Workplace Issues

Who's fault is it that Social Security is going bankrupt? Baby Boomers? I don't think so. All we hear about is the huge population of Baby Boomers who will take more from social security than it has to give. Excuse me, but what happened to all the money the huge population of Baby Boomers paid in income and social security taxes over the last 40 years?

If there's a big bubble now, there was a big bubble then. While the government received windfall revenues from the largest population of workers ever in the history of the United States, what were the OMB economists and politicians doing? Did it not occur to them that this generation of heavy-taxpaying citizens was going to grow old? It should have looked like a seasonal cash flow problem to them—the kind of problem that budgeters with even the most meager resources know how to handle—when you get most of your income in one season, you save for the slower seasons. Got a glut of tax revenue in one generation? Save for its old age—it's practically a no-brainer. But it's so much easier to blame the generation whose taxes were squandered for still being alive.

And now the trend is to blame Baby Boomers for the demise of corporate pensions! What were those OMB economists and politicians doing while the global marketplace was developing the capacity to compete with the US on price? Why didn't it occur to those supposedly forward-looking people that US companies were going to have to cut costs to compete? Why did they continue to allow US employers to hold the Boomer generation hostage for health benefits and pensions when simple math calculations would show those costs couldn't be sustained in the age of globalization?

It was the Silent Generation that made all those decisions. Now the Boomer generation is trying to help make late-life easier for its children—because Boomers learned the hard way that silence isn't golden.

By the year 2015, 54 percent of contracting officers will be eligible to retire from the federal government. But it's not only the government that will lose senior employees.

All Baby Boomers, the large population bubble of people born between 1946 and 1964, will soon be eligible to retire. Among them are people who are sick and tired of reporting to miscreant bosses who routinely get away with their misdeeds. These retirees will be relieved to leave workplaces riddled with bad bosses; they're so soured that it's unlikely they'll want to work in anyone else's enterprise ever again.

But this demographic group is also composed of a bunch of bad bosses. So, if baby-boomer bad bosses retire, will the US workplace become healthy for younger employees? No, absolutely not. Why not? Because personality types are the product of both genetics and experience. Greed, insecurity and jealously, the most likely root cause of bad-boss behavior, are not exclusive to any particular age group. The same personality types continually emerge, even in new generations.

A scientific word describes this phenomenon: autopoiesis. The word comes from biology, from the study of living cells that continually replicate themselves to sustain the life of the organism. It is also used in systems theory to describe what happens in organizations. Organizations continue to replicate themselves and function as always as long as no catastrophic event forces them to change. The military and the postal service are examples of organizations that continue to function pretty much as they always have; they existed when you were a kid and they still exist today although different people work there now—uniforms and equipment may have changed, but these organizations still function basically as they always have.

So a catastrophic event would have to occur to change bad boss behavior in the workplace--higher-level managers would have to stop replicating themselves.