To think that not all old people have worked hard all their lives...

[MrsKittyFane]

Go on, flame me.

I get bombarded at work (I work in NHS and a large proportion of the caseload is 65+) by patients regaling me with the evils of working mothers.
We don't give our DC nutricious home cooked meals.We drive them everywhere.We're not there when our DC are sick (or even worse inconvenience them if I have to take time off if my DC are ill/school closed). I'm working for luxuries- holidays, 2 cars (there's one in our household)- that I don't need.

But in the next breath, if I didn't work I'd be wasting my training and letting the NHS down.

We need 2 salaries. There are no houses round here that one wage could afford. The best of everything has gone.

My dad who is generally a nice bloke has got pretty self righteous about this since he retired (aged 52) claims that he worked 'hard all his life' my mum can be pretty bad in that respect too.

He got shit A-levels (One E, one fail and an N) Although he did get a B in general studies as he never ceases to remind me.

Trained to be a teacher (on a full grant) and bought a house with my mum straight after qualifying, along with getting married. (Both of which my grandparents made significant financial contributions to)

Spent the next 30 years doing the bare minimum - home by 4:30 every night and asleep in the armchair by 5pm, usually with his coat still on. Still drifted through, made a decent living.

Retired at 52 on the grounds of efficiency of the service on a generous final salary pension. Topped it up for a few years with the odd day of supply, before deciding it wasn't worth the hassle. He looks younger and younger each time I see him and no bloody wonder, he's had nearly 10 years of doing naff all, day after day and he's not even of pensionable age yet.

To my mind, this isn't a life of hard work and struggle, but one of almost unbelievable cosseted luxury. One that I won't be able to sustain thanks to the selfishness of their generation.

I wouldn't dream of asking for the handouts that they had from their parents - like a deposit for a house - but I could bloody do without the self righteous carping about how they've worked hard for what they've got.

Bloody baby boomers.

No compos - bloody middle class baby boomers. If you want to bemoan this, please don't assume all baby boomers are middle class. Drives me crazy these assumptions.

Fair point lesley

Although both my parents were/are working class and were afforded opportunities for social mobility unheard of before or since.

Your dad was a teacher. Teachers are not working class. In the past far far fewer people went to uni so opportunity to become a teacher even with a full grant was available to much much less people. Also many many baby boomers like my mum and dad left school at 14 or 15 because their family needed them to be earning full time.

Between pension payments and their mortgage-free home and a few benefits associated with being old, my PIL have more disposible income than any of their offspring. They complain constantly about how hard it is to be 'on a fixed income'. Everytime they say it, I repeat slowly for them: We are all on a 'fixed income'. And it's lower than yours.

However the middle class did used to be much smaller and had better standards of living than lots of comparable jobs now. But the middle class of baby boomers does not equate with the baby boomers as a whole. Many, many people on MNs seem to do this, because their parents are middle class and this what they see personally in their lives.

Coming from a poor background and working in a poor area I see a very different picture. Lots of baby boomers struggling to manage on pensions in rented housing and lots who may have longer life expectancy but are in poor health often related to poor working conditions (disability and death due to breathing problems caused by asbestos accounts for a shockingly large number of chronic health poroblems in this age group).

meant to type - struggling to manage on state pensions

Your dad was a teacher. Teachers are not working class

I said his background was from a working class background- his dad was a railway worker my mum's dad worked at the pit. Their background was about as far from middle class as you could imagine. My point wasn't that they did it by hard work, but by winning a genetic lottery.

Yeah sorry, just trying to make point that they were lucky not just about when they were born, but also to have parents who could support them and afford for them to stay on at school from 14 or 15 so they could then go to uni.

Yeah, they didn't go to uni either (local teacher training college - entry requirement: complete the A level course) both of them were lucky in that my dad was the youngest so the pressure on him to earn was less than his elder brothers, my mum lived with both her parents and grandparents, so there were four lots of wages coming in)

Okay teacher training college. Honestly it was pretty common then in working class families for kids to leave school at 14/15. A minority of working class parents could and were willing to fund their kids to stay on.

But yes your parents sound like they had a pretty easy time of it.

My parents were working class through and through when they got married. Mum was a typist and dad was a welder, but now I would say that they are the dictionary definition of middle class. Which in a way pisses me off more because they can see me trying to bring up my family under the same conditions as their own parents, and yet they dont see the struggle.

I think that that is a huge issue, as someone else said, social mobility within the baby boomer era created the middle classes we know today and that within a generation it will be gone, for the same reason but we will all be moving downwards instead of up!

I am aware that it wasn't the norm - my Uncle followed my granddad to the pit and another was in the forces soon after leaving school.

It kind of makes me cross that having had the opportunity to live this lifestyle from relatively humble origins, that my parents don't see that it is now nigh-on impossible for someone of a similar background to make a similar transition, certainly with so little effort.

They basically enjoyed the best of everything and kicked the ladder away.

Actually it wasnt common for baby boomers to leave at 14. Baby boomers are by definition those born in the baby boom following WWII. So assuming a person was born in 1950, the height of the BB, they would be leaving school at the absolute minimum of 1965 because the legal age requirement was 15. However, because of the introduction of child benefit within the welfare state, many children were allowed to stay on until 16 as CB was paid as long as the child was in full time education therefore wasnt costing the parents money. In fact it was decided that CB would cover all school children in order to encourage as many as possible to stay in school.

So you have better educated children, going into better jobs, with more prospects and security. This allowed them to earn better, save more and buy their own homes with increasingly available mortgages,.....and so on....

I put 14/15 because 1946 on 1st of April is when school leaving age rose from 14 to 15. My dad left at 14, just after the end of the war.

I suppose the other way of looking at it is this- whilst acknowledging differences in income within the baby-boomer cohort.

Even within lower income groups the 'boomers probably had it better. Even if the jobs on offer when leaving school at 15 weren't brilliant, how does that compare to a similarly situated 16 year old leaving school?

Have you seen the unemployment rate for 16 -25 year olds?

Also until 1970's CB was not paid for the 1st child.

Lesley, your dad wasnt a baby boomer then, sorry to nit pick but he wasnt and his experience would have been totally different as he was still living with the aftermath of the war. Sadly, he was born too soon to benefit from the boom 60's :(

The overuse of that phrase 'worked hard all my life' does annoy me too, so YANBU, MrsKitty.

I think it comes from that wartime generation who are now all 80+, who did really have tough lives, living through world wars, the Great Depression and the post-war grind / rationing.

The welfare state was put in place to help that 'Greatest Generation' but instead it's the 60-80 age-group who benefited most from it and yet they haven't had such a hard time economically by comparison. They're still trading off this idea of the older generation having had it harder than the younger generations and that's really not true anymore.

Compos - We are going through a very tough recession. But people graduating or leaving school 10 years ago were not BB, but were looking for work at a time of extremely high economic growth. Okay that was built on the back of debt which leaves us in the mess we are in now, but unemployment was at extremely low levels and incomes were rising. It is totally wrong to say all BBs had it easy, all yp since then had it hard.

Of course I'm not saying in all cases and in all situations and of course there will be exceptions, but in general as a cohort the b.boomers had it easier, than any generation before or since in living memories.

Opportunities for things like apprenticeships or secure 'jobs for life' - things the b.boomers could by and large take for granted when leaving school, had pretty much disappeared 10 years ago. Even if jobs were easier to come by for school leavers 10 years ago compared to today, the majority of those on offer were low skill low pay no prospect McJobs.

1970's: 3 day week, mass strikes, crippling inflation rates, the UK was broke.

1980's: High interest rates, Falklands War, high unemployment, Black Monday 1987 - heralded property crash and recession.

1990's: Early 90's were recessionary - high interest rates early in the decade.

2000's: All appeared lovely, high employment, massive feel good factor. Recession from 2008/9.

It's all cyclical. Bearing in mind the debt levels within families just think how you would feel if interest rates were 6% or 8% or 10% or 12% or 15%.

The baby boomers lived through some pretty bleak times too.

Inflation that basically got rid of their mortgages over night if they stayed employed in the 70's.
Every set of circumstances there are winners and losers. It almost annoys md more when people say I'm a boomer and font have a good pension, own a house etc because the opportunity was there and they didn't take it. Seems criminal.

Teachers are working class, if you couldn't stop work tomorrow and still pay your bills then you are working class. The waters have become very muddy in recent years but middle class professions are being worked at by working class people who have the brains but not the capital and family support of the middle classes