I was talking to my wife of 37 years last night. We were commiserating how the workplace has changed over the years since we first were married in 1975. We both worked for large corporations back then that had at least 25,000 employees worldwide. Where my wife worked, there was a mixture of union and non-union employees; my wife was a salaried exempt employee. My company may have had union workers in the factory, but I was a technical field rep so I too was a salaried except employee. We both had full medical and dental benefits, education reimbursement, reasonably generous vacation plans and a pension for that long off prospect of retirement. I remember that when I went to our HR person, s/he talked about my retirement in 2016. Boy, I thought that was an eternity away. Back then, it was. Neither my wife nor I really thought about our employment package, because it was rather standard for professional jobs in the 70s. Our employers even tried to keep us at least at parity during the big inflation period of the 70s and 80s. We weren’t rich by any standard, but with two incomes and no children, we had enough to buy a house, buy cars, eat out frequently and extra time and money to work in the yard and enjoy life. Then we started having kids.
My wife decided after her maternity leave that having perpetual sick baby and sick mother because of germs spread at day care was not for us, so she quit her paying job and became a full-time mom. She had no regrets. It was entirely her decision and we did pretty well with just one salary. By that time, I was working for a successful Silicon Valley start-up. A few years later, we had a second child. Both girls.
I won’t talk about the time my kids were growing up, it was a great experience and we have two great daughters. What I will talk about is how the work environment changed during that time.
I was in senior management of a start-up. We went public, I sold some stock, but as things go with some rising hopes, the harsh reality sinks in as the stock price drops. My hopes of being a multi-millionaire were dashed in a short few days. Our company went into a tail spin and my department went from 100 engineers to 15 before I was asked to leave. Two weeks later, the company declared bankruptcy. Two people went to jail, but I was lucky, I just lost millions of dollars just like the investors and a cool job. I looked for work but it was not good. Engineering teams in Silicon Valley were being sent to India, lock-stock and barrel. I interviewed for a few positions that called on my traveling to China and India, but they never panned out. People began wanting younger employees and I wasn’t getting any younger. I hung up my shingle as a Consultant and found barely enough to keep me in Cheetos.
My wife was a little better off. She found a part time position as a librarian in the local elementary school. It was a fun place, she really likes kids, but it provided no benefits and paid a little over minimum wage. What an incredible let down from the world before NAFTA. My wife decided to go back to school to get a teaching credential. I found random professional jobs, some with benefits, some without. Start-ups of the new millennium were very different unless you worked for Google or Intel.
My daughters got older and got various minimum wage jobs as they went to college. We ran up an incredible student loan debt, but both my daughters finished college with Bachelor of Arts degrees. If I had my druthers, I would have had them get engineering degrees and work in the software business, but they had no interest. My first daughter found absolutely nothing in her field, teaching music in high schools. My second daughter is a little bit luckier, she is a teaching aide for San Francisco School District while she attends grad school. My oldest daughter went back to technical school to become a pharmacy technician. She did it all on her own nickel and interned at a major drug store for 2 months without any pay. She got a job at that drug store, but within a year, she was fired for mistakenly giving the wrong prescription to a non-English speaker who didn’t understand when asked to verify her address or identity. No doubt, it was my daughter’s fault, but they canned her on the spot. Boom, no severance pay, no nothing. Her husband came out no better for the same organization. He was fired for calling a customer on his cell phone because the store phone was busy. Both happened within 2 months. I believe the corporation was looking to downsize and looked for any excuse to can people on any cause they could. It wasn’t like that when I was young. People are expected to make a few mistakes. All this accomplishes is to instill fear in the co-workers left in the aftermath of the apocalypse.
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