It really was a powerful piece. I only had the television on due to a potential tornado situation, but I got pulled into the program. One guy had a $200k job in human resources, but he hasn’t worked for something like two years. One administrative assistant got up early to go through her neighborhood dumpters “before the homeless guy got there.” (They didn’t give the homeless guy a chance to respond, of course!)
While boomers like myself are impacted (part-time for the first time in my life) it is the generation coming out of school that is simply being leveled. Law school graduates are substitute teachers. Young engineers close to taking their license exams are being laid off. Rush had a statistic that I could not believe until I looked it up: 85 percent of college seniors surveyed planned to move back in with their parents.
Couple this with the financial collapse and the potential for a spike in energy and food costs, and we may have the Great Depression and change.
Yet, they voted overwhelmingly for the "change" Obama is bringing them. I predict that this is a generation that will become conservative much faster than normal. Getting mugged by reality has a way of doing that to people.
This is common for people who are in director and VP positions during a down economy. I have a former VP who spent nine months unemployed after being let go during a restructuring i 2006 during the boom years. I have another former boss, a senior director, who spent over a year unemployed in California after being laid off.
In the white collar world, redundant management is the first to go when the economy gets bad. In the 60 Minutes piece, not only was the HR director laid off, but also a fiber-optics engineering manager.
It is also why I am quite comfortable being only a first-level manager. If I lose my job I can always move down one level back to my old role. Get two levels above it, and you are looking for another management position, and those are impossible in a down economy.
That is why I fewer issues about big salaries and golden parachutes for senior management. I know too many directors and VPs who struggled to get hired even in the boom times. Companies like to promote from within.