Long before quiet quitting, boomers rejected "working for the man," says UNC sociologist Arne Kalleberg, "which is exactly what’s happening now."
Long before quiet quitting, boomers rejected "working for the man," says UNC sociologist Arne Kalleberg, "which is exactly what’s happening now."
The ideal job of the 1950s looked a great deal like a marriage. As Fortune editor William Whyte wrote in his classic workplace study The Organization Man, by midcentury, the ranks of the rapidly growing white-collar workforce became filled with young men who had left their hometowns to devote themselves to their companies. It was an anonymous, bureaucratic turn for the supposedly ruggedly individualistic American economy. In turn, the employers, flush with profits in the postwar economic boom and wanting to retain their talent, offered a steady stream of promotions and carrots, like health insurance and pensions, that kept people tied to their employer. Then the job-hoppers arrived and consigned the organization man to history.
The dominant media narrative of the last several decades pinned the blame for this on Gen Z and millennial up-and-comers, often painted as the mercenaries who killed off corporate loyalty—ready to walk the minute they don’t get all they ask for, and the driving force behind the Great Resignation, “quiet quitting,” “rage applying,” and any number of similar workforce trends.
But the federal government itself has weighed in with new data that exposes this has been a lie. The original job-hoppers were none other than the baby boomers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who switched employers at least as much, and possibly more frequently, than millennials did at the same age.
In particular, men born in the second half of the baby boom era, 1957 to 1964, had racked up an impressive 10 jobs by the time they turned 34, and averaged 12.7 jobs by the time they turned 56, the BLS noted in a recently released report. Most of that job-hopping, as one might expect, happened early in their careers, with, on average, just under one job per year between ages 18 and 24, more than millennials did at the same age.
“In the beginning of your career, you sample the job market, you look around and see what is available, and you don’t get into stability until you’re in your 30s or 40s. That is a pattern that’s always held true,” said sociologist Arne Kalleberg, who teaches at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Indeed, rather than belonging to a particular generation, job-hopping appears to be a byproduct of the modern economy: a behavior that most workers experience early in their career (something they often forget that they had done once they’re more established). Like Gen Zers today, millennials and Generation X and, yes, even boomers had to contend with accusations that their desire for meaningful work, decent pay, and work-life balance were unreasonable. In fact, the boomers initiated the rebellion against the “organization man” mindset of their parents, Kalleberg said.
“Young people in the late ’60s, and ’70s began to criticize this view of work, because it was part of the establishment. They started rejecting the materialism of their parents and saying, ‘we’re going to find self-actualization,’” Kalleberg said.
“They rejected this idea of working for the man, which is exactly what’s happening now,” he added.
More stable than their predecessors
If anything, compared with their predecessors, millennials job-hopped at a slower rate. According to BLS figures, older millennials—those born between 1980 and 1984—had held an average of seven jobs by age 28, one less than baby boomers at the same age. At age 34, millennials averaged 8.6 jobs, about one less than baby boomers at the same age.
Blame the 2007 financial crisis, the Great Recession that followed, and the excruciatingly slow “jobless recovery” that hit young people hardest. Job hopping is one sign of a strong economy—workers don’t move unless they have somewhere to move to. In the decade after the recovery and until the pandemic, “the labor market just hasn’t been as tight, so people didn’t have as many opportunities to switch jobs,” said Nick Bunker, chief economist at job board Indeed.
Another reason, economists say, is that today’s young people stay in school longer and take more time to formally enter the job market, which reduces the number of jobs they hold on average during their lifetimes. And the heavy student debt load racked up by young graduates has also likely made them less inclined to take risks by job-switching.
In fact, while some pundits today worry that the stereotypical younger worker is “disengaged” or “doesn’t see a future” with their employer, as Gallup wrote in a poll this year, it wasn’t so long ago that economists had the opposite worry—that younger workers don’t move around enough.
In 2016, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco highlighted “a pronounced decline in the job switching behavior of young workers,” and mused whether those workers were choosing job security “at the cost of diminished experimentation with different jobs.” That same year, another set of Federal Reserve researchers highlighted the trend at a Brookings Institution symposium, noting that “Less fluidity in the labor market leads to fewer opportunities for workers… and thus may have important implications for the macro economy in general.”
No more ‘organization man’
The data also makes clear that the archetype of the “company man” who stays in a single job for his entire career was well on the decline by the time baby boomers came of age. To be sure, some of the boomer generation who started working in the late 1970s and early 1980s had this experience of stability. But this was also the decade that ushered in massive de-industrialization, the transition from a goods to a services economy, the decline of unions that had protected workers and encouraged company loyalty, and the mass layoff as a corporate strategy. (One of the strategy’s early proponents, General Electric CEO Jack Welch, eliminated a quarter of the company’s jobs in the first half of the 1980s, Quartz notes.)
Against the backdrop of this ever-more-uncertain economy, it’s no wonder that younger generations have tended to switch jobs less and less. The decades of the early 2000s, in which workers stayed put more and more, skewed Americans’ perception of what a “normal” job market looks like, noted Indeed’s Bunker. “We got used to such low levels of quitting and job switching, that [after the pandemic] when it went back to where it was in the year 2000, people got angsty,” he said.
Outside of a layoff, job hopping has well-documented benefits for workers. Getting a new job is usually the easiest way to get a raise, with pay for job switchers consistently rising faster than for those who keep the same job, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The young boomers who switched jobs nearly every year at the start of their careers saw annual pay jumps of 6.5%, the BLS found. Pay—the reason most humans work—remains a major motivator today. When consulting firm McKinsey earlier this year asked workers why they took a new job, nearly all groups gave the same No. 1 reason: More pay.
“Worker mobility—the ability to find and take another job—is at the core of worker power,” economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, wrote last year.
Not only that, but higher rates of job-switching are associated with a more productive economy overall, according to a recent working paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“Over the long term, people moving around and finding the best fit for their career is going to be a good thing for productivity,” said Jesse Wheeler, senior economist at the business intelligence company Morning Consult. “Ultimately we want people doing jobs they like as much as possible and they are good at.”
Pay—the reason most humans work—remains a major motivator today. When consulting firm McKinsey earlier this year asked workers why they took a new job, nearly all groups gave the same No. 1 reason: More pay.
Getting a new job is usually the easiest way to get a raise, with pay for job switchers consistently rising faster than for those who keep the same job
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I have the very slight suspicion that it's not actually the workers to blame for not staying at a company their whole life.
The only difference is how much each generation realizes what's going on. Surprise surprise, as the disparity in wealth grows, more people are realizing we shouldn't support it.
I was a manager at a big bank. They were having problems with attrition, so every manager had to doing a dumb HR class about retention. During the class, they asked us how we thought we could improve the retention rate. My immediate response was pay more and drop their policy of focusing on paying bonuses over giving raises. The HR person was dumbfounded and we spent the whole time talking about trust exercises...
Exactly. I'd bet good money most people don't get enjoyment out of job hopping, but it's almost necessary these days because companies have become increasingly disloyal and stingy towards employees.
If companies would just offer decent raises, meaningful career progression, and two-way loyalty, I'd bet most folks wouldn't job hop at all!
It wasn't the employees who killed the "Company Man". It was the companies themselves. Corporations value short term profit above all else, including long term stability. This means that the older, higher paid employees are a liability, not a benefit. So, they get shown the door the first time the line doesn't go up. Loyalty is a two way street. If the company isn't loyal to it's employees, the employees won't be loyal to the company. Once people woke up to the fact that the corporations are fully mercenary about employment, it was a natural reaction for the employees to become mercenary as well.
This is also why every company pushes bullshit about "we're a family". It's a bald faced lie to sucker gullible employees into thinking that the company wouldn't gut them and sell their organs at the first sign of that making a quick buck.
Every worker should watch this video at least once. It was speaking to designers, but is applicable everywhere.
Corporations value short term profit above all else, including long term stability.
It didn't used to be this way. I mean, all Corporations need to be profitable, of course, and the successful ones are more profitable. But using Shareholder Value as the main (perhaps only) metric for decisions didn't really come around until the 80's and Jack Welch at GE started talking about it extensively.
This focus on shareholder value exclusively also implies that Corporations do not have any responsibility to anyone except its shareholders. You can see the effects of this philosophy even today, where Republicans attack corporate ESG initiatives because they feel that they undermine this commitment to increasing shareholder value. It even extends to the Twitter mess: Twitter's board felt they had to force the sale to Musk at the inflated price he offered because it was so much higher than the company was objectively worth, and would be the best return for its shareholders, even though they probably knew he would end up wrecking the company (and screwing over employees). They felt they could only make decisions for the benefit of shareholders, and not employees or users.
This is not even true. In fact, the fastest growing companies are the ones that have the potential to be profitable in the future. The established ones that are run into the ground are often profitable, but it makes more money in the short term for vultures to dismantle and sell off the parts.
The real issue is that the tax structure incentivizes terrible business practices that rapidly funnel money into the wealthy instead of rewarding ownership of businesses for that are successful in the long term.
Seriously. I watched both of my parents get their "good jobs" sold right out from under them to private equity firms that laid off all the older, more expensive workers immediately. I, myself, was laid off twice before I turned 28 years old.
I have zero incentive to be "loyal" to any company when they so clearly will never be loyal to me. What a load of horseshit.
This is literally the definition of a liberal market economy. Bust unions and make it easy to hire and fire, and what you'll get is a highly mobile and vibrant but unspecialised workforce. Great for quick innovation like silicon valley, less great for traditional manufacturing that requires specialized talents.
It's all wanted politics - maybe more than anything, this is what they busted the unions for.
Which was set up by the rich to deflect the heat they should have taken, but don't worry; your generation will be vilified by the following ones as well, and the rich will still profit.
The reason there’s no organization man is because people in the current times have been exposed to the lie that is being part of the organizational “family”. Since employers are willing to discard employees like they are trash and cut pay and benefits while spouting the rhetoric of being a part of the family really laid bare how all of it was a PR campaign. I will change jobs as frequently as I need to keep advancing my career. If employers don’t deliver on their promises, I don’t need to show them any loyalty.
yeah, loyalty is earned. You can't get loyalty unless something bad happens and then the company makes a decision in favor of the employees at the expense of the company
I just have to say, while most companies operate exactly how you describe, that is certainly not all of them.
It's sad. Even the word 'company' should mean that you're in this together. It's what it means in militaries. It's what it means in social settings. It should also mean it in businesses. It used to, at one point. At one point people actually did work together and enjoyed a fair return on their labor. It was the only way to reliably get things done. People had to be dedicated.
It’s true but this is capitalism. The companies that still believe that either have a massive market share or a unique product (while it lasts) that allows them to do this. But most companies are driven by stock market share holders or by VCs. They’re all ruining it for everyone. Companies can’t afford to have bad years. If they do, employees pay for it through reductions in wages/benefits (collectively; not individually) or through all out layoffs. That always puts the employees in the line of fire. So a lot of companies can’t take care of their employees because they will get punished by their wealthy benefactors.
Age is apparently a very easy wedge issue to exploit. Rather than baby boomers blaming millenials or millennials blaming baby boomers, people should be complaining at the upper class who exploited baby boomers to the point they had no option but to job hop and the same upper class who guilt trip millenials into not doing it.
Objectively speaking, boomers have caused pretty much everything, though. Corporate leadership, it kind of depends, but most large corps use (or used,) boomer ceos.
Boomers also dominate politics etc, meaning they’ve had a disproportionate impact on current us society…. And a lions share of the blame. This has been true for as long as I’ve been alive, more or less.
Yes but those boomers had CEOs with the same age difference. There's a correlation with age, but I don't think there's a causal link with generation. Like with politics, it's typically dominated by people that are older - but also people of a certain social class. Different generations feed through but it's primarily the same class of people dictating things and making things shit for everyone.
Most boomers are just people like everyone else, they're trying to get by, the only difference is the opportunity afforded to them. They had more opportunity, and it's the people in charge of their generation that are causing a problem now, but it was the people in charge of the generations before them that caused them problems. The problem isn't the different generations, it's the people in charge, regardless of generation.
It makes sense that boomers had more jobs over their working life, they lived in an era where they could quit one job and have another job by the end of that week without any pre-planning.
Once again lazy writers arbitrarily wedge 1980-84 up into the millenial category so it can muddle details just enough to reinforce a narrative.
78ish to 85ish is a Xennial, a uniquely defined generation between X and Millennial. We took part in the last vestiges of an analog lifestyle period as our early lives steadily evolved into a computing connected and defined digital era that Millenials were further born into.
Xennial is a relatively new classification, and while I don't disagree that there are very important differences between the world that older and younger millennials grew up in, and probably moreso than the difference between the older and younger segments of previous generations, but I think it's still fair to lump us all in as millennials as a broader category, with xennials and zennials and whatever you want to call those in the middle as sub-categories/micro-generations/etc.
The use of the term Xennial itself is more recent, but the classification definitely isn't. I've seen Gen X classed as late as 1982, so there's always some muddling.
What they said is a lie, anyways. Collective action is the core of worker power. "Mobility" is a feature of a low worker power environment where we aren't able to extract our demands from our work places. Who would want to spend time looking for new jobs if we could just get good raises, advancement, and work life balance out of the jobs we've already got?
Don't trust fortune.com to talk about worker issues honestly, it's a rag for the other side of the equation.
Yeah, you can probably plot a graph that shows union membership declining at the same pace as 'company loyalty' or whatever. The job hopping phenomenon is largely caused by corporations themselves, who stopped giving raises and promotions and started doing regular layoffs.
the idea of "the company man" was really already gone by the time Gen X got to the professional workplace.. nobody expected to spend a career in one place, although there were still "career companies" around trying to create that atmosphere, and the promise of the older attitudes of being "part of a culture" and things like that.. any attempts by recruiters to peddle those ideas now has to be pure pantomime..
I saw Wells Fargo discard peers of mine because they were older. Despite, their ability to perform. And they were with the company for 20-25 years. This is my upbringing in the corporate world. They sure loved celebrating someone retiring after that time and would send out emails and throw parties but when the dust settled, you didn’t matter to them as an employee. People got to see that especially in the 2008 downturn.
the 90s saw a really hard erosion of labor bargaining power for blue and white collars, and that power and money moving up into the boardroom.. it seems to have just gone downhill since, although workers are more mobile than ever, especially in the white collar world.. but it just means less security in the end, especially when you have to consider health care in this country..