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Heidi Brockway spent about two years trying to land a job after a three-decade stint in early childhood education and a brief retirement in between.
“I was applying for jobs that I was perfectly qualified for, if not overqualified for, and I was just being thrown over and over again,” Brockway, 66, told CNN.
Brockway had decided to re-enter the workforce after realizing his small pension wasn’t enough to cover expenses. After an unsuccessful job search in Los Angeles, she sold her house and moved with her husband to Southeast Florida in hopes of finding more opportunities for older workers.
don’t lose
Eventually, Brockway was offered a job as an aide at a nearby preschool.
“Now I sweep, clean bathrooms, mop and empty the trash for $13.40 an hour and all the pride I can swallow. But at least I’m employed,” he said. “I was a preschool teacher for 30 years. Now I clean a preschool. But I can afford food.”
Despite several reports of older Americans extending their employment or “not retiring” as Brockway did, new research shows that workers may be overly optimistic when it comes to how long they can stay in an increasingly tight job market. more hostile to people as they get older.
Americans are more likely to retire at age 62
The latest installment of the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s (EBRI) 34-year survey of workers and retirees found that 28% of workers expect to retire at age 65, up 23% from a year ago.
But in reality, the average retirement age has been 62 for several years, the same year that Americans can start claiming Social Security benefits.
Several financial experts and personalities like Suze Orman have touted the idea of delaying retirement and claiming Social Security benefits later to get bigger payouts, but some older Americans simply have no choice but to retire at 62, or even earlier.
Half of the retirees surveyed in the EBRI report said they retired earlier than planned, and nearly 70% point to reasons beyond their control, such as health problems, layoffs or the need to care for family members.
Craig Copeland, director of wealth benefits research at EBRI, told the Wall Street Journal that this raises interest in how much Americans should save for retirement.
Read more: Jeff Bezos and Oprah Winfrey invest in this asset to keep their wealth safe; you might want to do the same in 2024
Experts point to “rampant racism” in the workplace
While three-quarters of workers in the EBRI study say they expect to continue working in retirement, only 30% of retirees do.
Hal Hershfield, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the WSJ that a bias toward optimism leads many Americans to believe that “the jobs will be there for us, even though that may not be the case because of rampant aging.”
AARP research showed that 64% of adults over 50 in the workforce think older workers face age discrimination in the workplace today.
And nearly one in six of these adults who are currently working or looking for work say they were not hired for a job they applied for in the past two years because of their age.
Hiring managers may make discriminatory judgments and assume that older workers are not as tech-savvy or productive as younger workers, or have concerns about potential health problems.
Older workers are sometimes perceived as “stupid but lovable,” Christina Matz, an associate professor at the Boston College School of Social Work and director of the Center on Aging and Work, told the BBC.
“They’re labeled as slower and set in their ways, well-intentioned on the one hand and incompetent on the other. People of a certain age are seen as disconnected and not seen as progressive and innovative,” Matz said. adding that women face additional obstacles.
What Older Americans Need to Know
Advocates for older workers say the group brings incredible value to the workplace because of their lived experiences and reliability, while digital skills can be taught through training.
John Tarnoff, a Los Angeles-based reinvention career coach, told Moneywise in 2022: “It’s vital that older workers dive in and roll up their sleeves along with everyone else. There’s no reason an older worker can’t learn the same remote work skills and technology skills as a younger worker”.
Tarnoff also explained that while the Age Discrimination and Employment Act was enacted in 1964 to protect workers over the age of 40, “it’s not a particularly useful tool” because it is so difficult to prove age discrimination in the workplace work
His advice to older Americans seeking employment is to “really double down on the value proposition you offer as a worker” and tailor yourself to employers and companies looking for that specific value proposition.
What to read next
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. Offered without warranty of any kind.
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