If junior can't get a job,
blame grandpa.
Battered retirement investments
have led older workers to stay in, or
re-enter, the workforce. And the
situation has caused a shift in the
average age of workers, with the
percentage of young people dropping to
the lowest level since the U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics started keeping
track in 1948.
At this point, the percentage
of people over 65 in the workforce is at
its highest rate since 1965, with almost
2 million older workers entering since
the start of the Great Recession. There
are now almost 7.7 million workers over
65, or 18.5 percent of the workforce.
That's 2 million more than the teenage
cohort of workers.
It's not just the younger
seniors who are still punching the time
clock. The number of workers over 75 has
never been higher, with 7.8 percent of
that age group in the workforce, nearly
double the percentage from 1987, when
the government starting keeping track.
There are now 1.4 million people 75 and
older in the workforce.
Dennis Jacobe, chief economist
for Gallup Inc. in North Carolina, said
his organization has been tracking the
same trends and working to understand
what's going on.
"There are a couple of
different factors," he said. "After the
recession and financial crisis, a lot of
older Americans lost their retirement
nest eggs." Those workers don't have the
time needed to recover their
investments, so they have to go back to
work.
"Retirement, in a way, has
changed," Mr. Jacobe said. "The old way
was you clip coupons, sit on the beach
and enjoy your retirement."
Now more people are healthy
later in life and able to work, so their
retirements are spent working part-time
jobs that leave them able to take time
off to travel but also give them
something to do and a paycheck when they
return home.
The part-time jobs they desire,
though, are a hot commodity with younger
workers.
In a recent survey by Gallup,
the company found 32 percent of 18- to
29-year-olds were underemployed in
April.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics
reported that the percentage of the
youngest workers, ages 16 to 19, who are
working or even trying to get a job,
fell to 31.8 percent in April. That's
down from an annual rate of 41.3 percent
in 2007, before the most recent
recession. And the percentage of teens
working is far off the annual rates of
51 to 57 percent that the country saw in
the 1980s and 1990s.
Some of that might be by
choice.
In the upper socioeconomic
groups, a summer job isn't as important
as it once might have been, said John
Challenger, CEO of the Chicago-based
outplacement firm Challenger, Gray &
Christmas Inc.
In past decades, teens would
mow lawns or work a retail job for
pocket money, but now he said, "Many
teens don't want that. They want to go
to camp or a summer program or take an
internship."
He said there is more pressure
to build a resume for college
applications so teenagers are looking
for experiences that have a cache that a
summer job does not.
Those who are trying to find
work aren't finding much of it.
In April, teenagers had an
unemployment rate of 23.2 percent,
without seasonal adjustment. That was
higher than any other age group and
nearly double the rate for people 20 to
24.
For young people who want to
work, many traditional avenues such as
municipal jobs at community centers,
parks or polls don't have the funding to
hire teenage help.
"They're also being crowded out
by competition from others," Mr.
Challenger said.
The 20- to 24-year-old
demographic is taking jobs that were
once the province of teenagers. Those
were the jobs, he said, that taught
young people the foundations of working,
such as showing up on time and being
reliable.
"It's a tragedy," Mr.
Challenger said. "If you don't have
those beginning jobs, it's harder to
build a working life foundation."
While young people may need
jobs to learn responsibility, employers
still struggling in a tough economy
often aren't in the mood to teach them.
Older workers, Mr. Jacobe said,
tend to be more reliable.
"From a business point of view,
you're getting a person with more
experience," he said. Older employees
already know that they have to be at
work on time and do the work.
In West Mifflin, Kennywood
Amusement Park has traditionally been
inundated with applications from teens
who live in the immediate area. Since
the economic crisis of 2008, the
applicant pool has broadened both in
terms of age and geography.
Jeff Filicko, a spokesman for
Kennywood, which also handles hiring for
the nearby Sandcastle Waterpark, said
the trend started to shift about three
years ago. Not only teenagers were
applying for work, but also people who
were retirement age.
He said typically there are at
least 3,000 applicants for the 1,200
jobs at Kennywood and 400 jobs at
Sandcastle. But the company hires all
season long because there is a good deal
of turnover among the young people who
thought that working at Kennywood would
be fun and later change their minds.
A job at an amusement park, he
said, is "a great idea in theory, but
then they find out it's work."
With a lifetime of work
experience, the older employees know
that even a job at Kennywood isn't
always amusing.
