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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

Boomers are leaving the labor market without as many people replacing them, creating a labor crunch. COVID accelerated that process. It's not much more complicated than that

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Some are, some are coming back

https://money.yahoo.com/older-americans-head-back-to-the-wor...

Sooner or later they will leave the labor market for good though, because dead people cannot work.

Indeed, 1.8 million people over 55 die every year in the US.

And there are 3.6 million new births every year in the USA.. where does that leave us?

https://populationeducation.org/resource/u-s-population-pyra...

Hey tmtd! Looks like our best bet might be to "hopefully" start hiring infants and young children into the workforce to make up for the attrition.

Heaven help us :)

Early boomers had to push back retirement because of 2008 GFC. They are permanently exiting the market, now. Later boomers are going part-time or being selective. They aren't going back to blue collar and that's where things are completely fucked.

That's a factor too, and I think that as Millennials and Xers realize that the BoomerJobs--the jobs in which you actually have some choice in what you work on, where you write your own performance review because the boss sees you as a friend rather than an exploitable resource--aren't going to be allocated to them, but written out of existence, we will see an acceleration of the discouragement and "presenteeism" that are already endemic.

The only reason we haven't seen 85% of society give up all at once is that some people still hold out hope that the BoomerJobs, once vacated, will be given to them. That isn't going to happen, though.

People work "hard" in our society, because they have no other choice, since there is no social safety net and employers can do whatever they want in this country, but no one really cares anymore. This has manifested itself as survivable mediocrity for quite a while, but as soon as our society finds itself in any kind of serious crisis it will collapse. It almost did, during COVID.

> BoomerJobs--the jobs in which you actually have some choice in what you work on, where you write your own performance review

Yes, boomers had better pay where a middle class blue collar job could afford you a nice house and kids in the suburbs, but this idea you quote, I'd need much more data on because the entire culture of being a boomer is much more top down, listen to your boss, do what your told then the modern culture.

People believe what they want to believe

Yeah but the reward for "listen to your boss and do what you're told" was often cushy overpaid jobs where you go golfing a couple of times a week with your boss and coworkers because you're all buddies. As long as you brown nosed your boss just enough.

Plus, you only had to brownnose for a couple afternoons. Once they decided they liked you, you just had to be not insufferable.

I think it’s now; do what you’re told or I’ll replace you with someone cheaper. Then it will be do what your told or I’ll fire you and you’ll lose your visa and have to go back to your home country. It’s also hard for me to think of it getting any worse than the gig economy where you’re one capricious algorithmically driven decision away from being fired. And don’t get me started on Amazons intentional grinding down of employees. I think the attempt at adopting a culture to placate millennials with some agency is simply a way to replace the older workers with cheaper newer workers. I think the reality is millennials on average have fewer good options and will always have to accept worse conditions.

Is that true for Boomers, or was that mostly true for the Silent Generation (those born 1928 to 1945)?

My experience of Boomers (my parents and their friends are early Boomers) is that most of them were working as two-income families, whereas my granparents' generation (late Greatest and early Silent), it was much more common for there to be only one outside income coming into the household.

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