Monday, December 24, 2012

The American Dream is fading for young professionals

After being dismissed from her job as a Midtown Manhattan securities attorney in October 2009, Christina Tretter-Herriger hitched a used horse trailer to her Dodge Ram pickup and drove 1,628 miles to Texas. 
The 32-year-old lawyer sold skin-care products in Houston before finding work as the assistant general counsel of a futures-trading firm where an irate customer punctuated a recorded voice-mail message with gunfire. 
“No one was left with the impression that he just happened to be phoning from a sporting clays range,” she says. 
Eighteen months and two busted jobs later, the daughter of a retired physician and a former editor at Vogue circled back to upstate New York and hunkered down at a small legal office that pays about one-quarter of her former $165,000 salary.
Generation Y professionals entering the workforce are finding careers that once were gateways to high pay and upwardly mobile lives turning into detours and dead ends. Average incomes for individuals ages 25 to 34 have fallen 8 percent, double the adult population’s total drop, since the recession began in December 2007. Their unemployment rate remains stuck one-half to 1 percentage point above the national figure. 
Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last. The nation’s younger workers have benefited least from an economic recovery that has been the most uneven in recent history.
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1 comment:

CRUZ COUNTRY said...

Hard to figure out why so many of these unemployed & underemployed young men & women voted to re-elect Obama, unless they just enjoy being on the government dole.

It's not as if Romney was going to remove the safety net if he got elected.

He was simply going to make the safety net less necessary by creating a growing economy with rising incomes and lower unemployment.