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Jobs Program for Older
Americans Struggles
by
Pamela A. MacLean,
New America Media
January 2, 2012
Picture
Credit: Senior
Service America
With passage of
the 2012
budget Congress failed to restore any of the deep
cuts made last year
to the largest federally funded program that
employs older adults. Last
year's cuts have already taken a heavy toll.
At a time when workers between 55 and 74 with
limited education and
jobs skills are far more likely to lose a job and
stay out of work
longer, Congress held steady on the funding level
for the Senior
Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) at
last year's amount --
cut 45 percent from two years ago.
The impact on SCSEP's ability to counsel and
provide subsidized jobs
for older adults has been "devastating," according
to Tony Sarmiento,
executive director of Senior Service America, Inc.
in Silver Spring,
Md. The good news is Congress didn't impose any
additional cuts.
Sarmiento compared the third quarter of 2011 to
the same period in
2010, prior to the budget cuts. For the entire
country, jobless older
workers joining the SCSEP program dropped from
over 13,000 in that
quarter of 2010, to 1,900 in the same period of
2011, an 85 percent
loss, Sarmiento said.
In 15 states, he noted, the reduction in SCSEP
participants was 95
percent. Five states had no new participants,
including Maine, Montana,
New Hampshire, Oregon and Wyoming. California had
54, instead of the
889 from a year earlier, representing a 94 percent
drop.
The news is not good for low-income older workers,
who are four times
as likely to be unemployed as their higher-earning
contemporaries,
according to a labor economist at the recent
Gerontological Society of
America's national conference in Boston.
SCSEP is the largest federally funded program for
older adults and is
the last vestige of the jobs programs that began
during the
depression-era New Deal under the Works Progress
Administration. It s a
community service and work training program for
older adults.
Participants work an average of 20 hours a week
and are paid minimum
wage. Subsidizing jobs at day-care centers, senior
centers, schools and
hospitals are intended to help older adults find
unsubsidized jobs.
Participants must be over 55, unemployed and with
an income of less
than 125 percent of the federal poverty level.
Currently the Department of Labor, which oversees
the program, reports
46,000 participants in fiscal year 2011, but that
is down from the
100,000 participants in year earlier. Of the
46,000, roughly 89 percent
were at or below the poverty level.
For these workers the Great Recession has been
particularly tough.
During 2010, more than 8.3 million people from
55-74 lived in
households with incomes of no more than $20,000 a
year, representing
roughly 15 percent of that cohort, according to
Andrew Sum, director of
the Center for Labor Market Studies and an
economics professor at
Boston's Northeastern University.
This low-income older population is far more
likely to be female, black
or Hispanic, a high school dropout, and unmarried,
Sum said.
The current 7 percent unemployment rate for
workers over 55 is below
the national average, but it is the highest rate
since World War II for
this group, Sum told the GSA conference.
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