Technology which actually reduced the amount of people needed to run larger scaled organizations and businesses. Both in terms of physical labor and service labor. You just didn't need a secretary or accounting pool, or file clerks anymore. Nor did you need as many people to run programmable machinery in the factories, or farm hands to help with harvest or at a dairy.
Corporations realized quickly the benefits of canning higher paid executive and management assistants, and saw that as an excuse for consolidating and restructuring their
internal company labor across the board.
The Post War boom was getting harder to sustain;
loosening regulations affecting big businesses and mergers which creating even more lost jobs as smaller businesses were bought out or couldn't compete.
Baby boomers flooding the job markets as their parents retired or sold their small businesses. Also, fewer and fewer boomers wanted to keep the family farm or small business; developers were offering them instant wealth to take all that hard work off their hands once Dad was no longer making the decisions and the heirs realized the amount of hard work it took to keep things running.
This is still going on; Boomers have found the get rich quick policies of the 70's and 80's did not enable a majority of them to retire and go on to do whatever made them happy as their parents did (401ks are not pensions....) in the 90's and early 2000's as they expected and the jobs they've been holding on to or keeping from younger workers are just starting to unclog. In the mean time, available jobs are again stratifying between physical labor/low end service and "professional" at an alarming rate - more people competing for fewer well paying jobs while those who make money off money take the lion's share of both money and power.
Boomers were the first large cohort of teenagers as we know today, and a larger percentage of them just weren't able to make the leap from a longer childhood to adulthood. This isn't a "kids these days" observation, this is seeing the difference between a far more time consuming work load my "Silent/Greatest Generation" grandparents had between jobs and home maintenance, and the increasing amount of leisure time my parents and I had to be able to just - hang out and veg - after work and chores.
All this being said, Americans have always been a bit more focused on what you do to make or have money than who you are and what you like to do. I suspect that's where a lot of our current malaise comes from. People don't count. Your potential skills or talents don't matter.
The money you can make for yourself or someone else is the only thing that seems to give Americans a sense of value to themselves and others. And that's a bad reflection on our society in general.
Haele
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