Is the workplace ready for hard-of-hearing workers?
Forbes post, “Is Robert Mueller Too Old? (Some Honest Talk On Cognitive Aging)”
Should we adapt our expectations in order to accommodate older adults’ declining cognitive abilities?
Forbes post, “Are Employers Ready For Old Employees?”
Originally published at Forbes.com on August 21, 2018.
Here’s an article by a Forbes staff writer earlier today: “Employers Say 64 Is Too Old To Get A Job.” This headline is based on the replies employers gave in a survey conducted by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, “Striking Similarities and Disconcerting Disconnects: Employers, Workers and Retirement Security” in response to two key questions in the survey, asking employers and employees both when a person is too old to work, and asking employers when a person is too old to hire. (The article, and the survey, also cover topics around 401(k) provision for employees and worth reading with respect to these other topics as well.)
Regarding the former, of those who answered, the median age that workers gave was 75, but the median age that employees gave was only 70. And regarding the latter question, of those who gave a response, the median age was 64 – bad news for unemployed workers who aren’t financially or otherwise ready to retire.
But there’s some possible good news: regarding who’s too old to work, 65% of employers answered, “it depends on the person” and 12% answered “not sure” – so that fewer than 1/4 of employers had a fixed idea of when a person is too old. With respect to “too old to hire,” 64% gave the “it depends” answer, and 12% the “not sure,” so, again, the large majority of employers are, at least for the purposes of a survey, unwilling to state that they’ll rule out employees based on their age.
(Employees, on the other hand, were less likely to say “it depends” – 54%, or “not sure” – 4%, presumably because they were thinking more concretely of their own future situations.)
Employers also recognize that their employees are likely to want to work past a traditional retirement age, with 70% of them responding that they somewhat or strongly agreed that “many employees at my company expect to work past age 65 or do not plan to retire.” They also, at a rate of 82%, claimed that their companies are supportive of late retirement, and 70% of employers reported that they consider their company to be “aging friendly.”
At the same time, employees envision being able to gradually phase into retirement: 30% want an opportunity to work reduced work hours as they approach retirement age, and 17% want to transition by means of a role change to one that is less demanding or more personally satisfying, both of which come under the header of “phased retirement.” However, over half of all employers (54%) say that they neither now have nor plan to institute in the future any sort of formal “phased retirement” program. While this, in principle, leaves open the possibility of informal arrangements, only 31% of employers said they enable employees to reduce work hours and shift from full-time into part-time, and only 21% of employers said they would allow employees to change to less stressful or demanding roles.
And, further, employers do recognize the value of older employers. Despite stereotypes of older workers as hopelessly behind-the-times, only 15% of employer-respondents criticized age 50+ workers as being “less open to learning and new ideas” and an even smaller percentage, 9%, said they had “outdated skill sets,” compared to 59% valuing them as “bring[ing] more knowledge, wisdom, and life experience” and 49% considering them “a valuable resource for training and mentoring.”
So which is it? Are employers ruthlessly discriminatory when it comes to older workers? Is the age discrimination alleged at IBM and in Silicon Valley more generally, widespread, leaving older workers trapped in “bad jobs,” as Teresa Ghilarducci reports, or are employers open-minded, particularly during a tight job market? From what I see, the picture is much more complex, and whether the report is bad news or good depends on one’s perspective. The retirement age is increasing, and has exceeded age 65 for college graduates (65.7, to be precise), three years greater than for high school-educated workers. Their unemployment rate, in absolute terms, is below average, though remember that the unemployment rate excludes those who have left the labor force, and it’s difficult, once one hits Social Security and Medicare eligibility age, to differentiate between folks who have retired do to lack of satisfactory employment vs. purely due to personal choice.
To a large degree, we will all simply have to wait and see how it plays out, and try to put policies which will enable older workers to stay productively employed longer. Some of this is a matter of ongoing efforts at understanding how best to stave off physical and cognitive decline. But at the same time, consider that, for workers over 65 at companies with over 20 employers, it’s the employer that’s still the primary payer for healthcare benefits, even after that worker becomes eligible for Medicare, and even when that worker, if retired, would collect full Medicare benefits. Given that these healthcare benefits can become an increasing burden on employers, a change that would lighten this burden, and encourage employers to keep them employed, would benefit not just the workers but the rest of us, too.
But employers could also benefit from thinking proactively about how to help their employees be as productive as possible, whether it’s through flexibility for personal issues, or provision of training opportunities, or rethinking job roles to best use their workers’ skills.
December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.
Forbes Post, “Too Old To Work, Too Young To Retire? ‘Everyone Just Works Longer’ Isn’t An Easy Fix”
Originally published at Forbes.com on May 24, 2018.
It’s taken as a given these days: The current state of affairs with respect to Social Security solvency and Americans’ retirement savings rates inevitably means that Americans will have to work longer, whether that’s to the Social Security Full Retirement Age, or to age 70, or even later. But’s it not that simple: workers will need to be healthy enough to continue working, and they’ll need jobs available for them.
Let’s back up briefly: readers may be familiar with the concept of the Old Age Dependency Ratio, defined as the ratio of older dependents (people older than 64) to the working-age population (those ages 15-64), expressed as the proportion of dependents per 100 working-age population. For example, in 1950, there were 14 retirement-aged people for each 100 people of working age; in 2015, 25; and the relative number of older people increases to 33 in 2025 and in 2075, there are projected to be 49 retirement-aged people for each 100 people of working age, according to the OECD. To be sure, this isn’t as bad as most OECD countries (the most extreme: Greece, Japan, Korea, and Portugal, each with over 75 oldsters per 100 working-age people in 2075) but it remains a considerable source of worry.
And, as ratios go, both sides impact the changes over time. There are relatively fewer people of working age, when the birth rate drops. There are relatively more people of retirement age when longevity increases. (And incidentally, but perhaps best reserved for another article, in the real world it also matters greatly how many of those people of hypothetical working age, are actually working — vs. spending increasingly many years in schooling to earn more credentials, for instance, or out of the labor force for childrearing or video gaming purposes.) Whether one has many, few or no children, clearly enough, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with whether older Americans are able to work later in life. But we tend to assume that increased longevity more or less automatically means that these longer-lived older Americans will be able to defer retirement for the necessary number of years to keep retirement finances in balance.
To the extent that Americans choose to retire just because they’ve reached an arbitrary age at which it’s traditional to do so, it’s all well and good. If it’s reasonable to spend a given portion of your adult lifetime working, and the remainder out of the labor force engaging in rest and relaxation, it’s fair enough that as one’s life expectancy increases, so too should your working lifetime. It may even be that the current fears of roadblocks in the form of employers who will age-discriminate, will fade; Tyler Cowen, writing last week at Bloomberg, expressed confidence that as the relative proportion of the population who fit into the mold of desirable younger workers, decreases, those companies which succeed in best adapting to an older workforce will be the most successful:
I would suggest that the ability to spot, mobilize and deploy older workers is the next biggest source of competitive advantage in the U.S. The sober reality is that many companies should retool their methods to fit better with the experience and sound judgment found so often in older workers. That also will involve a retooling of the glamour notion to valorize the young less and the idea of maturity more. HR departments may have to work harder to help older workers keep up with new technologies.
But that gets us, with apologies for the longwinded preamble, to the greater question: will American workers be healthy enough to continue working? It is, after all, important to recognize that increases in life expectancy are not necessarily paired with the number of years of “healthy life expectancy.” In fact, the data is mixed.
There exists a metric developed by the World Health Organization, the Healthy Life Expectancy, or HALE, which is intended to measure the average number of years of “healthy life” at birth, or at a given age. According to this measure, the data for which is available beginning in 2000, American’s HALE is indeed improving. In 2016, men had 16.7 years of “healthy life,” on average, ahead of them at age 60, compared to 15.4 years in 2000. Women had 19.0 years, compared to 18.0 in 2000. To be sure, these numbers are lower than elsewhere (Japan: 18.6/22.9; Canada: 19.4/21.6, etc.) but it suggests that, on average, the ability remains for older workers to, well, work.
But according to a recent report by the Population Reference Bureau, which itself compiles the results of multiple recent studies, according to some indicators, Americans are less well positioned to keep working, than was the case with the prior cohort of retirees, due to greater incidences of disability, including that caused by obesity. One study found that:
Obese individuals face a greater likelihood of having physical limitations. . . . Although baby boomers are less likely to smoke, have emphysema, or have heart attacks, they are more likely to be obese or have diabetes or high blood pressure than the previous generation at similar ages, they report.
Another study reported that
adults in their late 50s today are in poorer health than their parents’ generation was at the same age, even though the younger group will have to work longer to collect full Social Security benefits.
However, there are some bright spots. One of them is that dementia, surprisingly, is declining in incidence, not in absolute numbers of the elderly affected (because the number of elderly is increasing to such a degree) but in the proportion of the elderly so affected.
The other bright spot is that continued employment, far from harming ailing would-be retirees, may help them retain their health. Studies are difficult to come by, because it’s a chicken-and-egg-type situation, since those who are in poor health are more likely to retire early in the first place. But one study compared memory test scores of older Americans to older Europeans; the later-working Americans’ scores, on average, were higher, which is consistent with a working thesis of “use it or lose it,” that is, that the mental stimulation of work helps stave off cognitive decline. Another study found that later-retiring French retirees were less likely to develop dementia than early retirees. On the other hand, other studies found that blue collar workers’ cognitive function was boosted due to retirement “perhaps through more opportunities for intellectual stimulation than their workplaces” and that retirees might be using their leisure time to “practice better health habits,” for example, by exercising more.
The bottom line is that there is no ready answer to the question of how successfully Americans will be able to work later. But what is clear is that the question of Social Security’s financial stability, or of Americans’ retirement security in general, can’t be looked at as its own silo. Instead, it’s interconnected with a number of larger issues around the broader economy and culture.
December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.