What did the Boomers ever do for me?

[Nomama]

In the interests if balance, you understand!

I shall start with the Ford machinists:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_sewing_machinists_strike_of_1968

Equal Pay Act 1970

My thanks to you, Baby Boomers. Without you I couldn't have earned the same honest day's pay as the man working next to me. Hell, I couldn't even have got the job in the first place.

Now this generation needs to thoroughly break the Glass Ceiling!

[ssd]

what age are the boomers then?

[ssd]

just seen its being born between 1946 and 1964

[drudgetrudy]

People born slightly earlier paved the way for a lot of change and 1960 onward sounds quite late to be a "boomer" however that is the definition

[feebeecat]

As someone mentioned up thread, Farage and his contempories spring to mind at the mention of boomers. The generation who were able to walk in/out of jobs, who could buy property, who could save, who were able to take early retirement on fat pensions and yet still have the capacity to complain about how hard done by they are.
Never really thought about challenges to authority & changes they may have implemented - maybe due to fact all boomers I know are such Daily Mail cliches it's hard to imagine them thinking of anyone but themselves.
May also be due to large age gap (huge in fact) eldest sibling is a boomer, a walking, talking advert for DM & has the social awareness & empathy of a house brick. Yeah, could be that last bit that's influencing my opinion

[RoastingYourChestnutsHurtsAlot]

feebee saved me a whole heap of typing to me they're by far and away the most selfish generation to date.

[DustBunnyFarmer]

I get fed up of baby boomers in my & DH's family moaning about how hard they worked when nearly all of them managed to retire on good pensions in their early 50s. At the moment, I'm looking at possibly being able to start drawing my occupational pension when I am 68, with rapidly narrowing benefits, and I've been paying in since I was 23. I also know that my parents didn't bring much (if any) work home , nor were they expected to keep on top of work e-mails at the weekend/in the evenings. Most of them had housewives to keep the show on the road, whereas most of my friends work full or nearly full time & have to magic up the domestic goddess schtick out of thin air.

A lot of boomers are living quite comfortably on our pension contributions, leaving crumbs for those in their 30s and 40s, and whinging about maybe having to give up their winter fuel allowances. I think winter fuel allowances should be means tested given the current benefits freezes and squeezes elsewhere.

I also feel really sorry for people in their 20s who have been well and truly fucked over by their elders. There'll be cobwebs in any pension schemes still going let alone crumbs, and they'll still be paying off PFI deals, defaulted student loans etc.

I'm going to have to think quite hard about what the boomers ever did for us, to be honest. As others have pointed out, the war generation did a lot of the leg work on equal pay and I'm not wildly convinced legislative gains over the last 30 years have been all that. There are still depressingly low conviction rates for sexual offences and too many women trapped in dire relationships.

[senua]

The generation who were able to walk in/out of jobs.

I'm a babyboomer. I (luckily) started my working life in the late 70s when we were the sick man of Europe. The soundtrack of the time was UB40's One in Ten, I believe that unemployment is currently only 6%.
Yeah, we had it cushy.

[RoastingYourChestnutsHurtsAlot]

My parents are boomers by the dates given in the previous post (although they consider themselves not to be) my mum left school with no qualifications yet sits in a middle management position from which she has no desire to budge from until she retires in 10 years time and which is now a graduate entry only role.

Their education system far outshone the shitty comprehensive experiment my generation was forced to go through. You were educated to a level you wanted to or trained in a trade and freedom of movement between jobs was far greater than it is for my generation.

theyre also bloody job hoggers- they get to a post they are happy with the salary and sit until retirement meaning no employment mobility for my generation.

[Nonboomer]

6%, based on the way the government chooses to measure unemployment at the moment. Still youngsters today are lucky to have flexible 0 hour contracts, lucky bastards.

[DustBunnyFarmer]

Senua - If you were an unemployed NEET in the late 70s, you had a shot at a free university education and could sign on over the summer holidays. Nowadays, there's no education maintenance allowance for 16-18 year olds from low income families to stay in education to 18 and get level 3 qualifications (A level equivalent) that would enable them to progress to higher education and - God forbid, should they make it that far - they are now facing £27K in tuition fee debt + any debt accrued paying for housing, food and living expenses. Apprenticeships, for those that want to go down the vocational route, are also in desperately short supply. Yes, the official unemployment figure is below 10%, but there will be plenty on other benefits thanks to years of careful massaging of the system in the 80s and 90s. I don't think today's 18-24 year olds are any much better off than those in the late 70s. In fact, in the late 70s there were still well-paid skilled roles around for those without formal qualifications. Not so much these days.

[senua]

theyre also bloody job hoggers- they get to a post they are happy with the salary and sit until retirement meaning no employment mobility for my generation

Don't be ridiculous. People have done that for generations, I had to wait my turn for jobs to appear too. Our generation would never think such 'entitled' thoughts.

[DustBunnyFarmer]

I don't have as much of a problem with the job-hogging thing either. I do feel sad about the lack of social mobility more generally, which seems to be worsening as time goes on. Perhaps that's where the resentment comes from. Babyboomers were riding a wave of terrific social mobility, enabled by really enlightened policies on education funding, a decent welfare state and the sacrifices of the inter-war generation. They are now patting themselves on the back, assuming they did it all by themselves, and pulling the ladder up behind them. That's what grates.

[RoastingYourChestnutsHurtsAlot]

Babyboomers were riding a wave of terrific social mobility, enabled by really enlightened policies on education funding, a decent welfare state and the sacrifices of the inter-war generation. They are now patting themselves on the back, assuming they did it all by themselves, and pulling the ladder up behind them. That's what grates


Well said!

[ithoughtofitfirst]

They're alright.

I can say that now i'm not renting from Boomers anymore. That used to piss me off.

I eventually got my dream affordable housing flat home. Who's laughing now eh?? EH??

[Allalonenow]

Well we can't win really, we are either job hoggers preventing employment mobility for the much more deserving young, or we are fat cats retiring early on good pensions!!
Damned if we do and damned if we don't.

[SconeRhymesWithGone]

Wow. I am really glad that I don't have to endure this level of antagonism against my generation here in the US.

[RoastingYourChestnutsHurtsAlot]

Boomers in the public sector tend to job hog then retire as soon as possible on the pension funded by their children who, in similar roles, have now got no chance of similar benefits yet still get all the stick that comes with working in the public sector.

[DustBunnyFarmer]

It's alright, Scone. I get the sense that it's always been hard graft in the US, no welfare state, no leg up for anyone. In that context, no generation has been screwed over by the other and everyone's happy. The main problem in Britain seems to be that there's a really, really jammy generation in the middle and they don't seem overly bothered about sharing (on a population level, individual family members helping one another out is different).

[paxtecum]

I'm a boomer. I'm early 60s and have a long time to wait to retire. I must live in a different world to some of you. I don't know anyone who has retired early. I know people who were made redundant from a minimum wage job at 61 and couldn't get another job. I know a woman in her early 60s still working on the production line in Fords. I know an art teacher still working full time age 68.
How can a whole generation be derided?

[Ketchuphidestheburntbits]

It's hard to believe but even in the 1970's women couldn't get a mortgage unless they had a male guarantor (usually their father if they were single). There were very few married women who worked when I was growing up and divorce was very unusual. Sadly, women who did escape from abusive husbands were usually stigmatised and suffered terrible financial hardship.

Not all baby boomers are wealthy. Many women who are divorced or widowed don't have pensions at all. I have several friends who will be working into their seventies because they can't afford to live otherwise and they have never owned their own homes.

The best thing that the baby boomers have done is given women far more freedom to have careers, own property and be free to make choices about their fertility and relationships. The worst thing that has happened is that the role of being a mother has been devalued and now has to be squeezed into a career with another women (usually badly paid) looking after the children because mortgage payments are so huge.

[senua]

Times are different. We were able to buy housing but that was about all we could afford. We couldn't afford loads of clothes like the Primani generation can. I didn't go abroad until my honeymoon. We never blew half a week's wages on a concert ticket. We hardly ever went out for meals. We didn't have the concept of a bucketlist (again, such entitled behaviour).

[RoastingYourChestnutsHurtsAlot]

Because my generation realises until our parents generation stop profiteering from us by way of the property market we may as well play as hard as we work. Why try and save for something we'll never have?

For my generation to have a family is a huge sacrifice. We aren't blessed like yours in that we can have the house and one earner and one sahp. We both need to work we both need to earn and the majority of us have to rent. Many of my generation are remaining childless due to this.

[Scaredycat3000]

Senua Was there any concerts that cost half a weeks wages, or were prices more affordable? And the clothes you bought, did they last years or look like shit after 3 washes unless you spent a months rent on a dress?

[paxtecum]

Are you mad? Enlightened education policies on funding?
Most of us went to a secondary modern school and left at 15 or 16 and got a job in a factory. I have 16 cousins, only one went to university. She is a social worker and still working at 65.

[RoastingYourChestnutsHurtsAlot]

The secondary modern attendees in my family (which are over a dozen plus spouses as I have a very large family!) have done amazingly well in life they have literally had it all. The grammar school attendees even more so.

Lives I can only dream of having.