that the practical answer people are going to have to get used to is: immigration. This is certainly the view of many professional demographers I have known.This isn't such a problem in the US or Canada, with their proud history of accepting large numbers of immigrants. In the UK (and elsewhere in Europe) it is a political hot potato that people are going to have to grasp sooner or later.

While I'm hopeful that the balance falls on the side of Asgara's perspective and that demand for workers enables older persons to keep their jobs up until retirement, in high tech I have witnessed first hand the problem Lam describes in his opening paragraph. The young guns are *good*, they've grown up with the technology, they've had exposure to the most up-to-date technologies at university, they've got plenty of energy, and at least until they start a family (which a fair number either don't or wait till they're older) they have plenty of time to work long hours.It's a very tough combination to compete against. Oftentimes experience can make a big difference, but high tech is a fast moving field and technology often moves right out from under you. The poor COBOL programmers who held on till the last dregs of COBOL disappeared didn't find much demand for their services. Application programmers often find they've developed specialized skills over the years that don't generalize well for a new generation of application programs. For example, programmers of line oriented interfaces didn't exactly find the world beating a path to their doors as graphical interfaces became prominent. And later on, programmers of graphical interfaces found the need for their services diminish as many applications found they could more easily use browser interfaces. It isn't that such changes leave you unemployable, but it makes all your experience a lot less valuable.In the first half of my career I learned Fortran, Algol, Sail, PDP-8 assembler, PDP-11 assembler, Pascal, C, RT-11, RSX-11, DECSystem-10, DECSystem-20, VAX/VMS and emacs. In the second half of my career I've had to learn Verilog, VHDL, SDF, C++, HTML, JavaScript, Perl, SystemC, Unix and Linux, Windows, Interleaf, FrameMaker, a huge variety of miscellaneous unintuitive tools and interfaces and 967 different passwords. If I run as fast as I can I fall behind slower.Just like education has grade inflation, high tech has title inflation. When I first started the titles were (they were pretty much the same everywhere, though the specific nomenclature differed):

• engineer
• senior engineer
• principle engineer
• consulting engineer

Here's the nomenclature at my current company, and this is pretty standard today, though again the specific nomenclature varies:

• junior engineer
• member technical staff
• senior member technical staff
• member consulting staff
• senior member consulting staff
• architect
• senior architect
• fellow

Within a year or two out of college if you haven't already made it to member consulting staff then you're really screwing up. But like those of us who have parents or grandparents who lived through the depression and could never come to trust banks, those of us who lived through the downturn of the mid-90s and watched the ranks at senior member consulting staff and above decimated by layoffs to save money are very leary of being promoted too high, and while I've turned down two promotions over the last 10 years I've seen younger people promoted above me who have nothing technically over me other than that they're fearless, have more relevant training, work cheaper, and work longer hours.I like my job. I hope I keep it. One of the reasons I'm so busy lately is because competing with the young guns takes more than 40 hours a week. A lot more. How long can I keep this up? Till I'm 65? I sincerely doubt it.--Percy

As one of those who was surplused, I have some very definite thoughts on this matter.Getting old sucks!

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I know what you mean Percy, I'm just finishing up two years of trying to teach this old dog some new tricks. Right now, yes, Lam's post is being seen all too much. What I am thinking is going to have to start being seen in the next 5 to 10 years as the boomers start leaving the workforce in droves. Leaving on their own accord, not as part of "downsizing."Companies are going to have to offer retraining/education benefits to keep all their workers up on the latest technology.Am I being naive? Is it hopeful thinking?OH, and COBOL is alive and kicking around here, well alive at least. I live in the middle of paper and insurance country. Many of these large corporations haven't gotten around to getting rid of their mainframes and millions of lines of code yet.

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Asgara
"Embrace the pain, spank your inner moppet, whatever....but get over it"select * from USERS where CLUE > 0http://asgarasworld.bravepages.com
http://perditionsgate.bravepages.com

My God, you haven't even got onto .net yet!!! What a loser! This message has been edited by mick, 05-07-2005 09:49 PM

Heh. Good ol' Halliburton did a lot of that - I was 45, though, not yet 50, when they got rid of me. But it turned out to be the best career move I never planned....

The problem is not everybody have enough strength to do all the work demanded by corporate America that long. Oh sure, you can point out isolated cases of people having the energy after 60. But is that enough reason to penalize the condemn the rest of society? If you can't keep up, then you'd have to live in poverty, right?You are 18 and you are full of energy. I am 22 and I am full of energy. Does this mean the rest of the world should be full of energy?What an egocentric view of the humanity.Addressing the real issue, I know that democracy and privatization is a good thing, but we need to keep them contained. Corporations should realize that people are people, not disposable machines. Have a freaking heart!I swear, if I ever gain any real power, I'm going to go around and round up all the heartless people and put them in ghettos.

Troy writes:

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Oh sure, you can point out isolated cases of people having the energy after 60.

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Actually, most of them are. That is the reason why people are living longer: Better health care has resulted in people living longer and being more productive as they get older.Yes, the average lifespan is in the mid-70s these days. But does that mean that a person who is 55 is more or less likely to make it to 75 and a person who is 25? One of the strange facts of the matter is that the older you get, the more likely you are to live to see the next year.In 2002, the life expectancy at birth was about 77 years. But if you were already 65, you had a life expectancy of another 18 years or 83. And if you were already 75, you had a life expectancy of another 11 years or 86.In the 1900s, the life expectancy was just under 50 years old. When Social Security was instituted, 65 was actually beyond when most people were expected to die. If the retirement age had kept up with the extended expected lifespan, it would be 80 years old today.I'm not defending any particular practice. I'm just pointing out that the demographics of work and age have changed dramatically.

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Yes shame on me for being egocentric WHEN TALKING ABOUT MYSELF.My grandparents, and my great grandparents who died of natural causes, all lived (and are living) to be very old relative to other people in their generation, its reasonable to assume I will too, and I should plan my future accordingly.Oh and coming to terms with the fact that If my carrer doesn't go very well that Im going to have to work till im dead really makes me heartless, I should be put into a ghetto.

Rrhain writes:

quote:

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In 2002, the life expectancy at birth was about 77 years. But if you were already 65, you had a life expectancy of another 18 years or 83. And if you were already 75, you had a life expectancy of another 11 years or 86.

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Can you give an explanation of how expectancy is calculated for those who've already reached a certain age, such as 65 or 75? Does the calculation assume that such a person is in excellent health or only average health? Are your numbers for males or females, or at that age does it matter?I'm fairly ignorant on this subject, but it's interesting.

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