The abolition of mandatory retirement, and how it changed America (2011)
slate.com
slate.com
Maybe you could make the argument that European airlines have grown more in recent decades or something, but then you'd be able to see that per-airline (e.g. Virgin is mostly new hires relative to United, but Lufthansa certainly isn't).
Can't find any data on this, but it doesn't seem obvious. The largest european airline is ryanair, which is an irish company. And "employers in Ireland can face [...] lesser constraints in terms of trade union involvement."[1]
[1]: https://www.matheson.com/news-and-insights/article/key-disti...
If anything they are the gold standard on how to do court gimmicks.
PSA stewardess class, 1974.[1]
Labor is more expensive in Europe because of taxes, primarily. The fully loaded cost of a professional employee is often double their salary, and sometimes more.
https://www.dw.com/en/poverty-increasingly-threatens-elderly...
Coming from a country with a flat pension, the difference is visible. There are a lot of really poor old people here.
Then again, there are many fewer really poor young people.
Also, why is it mainly young people doing these jobs in other countries? Is that even a good thing? Why should relatively older, but still perfectly capable, workers be excluded from this profession? Is this job simply not as well compensated in other countries, so people leave it as they grow older and seek higher salaries?
This means that newer, younger flight attendants tend to fly the short domestic flights, while the longer, transoceanic flights (like the ones European travelers are more likely to see American airlines for) tend to be staffed by the older flight attendants.
Where are you getting that from? Average American wages are $63,000 per worker. Higher than any country besides Switzerland, Iceland and Luxembourg[1]. To compare to this five largest EU members: Americans are paid 28% higher than Germans, 41% higher than Frenchmen, 59% higher than Brits, and 64% higher than Italians and Spaniards.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...
Also, if you look at the median US wages, it's appearant how much does there is at the top.
Yes, Americans do have higher wages overall, but this is because there are fewer worker rights and less hidden costs for the employer. This does not mean labor is cheaper.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...
i don't know the specifics in germany, but there is net salary and gross salary, and there are employer contributions beyond gross salary, as well as other costs.
my understanding is that put everything together, the cost per employee is twice the gross salary. this includes cost for equipment, work space and whatever else you need to spend money on to help an employee to do their job.
25% seems very low. it's possibly only the taxes and insurance and related contributions. or maybe denmark calculates the gross salary different?
i searched a few resources and found references ranging from 1.5 to 1.7. so not quite 100%.
here is a swiss example with a compact table.
https://www.runmyaccounts.ch/2013/07/wie-viel-kostet-ein-mit...
this one suggests a cost of 6900 for a 4500 gross salary.
but it also adds hiring a manager per 10 employees and splitting that up among the employees being managed, bringing the cost to 8285.
so yeah, it depends on what numbers we are actually comparing
So that measure's not worth much.
The world is supposed to be getting better not worse. If i want something “to do with my time” when I’m in my 60s and 70s (if I’m even lucky enough to live that long: many aren’t, and never get to stop working) I want to help out at a local social club or volunteer for a charity, not get paid a pittance to greet customers until my hips collapse.
My theory: The economic success of my grandfather, part of the post-WWII "greatest generation" in the U.S., was an anomaly.
After WWII the U.S. economy was experiencing unique boomtimes. They won the war with their economy intact, and were by far the most productive country on the planet.
Since then, besides reverting to the mean, globalism and information technology has changed everything.
My grandfather had a 4th grade education, retired from his job at a steel plant, and lived in three of four houses he owned in two states. That is simply not the way the world works any more.
From an economic perspective he was in the right place at the right time. A couple generations earlier he would have been a poor farmer. A generation or two afterwards he would have been a working-poor service worker.
Like I said, this is a theory of mine, that the economy of post-WWII American was an aberration and should not be considered the normal state of things. For those couple/few decades the U.S. was the factory and research powerhouse of the world, other manufacturing bases didn't exist or were rebuilding.
I welcome comments.
Piketty pointed this out: in the early 1800s, authors would mention actual numerical dollar amounts paid for goods in books and plays. Because for all of prior history economic growth was a few basis points per year, at best. So a British pound earned in 1600 would be roughly comparable in value to one spent a hundred years later.
https://www.immediateannuities.com/
While social security of not a great “pension” for most people, if it continues to give the same inflation adjusted benefits today when we retire at the maximum benefit rate. It will give a married couple where one earned at the maximum contribution rate $4500/month. Since the couple with the lesser lifetime earnings can choose to get 1/2 of the higher earnings benefit while both are still living.
We could easily live off of that amount with a paid off house.
While I realize that’s not a realistic scenario for the average American, that’s very realistic for a tech worker living in any major city in the US.
This is just bad strategy.
The foreign service is the field where wisdom and experience count the most. The only thing new in the world is history you don't know.
I have an observation to offer, based on "anecdata" and the like. Let's assume that the Baby Boomer generation is that standard group born between 1946 and 1964. Where I worked in 2008, I noticed a lot of the Baby Boomer crowd taking a bath on their retirement funds due to, well, 2008. Lousy investments, house-flipping, and so on. Many of them grumbled about having to delay their retirements considerably. I saw this happen in effect as these people continued to work, often a decade longer than their stated departure dates. They didn't have mandatory retirement, and so they kept plugging along.
I believe this 2008 effect, combined with the relatively small cohort for Gen X, has left the Baby Boomers in power politically, in business, and in university still, leaving Gen X waiting for open positions to climb up into, but they haven't opened up yet. Indeed, with the youngest Boomers at age fifty-six, they will still be a forced to be reckoned with for at least another decade, while Gen X grows stagnant.
We're a small bunch, so aside from bones thrown to us like Stranger Things or Ready Player One, we are largely ignored. We will most likely be surpassed by the Millennials. Part of this, I think, may be slightly due to the kind of fatalistic passive nature which seems to permeate much of Gen X, who are, in some sense, still waiting for the bombs to drop, assuming the acid rain, killer bees, or GRID doesn't get us first.
Call it a wild suspicion, but I think Gen X will be a sort of forgotten bunch a century from now, and the lack of mandatory retirement may be part of it.
How did they take a bath on their retirement funds? Did they sell everything at its lows for some reason and ignore all advice about how to save for retirement?
We’ve had 10%+ returns for a decade now, they should be fine assuming they had adequate savings before 2008.
I suspect most people never had adequate savings to begin with, and 2008 didn’t have anything to do with their problem, which is they simply never saved or earned enough money to retire at the quality of life they expect.
Let's say you are in your 50s, have a nice upper middle class job that you spent a few decades becoming qualified for. You are putting away a reasonable fraction of your income such that you can live comfortably now and retire in 10 years. Then the economy collapses, you lose this high paying job and there are no comparable positions available. You are unemployed for a few months and then under-employed working retail at target. You still have all the expenses of an upper middle class lifestyle, but with a salary maybe a bit above minimum wage. You can tighten your belt a bit but a lot of those expenses like your mortgage still need to be paid. Selling off investment assets despite the poor market and reducing the amount of money you put away for retirement is likely your only reasonable option to maintain your current standard of living.
The stock market rebounded quickly, but people were still underemployed and had burned through a lot of their savings to stay afloat, so they didn't have the funds to buy back into the market, certainly not to the level they were prior to the crisis. Retirement is inherently a measure of savings, anything that makes you eat into savings will push back the earliest date you could have retired. Saying they simply didn't have enough money is like a doctor saying you just aren't immune enough to symptoms: maybe not incorrect but a thoroughly useless diagnosis.
It’s a big issue in law firms, where senior associates (the ones who actually are responsible for 99% of the work) get fed up waiting for 70+ year old partners to step down.
This is the government talking about what their lives are like. Imagine the harsher reality.
I've grown up seeing many retired folks having their own tiny business or just running their family businesses, but the greeter thing doesn't sit well with me. I don't know why it makes me so deeply uncomfortable. It feels like some kind of a breakdown of a social contract.
No, what the first two sentences describes is institutionalization (or environmental socialization), not social contract. The same thing that extensive periods in prison, or war, or any number of other hostile environments do that make it hard for people to adjust to any other living situation.
Some of my teachers in high school were retired industry executives who taught for the love of it. At least in the US, “retirement” is often about choosing to be a productive and social member of the community without optimizing for the paycheck. It gives them a sense of purpose. I can’t speak for retirement in other cultures but in the US many retirees take an enormous amount of pride in generating value to society even if it doesn’t generate income. My grandparents and great-grandparents were all like this, and they loved it. Sometimes it generated income but they didn’t need it.
I could easily see myself doing the same thing as they did.
Shortly after my mom retired, she was offered a part time position with the school system to help at risk children. At the rate they were going to pay her. She could only work 10 hours a week without it cutting into her pension. She negotiated a pay cut so she could work more hours and still be useful. So she definitely didn’t need the money. [1]
They took the money she earned and went on three month cross country road trip.
After the funding was up for that, she tried to retire again and then another opportunity came up. By now they are both over 62 and getting both of their social security checks, her pension, and my dad is getting money from his annuity that he bought with part of his retirement savings.
She still was kind of bored so she made the same deal again. They took another three month road trip and used some of the money to both fix up their house and increase the size of it by 50%.
[1] most of the time you can work without affecting your pension unless it’s for the school system.