Next Avenue: How the Biden administration could give a boost to older workers

This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org.

The barriers to employment among older workers remain formidable, especially due to the pandemic. But the new Biden administration has an opportunity to help.

Consider this: Even in pre-pandemic 2019, when nearly 25% of the workforce was 55 and older, roughly 2.5 million people in that age group would have liked to be working but weren’t — largely due to ageism and age discrimination.

On top of that, many older adults are minorities, women and people without college degrees, laboring in jobs with low and unstable wages. The odds of being employed in a decent paying job with good benefits in your 60s are laughably minuscule if you’re in an unstable low-wage job in your 50s.

In addition, experienced workers are more vulnerable to becoming long-term unemployed (out of work for 26 weeks or more) than younger workers.

Susan Houseman, vice president for research at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich., says 40% to 50% of Americans “can’t afford to retire and they need to work longer.”

What the pandemic has meant for older workers

The pandemic recession has only hiked the risks that the retirement years for older workers will be financially bleak.

“Older workers in the pandemic were first to lose their jobs and will be last to be rehired,” says Beth Truesdale, research associate, Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University.

But this could be an ideal time to help change the narrative about older workers.

“As the incoming administration and Congress thinks about what future economic rescue and stabilization legislation should look like, it’s worth considering incentives to keep older workers on the job or efforts to rehire them,” says Kerry Gilliam, vice president of marketing at the talent recruiting platform Jobvite.

As someone who regularly writes about older workers and unretirement, I hope Washington will strongly consider these policy prescriptions:

Three ideas for President-Elect Biden

1. Get the nation’s 2,400 American Job Centers, run by federal and state governments, to actively embrace older workers. These employment centers are the main government resource for helping the unemployed find work, offering everything from basic job search assistance to skills training. What they don’t have are programs and expertise targeted at older workers.

“You have to make the case to employers that they are good workers,” says Houseman in an interview. “Trying to break down barriers with employers, and at the same time to help older workers.”

The job centers could also better assist older workers deciding their best option is self-employment.

Most workforce centers focus on getting people into traditional salaried positions. But older workers often end up self-employed, partly because they’re so pessimistic about employers hiring them due to their age.

The self-employment share of workers is about 13% for those in their 50s, 15% for those 60 to 64 and 21% for the 65-to-69 cohort. Credit the gig economy’s tech platforms for helping boost self-employment options.

The Job Centers could serve as a clearinghouse of information on self-employment, including offering the AARP Foundation’s tool kits for starting a business and becoming a freelancer.

“This kind of arrangement may be very appealing,” says Houseman.

2. Restore funding for the federal Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) for older, unemployed low-income Americans. This is another proposal urged by Abraham and Houseman as well as by other older-worker advocates.

SCSEP participants must be 55+ and with a family income that’s less than 125% of the federal poverty level (about $21,500 for a couple). They’re assigned a part-time job, usually with a community-based organization, and are paid the minimum wage.

Funding in 2020 was only $405 million ($80 million less than in 2007) despite much higher numbers of older Americans with low incomes. Abraham and Houseman recommend setting a funding target of $563 million, which would restore it back to its inflation-adjusted 2010 funding.

3. Create a federal Older Workers’ Bureau within the U.S. Department of Labor. That’s a recommendation from The Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at The New School for Social Research in New York City.

Modeled after the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, created in 1920, this one would gather resources to document older worker concerns, advance job opportunities and raise awareness of the economic and societal benefits of quality work for these experienced adults.

 “We need to understand better why older workers work,” says Teresa Ghilarducci, the Schwartz Center’s director and a Next Avenue Influencer in Aging.

Bolder and more controversial ideas

Other proposals making the rounds are much bolder and far more politically controversial. Truesdale highlights three of them: Raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour; institute fair workweek laws and sustainable scheduling and mandate universal paid family and medical leave benefits.

Truesdale thinks a higher minimum wage is the most urgent of the three. “Too many people are living precarious financial lives with low and unstable incomes,” she says.

She notes that in 2019, two-thirds of Americans surveyed said they favored a $15 an hour minimum wage, including a majority identifying as moderate or liberal Republicans.

Why the time is right to support older workers

Two factors favor the Biden administration taking strong actions to support older workers now.

First, the pandemic has hastened the spread of the digital economy.

Automation can reduce the physical demands of many jobs, a definite boon to longer work lives. For instance, while nursing can be physically demanding, mechanical systems that shift patients from gurney to bed can reduce physical strains.

“Technology can lengthen the time people can be productive in the workforce,” says Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “It also becomes more economically worthwhile to train them if you think people will continue working at age sixty or sixty-five rather than retire.”

Second, America’s population isn’t growing.

The combination of surging deaths related to both the pandemic and opioid crisis; plummeting net international migration largely reflecting the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and a declining birthrate means that America’s population is set to grow by just 0.2% in 2020, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. That would be the smallest gain since 1918.

Consequently, employers are going to need older workers when the pandemic is in the rearview mirror (perhaps in late 2021) and the economy is growing at a fast clip.

There is cause for hope that at least some of these ideas will get a hearing from the Biden administration. Its high-level nominees include an unusual number of sharp labor economists, including Janet Yellen, Biden’s choice for U.S. Secretary of Treasury and Cecilia Elena Rouse, his nominee as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

It’s time to seize the opportunity to make the labor market better for everyone — including older workers.

Chris Farrell is senior economics contributor for American Public Media’s Marketplace. An award-winning journalist, he is author
of “Purpose and a Paycheck: Finding Meaning, Money and Happiness in the Second Half of Life” and “Unretirement: How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Think About Work, Community, and The Good Life.”

This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org, © 2020 Twin Cities Public Television, Inc. All rights reserved.

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