For some reason the BLS does an annual report about people who were born from 1957-1964. Why? It's a bit of a mystery. But since that cohort includes me, let's see what they have to say.
- Between the ages of 25-56, the average person in this cohort held 7.1 jobs. This makes me below average with only five jobs during that period.
- The average person in this cohort was employed 78% of the time. I am above average at approximately 100%. The lowest number was for Black high school dropouts at 46%. The highest was for men with a college degree at 89%.
- At age 56, a startling 46% of high school dropouts reported health conditions that limited the work they could do. Among those with a college degree it was only 10%.
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- Between ages 45-56, the average increase in earnings (adjusted for inflation) was 0%. I am below average on this score, at about -70% or so.
I guess that's about it. You're welcome.
"At age 56, a startling 46% of high school dropouts reported health conditions that limited the work they could do."
This may or may not reflect genuine health issues.
The US appears to have adopted a shadow welfare/retirement policy via the disability system, one which no-one wants to admit, but also no-one is willing to shutdown/crackdown.
In a way this is parallel to DARPA (the US shadow industrial policy agency), and in both cases the setup is probably about the best one can hope for in terms of getting a necessary job done while simultaneously pretending, to the satisfaction of many people, that the job is not actually within the remit of the Federal Government.
It remains to be seen if some Woke twit decides to upset the apple cart by insisting that this 46% represents some sort of reality and hence some sort of scandal, and thereby destroys the finely crafted consensus that has allowed this modus vivendi to come about...
This wasn't startling at all. Blue collar jobs are much more likely to require using one's body. Traditionally, when blue collar workers got into their 50s, their peak earning period was over. A machine operator, for example, would be demoted to pushing a broom. A sewing machine operator would be demoted to factory floor distribution and collection. Some people could up-skill, but that meant access to training and good enough overall health. Chronic pain, cumulative brain injuries and a host of other problems impose stark limits. There are also fewer up-skill jobs, so they aren't an option for every burned out blue collar worker.
If you started work at 16, you'd have forty years of work by age 56. That's 40 years of hard knocks, literally and possibly figuratively. Until recently, odds are you'd have a ten year life expectancy. When jobs offered pensions, this often worked out. You'd get hired out of high school, say at 18, work 40 years and retire. If you were in good enough shape, you might get a second less physically demanding job. Naturally, this kind of thing pisses off the boss class, and it was easy to stir up resentment. Such pensions are rare. There was a big protest in France when Macron raised the retirement age, but the boss class runs things and people's bodies are just raw material.
Disability is the shadow retirement system. There is also the opiate epidemic since we don't have a medical system that can really heal injured bodies. I'm college educated, so I never lived that life, but it was never invisible to me.
If I had to do physical labor, or simply needed to stand on my feet for an entire work shift, I probably would have been on disability by age 56. Not so much of a problem when I mostly typed on a keyboard, talked on the telephone, and went to meetings.
You think maybe there is an advantage to the individual and society to having a college education? And providing a pathway to get that education might also help that individual and society? We might call it affirmative action?
But don’t tell Justices Thomas and Alito when they get back from their all expense paid vacations.
I find interesting they keep track of us a separate entity. I have never particularly felt a part of the baby boom, more like the back ass end of a giant clusterfuck we had to deal with in School. Christ, we had “smoking “ sections in my high school. Lotsa nutty stuff like that folks in the early 70’s got set up.
My siblings are in that group and yes it makes sense that the group is tracked differently than the early boomers. This group became adults in the 1980s just when Reaganomics was giving workers the shaft.
"The average person in this cohort was employed 78% of the time. I am above average at approximately 100%."
How is this even possible, I have a post-graduate degree and have been employed maybe 2/3 of that time span (so far).
I've been working full time since college, age 21. Just one 2 month period of unemployment out of 34 years working plus part time work in HS and summer jobs in college. I know I've been really fortunate and no kids so no time off for raising kids. I fell into a stable career path out of college and it's served me well.
Kevin's blogging has been good steady employment I guess..
We took a year off in the early 90s and lived out of a van, that has been my only period longer than a couple of weeks of unemployment. So working for forty-two years, one year off, employed 98% of the time. Only three more years to go says he hopefully, God willing and the rivers don't rise and the markets don't crash.
It's also true I've been in the same job for nearly 30 years. Of course that is career limiting, but it did pay the bills and provide good benefits while we raised kids without benefit of family nearly.
Average increase in earnings since 46, about 2% raise every two or three years, whatever that comes out to. I haven't been very happy with that but given an average of 0 I should readjust my expectations..
There is a clear gender difference in the graph which Drum fails to mention, much less interpret, even when talking about physical labor among blue collar workers.