Bloomberg News, sent from my iPhone.
Generation X Stymied by Baby Boomers Refusing to Give Up Jobs
“We’re like the layer in between the cookies”
Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- In Tiffany Spaulding’s 12 years in the pharmaceutical industry, she’s worked for three companies, two of which no longer exist, and relocated to four states.
Now 39 and living in Brookfield, Connecticut, she hasn’t had a promotion in five years and says she sees no chance to advance, stuck behind a wall of baby boomers. She would quit and turn her hobby of jewelry design into a business, she says, if not for the home and school loans that eat up half her salary.
Spaulding, according to a new report, is a typical member of the relatively small group called Generation X, 46 million Americans born between 1965 and 1978: They’re ambitious, squeezed by debt and frustrated by people who aren’t retiring on schedule. More than a third hope to leave their jobs in three years, a survey of more than 1,100 members of Generation X by the Center for Work-Life Policy found.
Twenty-eight percent say they are working longer hours, an average of 10 more a week than three years ago, and credit card debt helps dictate career choices for 74 percent, according to the center’s report, based on research including interviews with Spaulding and 200 others.
“They are being leaned on from all sides,” says Sylvia Ann Hewlett, a co-author of the report and the founder of the center, based in New York. “They don’t think that there is necessarily a clear set of opportunities ahead of them in corporate America, so there is a lot of flight risk.”
