Working life wasn’t always easy for Geraldine Pennie and her husband.

Work as a tool and die maker was well paying, but intermittent, for her husband, Doug. For Pennie, there was a series of contracts in social welfare, including running subisidized housing. Neither spouse was in a job that had a private pension. Still, they were delighted to discover they could easily afford to buy a home, take summer camping trips with their son and daughter, and even enjoy the odd vacation in Florida. Now 74, Pennie looks back and sees a good life — one where if you worked hard, you could count on a decent income.

“It wasn’t always stable, but we always had hope we could find something else. And when money came in, you could pay stuff off,” said Pennie. Today, she lives in a clean, bright apartment in the east end of Toronto. She’s not wealthy, she says, but she doesn’t want for anything. She’s comfortable.

It’s a life she worries her children’s generation might not be able to achieve. And new data shows she’s probably right. According to a study being released Monday by the United Way of Greater Toronto, seniors — once the lowest rung on the income ladder — have caught up with and then surpassed young adults over the past few decades. The study, titled “Rebalancing the Opportunity Equation” — to which the Star was given exclusive advance access — found that between 1980 and 2015, seniors in Toronto saw their average annual income surge by 54 per cent, from $32,000 to $49,400. At the same time, young adults, ages 25 to 34, saw their incomes stagnate and fall — from $42,300 to $41,800. People in middle age — defined by the study as being 35 to 64 — remained at the top of the income pile.

“For seniors, there has been a clear and signficant shift away from the bottom … this analysis shows that young adults have become relatively poorer over time, while the economic prospects for seniors have improved,” the report notes.

“My dad was a cop, then worked for Hydro. My mother was a teacher. When they retired, they both had half-decent pensions. People of my stepkids’ generation just don’t have the same opportunities,” said report author Michelynn Lafleche in an interview.

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It’s a trend decades in the making, said Malcolm Hamilton, a pension industry consultant and former actuary at human resources consulting giant Mercer. And the reasons, Hamilton says, range from the gig economy faced by millennials, to the increasing number of women collecting Canada Pension Plan cheques and baby boomers drawing income from their RRSPs.

“This has been changing for a long time. And there is never just one explanation for something like this,” said Hamilton.

The main reason is that seniors are getting more money from the government than ever before. While the benefits paid by the Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (paid to low-income seniors) have stayed largely the same, today a much higher proportion of seniors are collecting them, Hamilton said.

“With baby boomers in retirement, we’re now seeing more women collecting CPP than a generation ago, because there were more women working. It’s not so much that the program has gotten more generous as it is that more people are using it,” said Hamilton. “In the 1970s, a retiring woman would have little work history.”

Despite the dramatic improvement in income levels for seniors, they’re still actively courted by politicians, who continue to offer up tax breaks and benefits. That’s because they’re one of the demographic groups who most reliably show up at the polls, said Hamilton.

“Long after seniors ceased to be poorer, there would be campaign after campaign with freebies for seniors, when the people who have it tough are younger, working adults.”

Politicians aren’t the only ones playing to seniors, said Hamilton. So, too, are financial institutions that keep telling people to invest more in their registered retirement savings plans. While having money coming in during retirement is crucial, a typical retiree’s income level doesn’t need to be as high as it was when the person was working, because the mortage is usually paid off, the kids are gone and it’s no longer necessary to save for retirement.

“We have exaggerated the amount of money seniors need to live comfortably. The idea that you need to be getting 70 per cent of your pre-retirement income is fiction. (Financial institutions) have an obviously vested interest in getting people to save more, even when they don’t need to,” said Hamilton.

Collecting from their workplace pensions has also helped propel the baby boomers’ earnings in retirement, Lafleche said.

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“The government support has lifted people above the very low levels they were before. At the other end of the economic spectrum, there are baby boomers who have had the benefit of good job opportunities and are starting to collect their pensions — in many cases, defined-benefit pensions,” said Lafleche, vice-president of research, strategy and policy for the United Way of Greater Toronto.

On the flipside, young adults living in Toronto have seen their incomes drop over the last few decades, as the opportunities for full-time work have diminished. With globalization shifting more jobs overseas and many of the remaining ones now being automated, the manufacturing sector, once a source of reliable, well-paying middle class jobs, has shrunk dramatically in North America.

Pensions? Home ownership? For many millennials, they’re a distant dream.

Maame Debrah, who recently graduated with a degree in social work, considers herself fortunate to have landed a full-time, permanent job at the age of 29.

“It’s been a long time coming,” said Debrah, a former community outreach worker with United Way in Peel Region. “Now that I’ve got a full-time job, I’m at the point where I’m starting to think about owning a home. But that’s so far removed, especially in Toronto.”

Many of her peers, said Debrah, face a struggle finding work. In addition to a lack of full-time jobs generally, young people — particularly those of colour — face another obstacle: fewer on-the-job mentors and fewer networking opportunities.

“There’s a myth that if you work hard and do a good job, everything will be OK. But that’s not really true. If you don’t have the right network and support, it’s not good,” said Debrah.

Younger adults also face the perception that they’re entitled, don’t work hard enough, and spend their money on frivolous things (avocado toast, anyone?).

Those perceptions arent’t fair, Debrah said.

“There’s a myth about millennials, that we don’t work as hard. We’re actually really resilient and hard-working,” Debrah said.

That millennials would face that perception from baby boomers is particularly ironic, said Hamilton.

“The stereotypes never change. Baby boomers heard all these things 30 or 40 years ago: that they were lazy, they were entitled, that they spent too much money on frivolous things. It was all BS then, and I’m confident it’s mostly BS now.”