By Dick Snyder
As winter turns to spring and the scent of renewal fills the air, a young person’s thoughts turn to those baser animal instincts common especially among monogamous mammals: employment.
Despite the fantasy perpetuated by greedhead corporations and overly-optimistic governments, the touted economic recovery is but a fabrication of old, twisted, scotch-addled minds. For you, the twenty-something and—dare I say—X-type student, the word “recovery” better describes the morning after your last exam than it does the economy.
The science of demographics—how statistics such as births, deaths and age can describe life in communities—portends a difficult time for today’s average university student. Demographer David Foote, recently interviewed on Morningside with Peter Gzowski and in the Globe and Mail, says that while it’s imperative that Xers and twenty-somethings get a toehold in the workforce before they lose all reason for living, it just isn’t likely to happen.
“(Gen Xers and twenty-somethings are) the people who are going to pay the taxes in the future, they’re going to pay the pensions, and it’s in all of our interests to get them well-established on a good working career, and not allow them to be on a heap of shattered dreams,” Foote said.
The problem is that the boomers are littered throughout the workforce, a workforce that is shrinking rather than expanding to accept new, eager subjects.
Parents of frustrated youth are now, in the words of Foote, “beginning to understand why their 29-year-old sons and daughters are still living at home with them. They’re in the back end of the babyboom and have had one heck of a tough life.”
The way things look, the job market won’t really open up again until the boomers start retiring sometime over the next decade. This means that the “baby burp”—today’s teens—will have their pick of plum jobs, just like the boomers did. Meanwhile you’ll be handing out flyers on Yonge Street. Sound fair? Of course not.
The going advice for Xers nowadays is to get a wide variety of job experience, because they’ll be going through many different careers in their lifetimes. But by moving laterally instead of vertically, doesn’t that mean that they’ll always be at basically the same level, no matter what the job? Yes. Fucked again. And your little sister will probably be your boss some day. Nice, eh?
Is there any hope? Yeah, lottery tickets and crime. Of, my favorite, a mandatory boomer cull: a systematic, government-sponsored reduction in the boomer population perhaps by aerial spraying or water treatment. It’s a modest proposal, the least we could do for the good of the country.
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