NEW YORK TIMES
‘I
Had to Go Back’: Over 55, and Not Retired After All
After leaving the labor force in
unusual numbers early in the pandemic, Americans approaching retirement age are
back on the job at previous levels.
Kim Williams, 62, lost her job early in the pandemic but has recently gone back to work. “I’m too young to retire, so I had to go back,” she said.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
May 19, 2022
When Kim Williams and millions of other
older Americans lost their jobs early in the coronavirus pandemic, economists
wondered how many would ever work again — and how that loss would weigh on the
economy for years to come.
Ms. Williams, now 62, wondered, too,
especially when she struggled for months to find work. But in January, she
started a new job at an AAA office near her home in Waterbury, Conn.
“I’m too young to retire, so I had to
go back,” she said.
Whether
by choice or financial necessity, millions of older Americans have made the
same move in recent months. Nearly 64 percent of adults between the ages of 55
and 64 were working in April, essentially the same rate as in February 2020.
That’s a more complete recovery than among most younger age groups.
The
rapid rebound has surprised many economists, who thought that fear of the virus
— which is far deadlier for older people — would contribute to a wave of early
retirements, especially because many people’s savings had been fattened by
years of market gains. But there is increasing evidence that the
early-retirement narrative was overblown.
“The bottom line is that older workers
have gone back to work,” said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for
Retirement Research at Boston College.
For many people, retiring early was
never an option. Ms. Williams spent more than 25 years in manufacturing,
working for a Hershey’s plant making Almond Joy and Mounds bars. The job paid
reasonably well, and offered a retirement plan and other benefits. But in 2007,
Hershey’s closed the factory, moving production partly to Mexico.
The
State of Jobs in the United States
The
U.S. economy has regained more than 90 percent of the 22 million jobs lost at
the height of pandemic in the spring of 2020.
·
Higher Interest Rates: Spurred by red-hot
inflation, the Federal Reserve has begun raising interest rates. What does that mean for the job market?
·
April Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 428,000 jobs and the unemployment rate
remained steady at 3.6 percent in the fourth month of 2022.
·
Trends: New government data showed
record numbers of job openings and “quits” — a measurement
of the amount of workers voluntarily leaving jobs — in March.
·
Job Market and Stocks: This year’s decline in stock
prices follows a historical pattern: Hot labor markets
and stocks often don’t mix well.
·
Unionization Efforts: Since the Great Recession, the
college-educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and
Amazon. Now, they’re helping to unionize them.
Ms. Williams, then in her 40s, went
back to school, earning an associate degree in hospitality and eventually
finding a job as a supervisor at a local hotel. But the position paid
significantly less than her factory job, and she drew down her retirement
savings to cover medical expenses and other bills. When she was laid off again
in June 2020, just a few weeks after her 60th birthday, Ms. Williams had little
in savings.
Ms.
Williams tried to change careers again, this time going back to school to train
as a medical secretary. But she has been unable to find work in her new field.
In January, with her savings gone, she took a job at AAA for $16.50 an hour, $2
an hour less than she earned at the factory in 2007, before accounting for
inflation. She says she will have to work at least until she can start drawing
her full Social Security benefits at age 67.
“If I could’ve left at 62, I would’ve
left at 62, but I can’t,” she said. “Not all of us made that money where I
could move down to Florida and get a $400,000 house.”
The fastest inflation in decades has
added to the pressure on people of all ages to return to work. More recently,
so has the turmoil in financial markets, which has taken a bite out of
retirement savings.
But even some people who could retire
are choosing to return to work as the pandemic ebbs.
When the Long Island fitness studio
where she worked as a spinning instructor shut down early in the pandemic,
Jackie Anscher lost both a job and a part of her identity. In an interview with The New York Times that
summer, she described what seemed at the time like an abrupt end to her career
as “a forced retirement.”
But after spending the beginning of the
pandemic reorganizing her life and re-evaluating her priorities, Ms. Anscher,
60, has begun teaching spin classes again as a substitute instructor at a local
gym, and she is looking for a more regular gig. Her husband is already retired
— “he’s been waiting for me to go fishing,” she said — and the couple could
afford for her to stop working. But she isn’t ready to hang up her cycling
shoes.
“I liked what I had. I loved who I was
in front of the room,” she said. “It’s about my mental health. For me, it’s
about preserving me.”
Older workers weren’t any more likely
than younger workers to leave the labor force early in the pandemic. But
economists had reason to think they might be slower to return. Unemployed
workers in their 50s and 60s typically have a harder time finding jobs than
their younger counterparts, because of ageism and other factors. And unlike
after the 2008-9 recession, when depressed housing prices and high debt levels
left many people with little choice but to keep working, in this crisis prices
of both homes and financial assets kept rising, providing a financial cushion
to some people nearing retirement age.
The
share of Americans reporting that they were retired did rise sharply in the
spring of 2020. But retirement is not an irreversible decision. And research from
the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has found that at the pandemic’s onset,
there was a steep drop in the number of people leaving retirement to return to
work, attributable at least partly to fear of the virus and a lack of job
opportunities, swelling the ranks of the retired.
As
the economy has reopened and the public health situation has improved, these
“unretirements” have rebounded and have recently returned roughly to their
prepandemic rate, according to an analysis of government data by Nick Bunker of
the Indeed Hiring Lab.
The return of older workers has been
concentrated among those in their late 50s and early 60s, people who were still
several years or more away from retirement when the pandemic began. The
employment rate among those 65 and older fell more sharply and has been much
slower to recover. That suggests that the pandemic might have led some people
who were already closer to retirement to accelerate those plans, and that the
greater health risks they faced may have made them less likely to return to work
while the virus continues to circulate.
Still, the return of early retirees to
the labor force is a reminder that rising wages and abundant job opportunities
can draw in workers who might otherwise remain on the sidelines, Mr. Bunker
said. The labor force shrank during the last recession, too, and some
economists were quick to declare that workers were gone for good. But many
people eventually came back during the strong job market that preceded the
pandemic: It provided opportunities to people with disabilities and criminal
records, to people with little formal education and to people who had taken
time away from work to raise children or to care for ailing parents.
That pattern may be repeating itself,
but on a much more compressed timeline.
“Don’t underestimate labor supply,” Mr.
Bunker said. “Don’t count out the possibility that people want and need work.
It has happened much more quickly than what we saw after the global financial
crisis, but the broad principle is the same.”
When Tad Greener lost his job managing
utilities for a Utah university in late 2019, he wasn’t worried at first about
finding a new one — the unemployment rate, after all, was near a 50-year low.
But Mr. Greener had hardly begun his search when the pandemic hit and the
bottom fell out of the economy. Suddenly, he was 60 years old, unemployed and
facing the worst labor market in nearly a century.
Mr.
Greener eased up on his job search during the first phase of the pandemic, in
part because of some health issues unrelated to the coronavirus. By spring of
2021, he was ready to work again, but he had little luck applying for jobs. He
thinks many prospective employers were turned off by the combination of his age
and his time out of the work force.
“It’s a daunting task to be 62 years
old, to be unemployed for over a year and to try and find work,” Mr. Greener
said. “There were times where I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to go
back to work.”
As the economy reopened, however, many
businesses struggled to hire enough workers to meet the surge in demand. That
prompted employers to consider candidates they might otherwise have dismissed,
or to look for ways to attract people who could work but weren’t looking.
In Mr. Greener’s case, he learned about
a new “returnship” program from the State of Utah that was
meant to help people who had been out of the labor force get back to work. Last
fall, he was accepted into the program, landing a part-time job in the state
Office of Energy Development, which quickly turned into a permanent, full-time
job. Now that he is back at work, Mr. Greener says he plans to stay until he is
67, or perhaps longer if he stays healthy.
“Every
day I hear about how there aren’t enough workers available,” Mr. Greener said.
“There are a lot of older workers that are being written off, or at least
finding it much more difficult to get back into the workplace, who have a lot
of years and things to offer.”
