MYTH VS. REALITY: WHEN UPWARD MOBILITY STOPS
Hard work pays off—that is the essence of the Horatio Alger myth, which strongly shaped the lives of this generation of American men. They were brought up to believe that their manhood depended on becoming a success, and that to do this they must compete ruthlessly, move up the job ladder continuously, and make more and more money. Taught to aim for the Number 1 spot, they learned that their worth was measured by how far and how fast they scrambled up the ladder of success.
The crunch comes at mid-life, when most men discover that the yardstick by which they have always been measured has been yanked from under them. Suddenly the possibilities for continual progress on the job are dramatically narrowed. Suddenly the rewards for striving seem to have evaporated. Suddenly upward mobility turns out to be a myth.
Statistics show that only a handful of highly educated men will continue to move up the ladder after forty, while the majority will merely hold onto whatever rung they have already reached. And some, usually the least educated, will start to slip down. This is the reality in America today, according to a recent study of job problems during the middle years. What this means for most men is no more pay increases or promotions after forty.1
This halt in advancement occurs partly because our bureaucratic system organizes workers in a pyramidal form. The higher up the career ladder they go, the more power struggles and fewer jobs there are—with finally just one chief at the top. Only 1 per cent of American workers scale the heights to upper-management positions; and only 5 per cent make it into middle management.
But this is not the sole cause for dismay. Profound social changes and rapidly shifting values have made the American marketplace a much more hazardous arena in which to compete than it was several decades ago. Corporations are much less reliable than they used to be, job security exists no more, and the rewards for working hard are not as certain as they once were.
All these changes are especially hard on a generation of men who were taught that dedication and self-denial would earn them the good things in life—or even the good life. Entering their middle years, they find the payoffs smaller and the pressures larger than expected. The myths they learned to live by and the reality they now confront seem strangely out of sync.
When a man reaches mid-life the demands on him to perform professionally, as well as administratively, arc at an all-time high. At the same time, however, the pressures are compounded by a sense of rivalry on all fronts. Younger men are nipping at his heels, competing for his job, and accentuating his anger toward today’s youth. Women are entering the labor market in greater numbers and at higher levels, especially during their forties; and blacks and other minortiy groups are also making their presence felt.
For the white middle-class male this invasion of territory he always thought was his exclusively is infuriating. To make matters worse, our culture’s premium on youth has become an increasingly ominous threat. “Age discrimination in employment may start as early as thirty-five or forty in some industries and occupations, and begins to take on major dimensions at age forty-five,”2 states the National Institute of Industrial Gerontology.
To ease this “older worker” problem a federal law against age discrimination in employment was passed in 1968. But it has been poorly enforced at both the federal and the state levels. Countless middle-aged job hunters have testified to the continuing prevalence of discriminatory hiring practices, reporting that employers generally regard these laws as a farce and ignore them completely, or else simply tell the .older applicant that he is “overqualified.”
Said one forty-six-year-old man about his humiliating job hunt: “I’ll never forget getting off the train at Grand Central Station every morning for weeks, and looking up at all those tall buildings and hating them. I knew they were filled with people who didn’t want me to call them for lunch because they didn’t know what to do with me. They thought I was too old.”
Four million American males were unemployed in 1975— and the situation is expected to worsen. For men with technical skills or professional knowledge there is a threat of occupational obsolescence.3 Within the corporate world there is the increasing trend toward early retirement, both voluntary and involuntary. Although belatedly some manpower experts, economists, and sociologists have begun to doubt the wisdom of this trend, corporations are providing continuing impetus for it. The number of companies whose pension plans now contain liberalized early retirement benefits has doubled in the past decade.
Today even chief executives are discovering that their working life span is shorter than it used to be. The turnover rate among corporate presidents is now 20 per cent a year— twice what it was in the 1960s. And although a growing number of bosses are quitting voluntarily before the traditional retirement age to begin another career in public service, or to pursue some personal interest, more than half of those who leave are being forced out.
This exodus is largely due to future shock: Chief executives are being fired faster because the accelerating pace of change in our society makes running a corporation tougher than ever, and more unpredictable. Marketing cycles change rapidly. Rules and procedures become obsolete almost as soon as they are set. And dissatisfied workers as well as aggressive consumers are clamoring for more response from top management.
All these intensified pressures make the men in charge increasingly vulnerable. But the shock waves reverberate insidiously throughout the entire corporate structure, imposing a distinctly unsettling feeling of disease on men raised to value job security above all else.
Their distress is justified: Today workers at the middlemanagement and supervisory levels are competing more intensely and being judged more harshly than ever before. Thus they are actually being “defeated” at an earlier age than ever before.
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