The suddenly lost generation?

I noticed a handful at a South End event for professionals who had recently lost their jobs. I saw more in line at a Concord job fair for a new hotel resort. They were the best dressed of the job seekers, in business suits and with briefcases, the way they had gone to work for decades.

Boomers - the generation some are prematurely faulting for the credit crunched recession - might be the generation that will struggle hardest with it.

The unemployment rate for adults age 55 and older was 5.2 percent in January 2009, the highest since July 1992, the New York Times said in an article this weekend on Generation B. About 1.7 million adults 55 and older are unemployed now, according to Department of Labor statistics. That's almost twice as many as in November 2007.

There is no good age to lose a job, but Boomers find themselves in a particularly perilous place. They cannot pivot into new careers as some younger workers can. They face withering retirement accounts and just 10-20 years of employment - maybe less - to replenish them. They worry that future employers will think them overqualified - or assume they don't have the drive of the younger set.

They are easy to spot at the job fairs, dressed for interviews the old-school way - proper business attire, resume at the ready. In the line for the Great Wolf Lodge in Concord were accountants, promoters, marketing execs. One woman, who was reluctant to give her name, had worked in marketing before getting laid off a few months before - "Not a big surprise," she said, given the economy - but the scarcity of jobs since had stunned her.

She knew that the jobs awaiting her in this line were different - with significantly lower pay - than what she had done for the last two decades. But she and so many others have a longer-term worry, too.

They never expected the one job/one company stability their parents' generation enjoyed, but many still believed that if you were good at what you did, you'd be able to do it for as long as you wanted. Now this economy, built on the consumerism and credit spree many will lay at the Boomers' feet, is contracting. The high-paying jobs they performed might be a long way off - if they return at all.

It's the most frightening prospect for all workers - but perhaps this generation more than any other, standing in line, looking out at the others, looking oddly out of place in a world where everything has changed.

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