It’s
happening again. One of the perverse hallmarks of the Great Recession
ten years ago was the expulsion of many older workers from the
workforce. A significant amount of experienced employees found
themselves forced into sudden unemployment or premature retirement. Many
never fully recovered financially or emotionally and their careers were
left scarred and lacking in dignified closure. The current
Covid-induced recession is again presenting similar employment hardship
for mature workers. Since March the labor market has shed many
senior-aged men and women, who possess both high and low skill levels.
In other words, this elder layoff is widespread.
Unfortunately,
this is not turning out to be simply a temporary furlough for these
workers, but rather a longer-termed separation marked by an acceleration
of egregious trends. Again, as during the last recession, newly
trending labor shifts are weakening older workers’ employment security.
Previous examples included labor-saving technologies and increased work
loads for younger and less expensive staff, which combined to lessen the
management need to restore previous personnel levels. Once again,
mature employees find their bargaining power diminished when facing
dismissal and rehiring. Weak or non-existent unions, the rise of the gig
economy, and continued lenient enforcement of age-discrimination laws,
not to mention the harmful economic disruption from Covid, leave senior
workers feeling increasingly insecure and inadequate.
The New
School’s Retirement Equity Lab studies the factors impacting the quality
of retirement, which necessitates an examination of when a retreat from
work is chosen or forced. Their assessment of the plight of older
workers is sobering. Even for those older workers who haven’t yet been
laid off there is considerable incertitude about their futures. This
cohort more and more knows they are less employable than younger
workers. Those over age 55 often realize that if they were to quit their
current jobs the chances of transitioning to one that is comparable or
better is doubtful. For many, it becomes prudent to stick with a less
than satisfying job, then to risk unemployment.
Relatively robust
earnings have traditionally been an expectation for long-term commitment
to a profession and/or an employer. Seems fair, right? However, these
days when an older worker is rehired after a job loss hourly wages are
typically lower than with the former job. Workers aged 50-61 receive 20%
less pay with their new job while workers 62 and older see a decrease
of 27%. In addition, once a worker hits their fifties periods of
unemployment after a lay off are longer than for workers aged less than
50.
The growth in uncertainty and low confidence older workers
face add to the weakness of their bargaining power. Employers know in
most cases that they have the upper hand with older workers, except for
those situations in which the worker possesses a unique or hard to find
skill. This is unfortunate. A lifetime of work deserves value and
respect. Retirement in the modern era should be a reward for the toil,
dedication, and achievement for decades of work, not an imposed
isolation or banishment due to the vicissitudes of employment economics.
As
the Retirement Equity Lab points out, policy makers may need to
intervene with schemes designed to lessen the hardships for prematurely
laid off older workers. For example, employers could offer rainy day or
emergency savings plans through payroll deductions, which become
available when needed to augment unemployment benefits or the federal
government could step in with a guaranteed retirement account savings
option to supplement what retirees receive from Social Security. Of
course, more stringent enforcement of The Age Discrimination in
Employment Act of 1967 would help immensely.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10373225
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