Giving Compass' Take:
- Katharine Abraham and Susan Houseman share insights on how to improve workforce services and policies that could help the elderly population of workers.
- How can donors support or encourage policies that will sustain the elderly workforce and offer protection?
- Read about driving progress in equitable recovery for the aging population.
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Americans are living longer, are healthier at older ages, and increasingly are working beyond the traditional age of retirement. While many who work until late in life do so to stay active and connected or for other nonfinancial reasons, others work out of financial need. Owing to a variety of factors including changes in the structure of private retirement benefits, an increase in the eligibility age for claiming full Social Security benefits, and stagnant wages in recent decades for those at the bottom and middle of the earnings distribution, a large share of older Americans lack adequate savings for retirement.
At the same time, the U.S. economy has become more reliant on older workers. Reflecting not only the increased labor force participation of older workers but also, and more importantly, the aging of the baby boomer generation, today nearly a quarter of the labor force is age 55 and older, an increase of 12 percentage points since the mid-1990s.
A significant challenge to continued employment at older ages is that workers often must change jobs late in life. Particularly for those in manual jobs, the physical demands of their work may become too great, leading them to need to change the type of work they do.
We propose seven relatively low-cost reforms that will improve the workforce services provided to older adults and can be implemented quickly. These proposals include:
- Having specialized staff at job centers who understand older workers’ needs and who can serve them more effectively,
- Experimenting with job placement programs specifically for older workers,
- Promoting self-employment among older adults,
- Providing targeted skills development for older workers,
- Adopting separate program performance standards for older adults to eliminate disincentives for the provision of services to this population
- Restoring funding to the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP, a program that serves disadvantaged older adults), and
- Evaluating the new programs and initiatives we recommend to ensure they have the intended effect.
Read the full article about improving workforce services by Katharine Abraham and Susan Houseman at Brookings.