It's an exaggeration to say that I'm back from Death's Driveway (not to mention its door). But when your major accomplishment of the last 48 hours is keeping your dinner down without having to sleep your stomach into submission, it's tempting to cast it in hyperbolic terms. I just want to go on record saying that Gatorade and Zantac are tied for second place--albeit a distant second--in awesomeness to Dr. Husband.
Anyhoo, I'm just off the phone after wishing Dad both a Happy Father's Day and a Happy Birthday besides. Dad's retired, so you can definitely keep a conversation going by mentioning the stock market or the economy in general. I sometimes question whether all financial behavior is, in fact learned. Despite the fact that my sister and I were primarily raised by our Mother (who tends toward being more generous than she can afford), I'm more of a tightwad like my Father. For all that, he and I don't always see eye-to-eye when it comes to the reasons for opening our respective wallets. I've come to the conclusion that it may be partly generational.
Both Mom and Dad grew up in the age of The Company Man, where the assumption was that you'd work for the same company for X number years and your pension would take care of you after you pocketed your gold watch. The chicanery of pension-raiding since the 1980s and the number of companies who will walk away from those obligations via bankruptcy in the 2000s and 2010s has voided that assumption. (Fortunately, I think that Mom and Dad and my Stepmom, all having made their careers in the health care industry, should be pretty safe.) Employer-sponsored 401K programs and ESOPs, being less entrenched in The American Dream, will probably melt away with less fanfare.
And that leaves us at an interesting--not in the good way, mind!--juncture. If there's no long-term incentive to stay with an employer, my guess (and it's just a guess) is that it will cost companies more in training and hiring (next to none of that on the books, mind you, which is the problem) than it would to fund some sort of retirement benefit.
Moreover, what will the shift in mentality do to a company's long-term value when everyone has to think of her/himself as a temp. in disguise? Bad enough that the number-jigglers at the top of the corporate food chain can't see past the end of the fiscal quarter. What happens when the rank and file learn that there's no point in looking beyond the next paycheck or the next raise/promotion date? Most predictably, the risk-taking that, at the ground level, drives innovation will be discouraged because no one wants to set back her/his financial future. And I think you can safely say that older workers--i.e. those likely be be in management--will be even more averse to risk, because they have less time to reboot their careers if fired. Almost ironically, I think that the risk-taking that will occur will be more an exercise in stampeding after the same main chance as most of the market-sector, with no regard to the long-term viability of any investment.
On the long-term, macro level, that probably wouldn't be any great loss. There are any number of unimaginative, unremarkable and criminally thick-headed companies--heck, make that whole industries--that I would dearly looooove to see pwned by cheeky startups. Barring competition-stifling regulation, that's pretty much a given in some cases. And that's the B-side of the proverbial coin, when by "the coin" I mean a work culture that no longer operates on a service-for-security compact.
Between those two scenarios, the classic American corporation may not only be digging its own grave, but also carving its headstone besides. If it weren't for the disruption that it will cause, I'd say good riddance. But, historically, social and economic upheavals almost always translate into the rich becoming more so at the expense of the middle and lower classes, so I'm not at all anxious to see that happen.
