When Will We Finally Get A Gold Watch?

The retirement party will all but disappear. So will retirement

Remember when the gold watch was a metaphor for retirement from a corporate culture that cared for its workers during those years between wedding and Winnebago? A company took you in after college and for 40 years gave you Christmas bonuses and ignored your martini breath after lunch. In exchange, at 65 you left with a Rolex or a gold-plated Timex, depending on pay scale.

Like other '50s myths, this one was never really true. Even 20 years ago, only 7.7% of men in the private sector had worked at the same company for 25 years. In an era when computer...

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