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Employers have already despaired of the Baby Boomers' unwillingness to serve their time as modestly paid drudges in return for future reward and advancement. Certainly, young workers do not hesitate to demand more interesting work and more flexible hours (although, suspicious as ever of large and impersonal institutions, they have proved notably reluctant to join labor unions to press their demands). "We have less loyalty to companies, and we put up with a lot less than our parents," concedes Rick Garnitz, 37, who quit his job as a marketing manager at Xerox and started his own life-planning firm in Atlanta.
Rather than fight the corporate grind, many Baby Boomers have simply moved on to the next job. "People are less wedded to the institution of a career," says Harvard Professor Robert Reich, 39, who was profiled in TIME's cover story on the class of '68, and in 1984 became a prominent economic adviser to Democratic candidates. "Almost all of my friends are doing different things from five years ago, and five years ago, they were doing different things from five years before. Success today is more a subjective condition based in your own head than an objective condition established by society." It remains to be seen how Boomers will define success in middle age, when job switching is a risky business and those who stay put are more likely to earn real responsibility and power.
The Baby Boomers value entrepreneurship over climbing the career ladder. Their hero may be Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer who made a fortune with personal computers and then was forced to resign when he made moves to start a whole new enterprise, Next, Inc. "It's the idea that you can do it in the garage and wag your finger at IBM and get away with it," says Landon Jones. "And then when the company gets too institutionalized and oppressive, you start over."
The beau ideal of the Baby Boomer corporations may be People Express, the cut-rate airline run largely by Boomers in their 20s and 30s in an atmosphere free of a bureaucratic chain of command. But as the work ethic of the Baby ; Boomers collides with accepted corporate norms, and as the younger generation begins to move into top jobs in tradition-bound companies, it bodes an interesting tug-of-war. Will Baby Boomers mold corporations? Or will it be the other way around?
The greatest change that Baby Boomers have brought to the workplace is, in a word, women. Today, 53% of the work force is female. There have always been many women who worked, of course, but increasingly women are breaking out of the old "pink ghetto" and moving into areas that were once exclusively male preserves--in law firms, doctors' offices and the executive suite. Many are continuing to work after they marry. Both husband and wife work in two-thirds of young married couples ages 25 to 34, up from 47% in 1973.