| The latest tactic of America's 1%, who are determined to have the 99% pay their fair share* (or at least quit "taking" from the 1%'sw cut) and finally kill the Middle Class, is the idea that the only way to save Social Security is to have most people work until they are 70 years old.
The idea is currently being promoted by The Business Roundtable in coordination with Pete Peterson's Fix the Debt group that doesn't give flying rat's patoutie about the debt:
Corporate America wants to make it harder for you to retire.
Following in the footsteps of CEOs who've organized the "Fix the Debt" campaign, which promotes raising the retirement age for Social Security, another corporate front group - the Business Roundtable - is calling for the same thing.
They want to raise the retirement age for Social Security up to 70 years.
Of course, just like "Fix the Debt", the Business Roundtable is made up of wealthy CEO,s who have little use for Social Security anyway - and will do just fine on their multi-million dollar nest eggs when they retire.
(This also applies to Jared Polis, Michael Bennet, and Mark Udall. -z)
But, fearing that they might see their taxes go up if the payroll tax cap was lifted to make Social Security more solvent, these executives would rather see Americans laying bricks until they're seventy-years-old. And for the record, this argument that Americans are living longer is bunk. While the wealthy who work non-physical jobs - like banksters - are indeed living longer - the working people in physical jobs have seen very few gains in average life expectancy. It's up to Democrats in Congress to protect Social Security - a program they created.
If these big time CEOs, and the politicians that host them in their Capitol offices, believe the elderly should work until they are 70 before earning their fair share of Social Security, then why do those big time CEOs insist that older workers cost more to society and send perfectly good workers to the unemployment lines with mass layoffs and reluctant hiring practices?
The tech job market is excellent for younger workers, but many of those who are laid off and over 35 will find the market less welcoming. They're perceived as too expensive. The HP layoff will consist disproportionately of older workers. Indeed, jettisoning the veterans is often the hidden agenda in mass layoffs. It's no coincidence that many of the U.S. core engineering openings at HP have titles like Recent Graduate, Intern and Post Doc, all aimed at the younger crowd.
The difficulties of older techies have been investigated statistically in studies at American University and the National Research Council, but a very public human face was placed on this recently in an online town hall meeting with President Obama.
The wife of electrical engineer Darin Wedel explained to the president that her husband has never found a permanent job after being laid off by the electronics giant Texas Instruments. Granted, family issues restricted him to the Dallas area, but if the hype regarding a seller's market for engineers were true, Wedel should have been able to find something in that region, which sadly has not been the case.
A former student of mine was a star at HP for 10 years or so, acquiring patents and promotions. Yet he, too, got caught up in a huge layoff, and could find engineering work only sporadically afterward. Ultimately he left the field.
So, elderly workers are being laid off to make way for the new, lesser-paid, generation of workers. But those same CEOs who signed those same RIF orders want older workers to continue to work to 70, just not for them or at that same salary.
And while millions of long-term, unemployed workers have been forced into lesser-paid, low-skill jobs that are traditionally held by young adults new to the work force, those young adults are also coming out of college with skills and educations, and large college loan debts that aren't able be absorbed by the structure of the work force that has been the result of the CEOs' typically self-centered actions.
This proposal to have people work until 70 is another big, easy Win for 1% CEOs and a Lose-Lose-Lose for American workers.
UPDATE: Boeing's recent trouble with lithium batteries and the resultant grounding of their newest plane, the Dreamliner 787, shows what the obsession with cheap labor and foreign-made parts gets you in today's world. |
