I don't know where she read that but she is in the personnel business, so I'm willing to take her word for it.

Even more than the Y crowd, the generation growing up now has been bred on being wired from infancy. Today's version of having a friend over to play might as easily involve playing online with laptops as it might include Barbie or GI Joe.

So, one of the things that Gayle is beginning to see in her virtual staffing agency is younger adults entering the workforce who are used to their own ‘always available, all day, my way' post-MTV world.

They are, as Gayle puts it, the Plug-n-Play Generation.

Try to imagine that for a few minutes. Imagine an American economic landscape in which an employee who has been with the same firm for two years is an old hand. Imagine an employment scene in which workers will simply get tired of a job and move to another one, often not even bothering with the old-fashioned two-week notice.

It will simply be, "I'm outa here, c ya."

It will mean that businesses will not be able to lure, persuade or cajole employees to stay where they are with bloated benefits packages that, given what has been happening with benefits costs, they won't be able to afford anyway. On the job training will become a waste when, on the average, the new employee leaves almost as soon as they are trained.

Perhaps, in self-defense, firms will stop offering on-the-job training altogether and will seek experienced workers instead. But, with succeeding generations who will place little to no value on loyalty to an employer and who will understand that they become more valuable as jobs get harder to fill, even that is unlikely to keep them on the job.

Imagine the kind of turmoil all that would cause. The U.S. economy does not have systems in place to handle it.

The obvious answer to keep this kind of labor market scenario from becoming an expensive drain on the economy would be the less expensive independent contractor working relationship.

The learning curve for many businesses might be pretty steep, after centuries of hyper-supervised employees, but the cost savings might well be worth it. The paradigm shift for policy makers would perhaps be even more drastic but I expect they'd survive.

Except that the U.S. economy does not have systems in place to handle that, either.

No matter how you slice it, we have our work cut out for us, don't we?