Weekend Economists Piece for Peace April 3-5, 2015

[Demeter]

50. Out-of-work boomers face tough job market By Andrea Coombes

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/out-of-work-boomers-face-tough-job-market-2015-03-31?mod=MW_story_recommended_default&Link=obnetwork

The U.S. job market is on the mend but boomer workers are probably being left behind. Workers aged 45 to 70 who lose a job face steep challenges in finding new work — and even when they do find a job, it’s often at lower pay and with fewer benefits than they enjoyed before, according to a new survey by AARP, published Monday. Fully 50% of the people surveyed — respondents were 45- to 70-years old and had been unemployed at some point in the past five years — were still unemployed or had dropped out of the workforce, according to the survey of 2,492 people.

Twenty percent of those surveyed had two spells of unemployment in the previous five years and 23% had three or more bouts of unemployment in that time. (AARP didn’t release data on income and occupation.) “Long after the Great Recession, too many 50-plus workers who want to work are still unemployed, and once unemployed it takes them longer on average to find jobs than younger job seekers,” said Jo Ann Jenkins, president of AARP, in a news conference in Washington. That’s despite a relatively strong labor market. In 2014, job growth hit its fastest pace since the late 1990s, with the U.S. economy adding an average of about 250,000 jobs each month, according to data cited by Heidi Shierholz, chief economist with the U.S. Labor Department, in a presentation at the AARP conference.

Older workers do enjoy a lower unemployment rate: 4.4% for workers age 65 and over, compared with 5.5% for the U.S. market overall, according to February data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The problems start if and when they lose their jobs.

“Older workers are less likely to become unemployed, but if they are unemployed they are more likely to get stuck in unemployment for long periods,” Shierholz said. “We are potentially seeing the fingerprints of age discrimination here.”

When asked about barriers to finding work, 57% of the job seekers surveyed by AARP said “employers think I am too old.” But 71% pointed to a lack of available jobs and 60% said that being tied to a specific geographic area hampered their job search. Other factors also are in play, Shierholz said. “Older workers spend a long time developing specific skills and experience” — that means it can take them longer to find a match. Even if they find work, often it’s not as good a job as they left behind, according to the AARP survey. Fully 48% of the job seekers who had found work said they were earning less money than before. And older job seekers who found work were twice as likely to be working part time than older workers who had not been hit by recent unemployment. Among the re-employed older workers, 34% were working part time, compared with 16% among all workers age 45 to 70.

“A lot of these folks, although they are working which is certainly better than not working, they are doing so at jobs that are not as good as the jobs they had before they became unemployed,” said Gary Koenig, a co-author of the report and vice president of the AARP Public Policy Institute.

“The national statistics on unemployment are masking some serious challenges that older workers face,” Koenig said.

It’s likely that some older workers who move to part-time jobs are choosing to scale back and work less hard (the survey didn’t ask this). But some are not: 47% of the part-time workers surveyed said they would prefer a full-time job. The survey also found that 53% of the re-employed workers had switched occupations. Some of that might have been a job seeker’s decision to find more rewarding work, but, the report said, “In most cases, the change was probably necessary to find a job.”

There is some good news: 29% of the re-employed workers said they were earning more than they had before, and about 20% said their new job had better retirement and health benefits than their old job.

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