“Old Person” Jobs

Did you know there is such a thing?  The New York Times recently ran an article, More Older People Are Finding Work, but What Kind?, that features a new brief from the Center for Retirement Research.  The Times article explains

As men and women 55 and older looking for employment probably suspect, at a certain point the kinds of jobs available to them narrow significantly. New research by Matthew Rutledge, an economist at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, found that they are increasingly being funneled into what he describes as “old-person” jobs.

And not surprisingly, older workers with the least education have the narrowest set of opportunities, though Mr. Rutledge found this effect was small.

It turns out that “old-person” jobs are a mix of high-skilled service work (like managers, sales supervisors and accountants) and low-skilled service work (like truck drivers, janitors and nursing aides). Absent from the top of the list are jobs calling for a fair amount of physical labor. Jobs in farming, manufacturing and repair represent less than a quarter of all new hires in this age bracket.

The brief from CRR,  How Job Options Narrow for Older Workers by Socioeconomic Status offers these findings

• Job-changers over age 50 increasingly end up in “old-person” jobs, with a high share of older hires relative to prime-age hires. 

• These basic findings hold by gender and by education. 

• However, the overall outlook has improved since the late 1990s for all groups, particularly for older women with more education.

• Also, older job-changers hired into “old-person” jobs are paid no less than other jobs.

The full brief, available here as a pdf, examines “suitable” employment, with the introduction explaining 

The ability of older job-changers to find “suitable” employment affects both their current income and their ability to work long enough to secure an adequate retirement income. One measure of suitable employment is the range of occupations available to them. This brief, based on a recent study, assesses the extent to which occupational options narrow for workers as they age from their early-fifties to their mid-sixties and whether the pattern varies by gender or socioeconomic status, as measured by education level.

Back to the Times article, which lists most and least common “old person” jobs (hint-lawyers are in the “least common” category).  The Times story also discusses several other studies regarding elders in the work force.  This would be a great article to include in an unit on economic security or in a discussion regarding ageism.