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Making
It Hard to Work Kelly
Greene, The Wall Street Journal December 7,
2003 Lots of older
Americans say they want to continue working in later life. But employers
and government officials don't seem to be getting the message. "In the U.S., there seems to be an emphasis on reducing early-retirement pathways rather than providing incentives to continue to work," says Philip Taylor, a senior research associate at the University of Cambridge in England. In contrast, the United Kingdom, Australia and Denmark offer subsidies to companies that hire older workers. Sweden provides portions of pensions to people who want to retire from their full-time jobs but continue working part-time. Dr. Taylor's findings on older workers were among nearly two dozen such studies presented at a recent meeting in San Diego of the Gerontological Society of America, a group of scientists who study aging. No part-time pension option exists in the U.S., where the law governing company-provided pensions largely prevents workers from collecting a pension and continuing to work for the same employer. "We need a special statute to clarify" the rules and allow more options in the workplace for older employees, says Pamela Perun, a consultant on pension-policy projects at the Urban Institute in Washington. On her wish list for a new law: "Late-retirement features that would let workers continue to accrue meaningful benefits" rather than maxing out their pension benefits at a certain age. Already, an estimated one-third to one-half of older workers are taking part in "bridge employment," which is transitional work between a full-time career of 10 or more years and full-time retirement with no paid employment, according to Kenneth Shultz, a psychologist at California State University, San Bernardino. Such jobs are typically held by people leaving their longtime employers, though they may stay in the same industry, further highlighting the problem with pensions that don't have late-retirement incentives. Dr. Shultz is one of several gerontologists mining the University of Michigan's Health and Retirement Study, which has surveyed more than 22,000 people in the U.S. who are over 50 every two years since 1992. Older people who continue working take part in a broad array of leisure activities as well, according to another study using the same data. In fact, when people finally retire altogether, they typically continue doing the same things, says Nancy Fultz, a research investigator at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "We didn't get the sense of people moving into new activities as they retired," Dr. Fultz says. "As work decreased, people spent more time on the activities they were engaged in before, outside of work." Another study using the same data concluded that the type of work you do affects your memory as you age. Health and Retirement Study participants were given a list of words, then asked to recall them immediately and after a delay. The scores on the test for white-collar workers, defined as people in clerical, professional and sales jobs, went up with age relative to the scores of blue-collar workers, defined as those in farming, construction and manufacturing. The results were the most dramatic with delayed recall as the workers tested got older: The two sets of workers had similar results in 1992, "but there was a big difference by 2000," with white-collar workers coming out on top, says James Grosch, a research psychologist with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Cincinnati, who did the analysis. Among the more offbeat findings: Older workers who lose their handgrip strength -- a specific indicator of overall strength -- are twice as likely to leave the work force as those who with a stronger grip, says Robert Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
