The End of Retirement
May 1, 2006
An esteemed colleague read three paragraphs of news clip on employer pensions before he realized it was from the satirical newspaper The Onion. The tip off was the interview with an eighty-seven-year-old machine shop worker struggling with widowhood, high stress, and early stage Alzheimer's at General Electric. Early stage Alzheimer's was the first clue, not the eighty-seven-years of age. Satire writers must have a holy grail of seconds before the earnest reader starts chuckling; my colleague's delay might be a record. It takes three seconds to know "Cindy Sheehan loses second son in Katrina" is a lampoon. The reason it took so long to laugh at a news story that GE was adopting a new policy of "lifetime" jobs and a new forty-five-year vesting period for their pensions is that it is credible; the signs of the end of retirement are all around
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