Your Baby Boomer Boss is Finally Quitting…

Baby boomers are finally being forced to retire after spending the last decade and a half refusing to leave their jobs, and hurting every other generation of workers while slowing productivity, wages, and career growth opportunities, mostly for Millennials. And ironically, research is showing that the current labor crisis that the media is portraying as being Millennial-caused is actually being caused by millions of Boomers retiring at the same time.

Against the backdrop of the Great Resignation, the unemployment rate is also being hammered by people over 55 permanently leaving their jobs, because during this year’s stock market and housing price explosion, baby boomers are cashing out and leaving the labor market.

And that’s actually really good news, because pre-pandemic, older workers were putting off retirement in middle and upper management positions. And they held onto their jobs for so long that for the first time in history, 5 generations were simultaneously engaged in the job market. That’s never happened before. And frankly, it was creating pretty big problems for everyone else.

Not leaving upper management jobs means that there’s no room for upward growth for younger workers, which is especially devastating because most Millennials entered the job market during the Great Recession and accepted lower salaries - so in addition to making less to start with, they’ve been blocked from promotions because the top layer of workers wasn’t budging.

That’s actually one of the biggest reasons we’ve seen a work-culture change where Millennials job hop significantly more than any previous generation. Within companies, salaries have been decided by, and directed to, older, upper management positions, leaving little for younger employees, even if they’ve worked there a long time.

And again, ironically, this problem has only been compounded by the fact that companies where Baby Boomers are prevalent see significantly lower productivity and wage growth, and reports show that that’s likely because they’re resistant to productivity-enhancing technology.

Anecdotally, anyone who works in an office with a lot of baby boomers knows this, but we finally have the data to show that, yeah baby boomers who don’t “do computers” affect their company’s bottom line. There’s literally a direct relationship between older workers with lower productivity due to technological avoidance, and slower growth in the overall economy. In fact, one of the big reasons we’re seeing Baby Boomers retire during the pandemic is because working-from-home requires basic computer skills, and instead of learning them, they’re quitting their jobs. 

But to be clear, that’s not all Baby Boomers - we’re mainly talking about white, upper middle class Baby Boomers who have been able to cash out during this lopsided economic bubble. Baby Boomers who are not well off, and are in lower career positions, are being forced to work well past retirement, and not by choice.

For many, the Great Recession that was caused by their wealthy peers crushed their retirement funds which are largely in the form of 401ks. So when wealthy Boomers crashed the economy, they also crashed their generation’s working class dreams for retirement, Actually, 45% of Baby Boomers have no retirement savings at all, and 28% have less than $100,000 to retire on.

As a matter of fact, despite the reality that Millennials have the worst wage growth in all of US history, it’s mainly due to Millennials belonging to the financial class that’s being screwed the hardest, while most Baby Boomers belong to the class that’s doing the screwing, which is why Millennials control less 5% of total US wealth, and Boomers control 53% - however, not all boomers belong to the same wealth class, and a huge number are also suffering under the same abysmal wage growth that Millennials are, and their situation is arguably even worse, because instead of retiring with a guaranteed pension like their parents did, they’re either being pushed out of the job market with little to no financial stability to see them through later years, or forced to continue working against their will just to maintain basic levels of comfort, because Social Security payments simply aren’t enough.

And while we reckon with the fact that there are millions of older Baby Boomers who have been hung out to dry by their peers, we can also clearly see that this generation financial crisis that’s being experienced by a moderate percentage of older Americans is exactly the future that most working Millennials have to look forward to, regardless of their efforts in the job market. 

An absurdly small portion of the Millennial generation is on par with average Baby Boomer wealth when they were the same age - in 1989, they controlled 5 times as much wealth as we do now. So not only are we looking at a future where Millennials and Gen Z will be unable to retire when they reach their late 60s, they will be making less, and have less stability than even today’s Baby Boomers who weren’t able to take advantage of the generational syphoning of wealth that their peers did.

In short, it’s great news for now that Baby Boomers are leaving the job market, finally - but that’s not really making it easier for Millennials or Gen Z to see their futures any more clearly, beyond seeing that it doesn’t look good.