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'Work Until You Drop': In Aging
America, it's a New Era for Baby Boomers
John
Rogers, Associated Press
February 21, 2012
JAE
C. HONG/ASSOCIATED PRESS Steve Wyard, 61,
is a regional sales director of All Valley
Washer Service in the Van Nuys section of
Los Angeles.
When Paula Symons joined the U.S. workforce in 1972,
typewriters in her office clacked nonstop, people
answered the telephones and the hot new technology
revolutionizing communication was the fax machine.
Symons, fresh out of college, entered this brave new
world thinking she’d do pretty much what her
parents’ generation did: Work for just one or two
companies over about 45 years before bidding
farewell to co-workers at a retirement party and
heading off into her sunset years with a pension.
Forty years into that run, the 60-year-old
communications specialist for a Wisconsin-based
insurance company has worked more than a half-dozen
jobs. She’s been laid off, downsized and seen the
pension disappear with only a few thousand dollars
accrued when it was frozen.
So, five years from the age when people once
retired, she laughs when she describes her future
plans.
“I’ll probably just work until I drop,” she says, a
sentiment expressed, with varying degrees of humor,
by numerous members of her age group.
Like 78 million other U.S. baby boomers, Symons and
her husband had the misfortune of approaching
retirement age at a time when stock market crashes
diminished their 401(k) nest eggs, companies began
eliminating defined benefit pensions in record
numbers and previously unimagined technical advances
all but eliminated entire job descriptions from
travel agent to telephone operator.
At the same time, companies began moving other jobs
overseas, to be filled by people willing to work for
far less and still able to connect to the U.S.
market in real time.
“The paradigm has truly shifted. Now when you’re
looking for a job you’re competing in a world where
the competition isn’t just the guy down the street,
but the guy sitting in a cafe in Hong Kong or
Mumbai,” says Bill Vick, a Dallas-based executive
recruiter who started BoomersNextStep.com in an
effort to help Baby Boomers who want to stay in the
workforce.
Not only has the paradigm shifted, but as it has the
generation whose mantra used to be, “Don’t trust
anyone over 30,” finds itself now being looked on
with distrust by younger Generation X managers who
question whether boomers have the high-tech skills
or even the stamina to do what needs to be done.
“I always have the feeling that I have to prove my
value all the time. That I’m not some old relic who
doesn’t understand social media or can’t learn some
new technique,” says Symons, who is active on
Twitter and Facebook, loves every new time-saving
software app that comes down the pike, and laughs at
the idea of ever sending another fax.
“Ahh, that’s just so archaic,” she says.
Meanwhile, as companies have downsized, boomers have
been hurt to some degree by their own sheer numbers,
says Ed Lawler of the University of Southern
California’s Marshall School of Business.
The oldest ones, Lawler says, aren’t retiring, and
more and more the youngest members of the generation
ahead of them aren’t either. It’s no longer
uncommon, he says, for people to work until 70.
“People who would have normally been out of the
workforce are still there, taking jobs that would
have gone to what we now call the unemployed,” he
said.
John Stewart of Springfield, Mo., sees himself
becoming part of that new generation that never
stops working.
“No, I don’t see myself retiring,” says Stewart, who
is media director for a large church. “I think I
would be bored if I just all of a sudden quit
everything and did whatever it is retired people
do.”
Then there are the financial considerations. Like
many boomers, the 60-year-old acknowledges he didn’t
put enough aside when he was younger.
For more than 30 years, Stewart ran his own
photography business, doing everything from studio
portraits to illustrating annual reports for
hospitals and other large corporations to
freelancing for national magazines and newspapers.
As the news media began to struggle, the magazine
and newspaper work dried up. As the economy tanked,
his large corporate clients began to use cheaper
stock photos purchased online rather than hire him
to take new ones. Eventually he took his current
job, producing videos of pastors’ sermons and photos
for church publications. He says he is glad to be
one boomer to make a late career change and keep
working.
“There were times when the money was really rolling
in,” he says of his old business. “But somehow
retirement wasn’t really in the forefront of my
thinking then, so saving for it wasn’t an automatic
thing.”
Steve Wyard of Los Angeles says he and his wife have
planned carefully for retirement.
He’s worked for 30 years for a company that sells
and services commercial washers and dryers, and
she’s been with a health maintenance organization
for even longer. They’ve invested cautiously, lived
in the same house for decades and meticulously paid
down the mortgage.
Plus he’s one of the few boomers who figures that,
no matter what technology comes along, his job won’t
go away.
“Everyone has to do the laundry,” he says.
Still, he and his wife have two sons, 19 and 21, to
put through college, and Wyard, 61, sees that
pushing back retirement for several years.
Until then he plans to keep working, which is what
every physically able boomer should consider doing,
says Lawler.
Union membership, which has been declining for
years, now includes only about 10 percent of all
eligible employees, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. The number of defined benefit retirement
funds offered by private enterprise have fallen from
about one in three employers in 1990 to about one in
five in 2005.
With unions no longer in a strong position to fight
for benefits like pensions, with jobs disappearing
or going overseas, and with Gen Xers and even
younger Millennial Generation members coveting their
jobs, Lawler warns this is no time for boomers to
quit and allow the skills they’ve spent a lifetime
building to atrophy.
“My advice is above all don’t retire,” he says. “If
you like your job at all, hold onto it. Because
getting back in this era is essentially impossible.”
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