On 2002-05-26 16:49, wrstrutts wrote:
In response to your data on WWII draft laws, I know for a fact that my father born on Nov 14, 1904 was drafted into the US Army Air Corps in Feb of 1942 and served until the fall of 1943. He was a Staff Sargent and was assigned to Hamilton Field in California where he was an airplane mechanic. He trained new recruits into the maintenance of Air Planes for the Pacific fleet.
He was also heavily involved in the US labor movement in the 1930's. He was in the Flint Sitdown Strike of 1932 and 1937. The 1937 strike brought GM auto production to a halt and forced the company to sign a pact with the UAW. In the following years, the union strikes were just a threat to get GM to conceed more benefits to his generation. The next twenty years the Big Three auto companies gave a lot of ground to the union movements. The major benefits to the High was that other corporations non automotive related were forced to match benefits. The early Gen Xers heard of this contract with labor but were never to actually benefit from it. These benefits were gradually removed from the younger generations as corporations fought the battle with Japan Inc in the 1980's. The major effect of this this was for the younger generations to loose hope that they would ever benefit from the system and giving creedence to the Gen Xer cynicism. The GI's got the benefits and the younger generation lost out.
When the Gen Xers began entereing the work force in the mid-80's. It was a period of great generational divide in the economic realm. Those over 30, were firmly entrenced in the old system and were guaranteed good benefits and long term commitments. Those under 30, saw the great GI Social Safety net dismantled and the end of the FDR "New Deal". The old system was replaced by the laisez faire system of trickle down espoused by Ronald Reagan and the great decade where "greed is good". The effect of this was that corporations were no longer good citizens and began to reduce benefits with the blessing of the Reagan administration. For example, think of the airline strikes in the mid-80's where Ronald Regan basically fired the air traffic controllers union.
The effect of this new economic reality was that corporations no longer had to be good corporate citizens and began to downsize operations to maximize its profits. This great downsizing lead many younger boomers to the take entry level jobs that would normally be open for the upcoming college grads. The college grads then had to fill the positions normally filled by HS graduates and the HS graduates were out of work. Look at the statitistics of the mid-west states. The 80's saw the unemployment rate amoung under 30 people at an all time high. In Michigan, the over 30 unemployment rate was 11%. The under 30 was even more dramatic. The under 30 white unemployment rate was 30% while the black 20 year olds it was closer to 50%.
I don't ever recall this positive decade that many of you quote as being your 80's memories. It was a harsh decade for twenty somethings and the net result was that most of my peers became hard and cynical. You did what you had to do to survive and so we started our own business or we moved to where the jobs were. We became nomadic because we had to survive. That is what Reaganomics means to me.
The older employed boomers saw all of us college graduates working McJobs and called us slackers. They saw us living with parents still because we didn't make enough at McJob to afford our own place. They did not understand a system went awry and did not understand the new employment situation. My elder boomer siblings were often telling me how to run my life and that I should be more motivated. After a while, we tired of the boomer lectures and began tuning them out. Whatever became a way to dismiss their lectures. If we became cynical, it was because we saw the old rules slip away and the bar forever raised higher in the older gens favor.
