Main Street

More on “Too old to hire, too young to retire”

Matt Yglesias considers proposals to raise the retirement age, and concludes,

At any rate, my concern with the idea of raising the retirement age is twofold. One is the pretty obvious point that many jobs are a great deal more physically taxing than the job of the average economist or political pundit. But you could in principle handle this fairly and equitably through the Disability Insurance element of Social Security. The other issue is that as best I can tell from the labor market fate of people in the 50-65 age bracket, employers aren’t exactly chomping at the bit to hire older workers in any capacity.

He points to a Washington Independent piece by Annie Lowry that starts with something that will sound familiar to Main Street readers: “Too young not to work but too old to work?”

Last week, Ashley Keith told us about a Working America member who characterized herself as “too young to retire but too old to hire” and Susan Bruce pointed to rising suicide rates among baby boomers, while in the past Mitchell Hirsch looked closely at record levels of unemployment for older workers.

Lowry takes a look at the age discrimination component of older workers’ struggles.

McCann called age discrimination in hiring “the most under-reported form of discrimination” and “prevalent” throughout the recession, as an average of 5 workers compete for every job opening. In an interview, she explained why age discrimination is so hard to quantify: “[It is] the lack of proof. If you’re laid off, you might be in outplacement, and see that everyone who got laid off was older. Or, you might have friends in your office to tell you that a younger person took your job when your employer told you the position was being eliminated. But hiring discrimination is much harder to see, and can be impossible to prove. In most cases, you’re not going to know who was hired. You’re not going to know how they filled the position. There’s just a hunch, or a feeling, that you’re not getting through the door because of your age.”

Incidences of age discrimination in firing are much clearer to see, and have risen along with the recession. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says age discrimination cases have jumped 17 percent since the start of the recession, and climbed 30 percent between 2007 and 2008. But virtually all of those cases involve layoffs, rather than the lack of job offers.

Still, evidence of age bias in hiring is accumulating in academic research and anecdotal reports to the EEOC, Commission on Civil Rights and AARP. In one famed 2005 study, a Texas A&M economist sent out 4,000 job applications for entry-level positions. (The resumes were only women’s.) Older workers were 40 percent less likely to receive a response back. And of the letters sent to Congress last week, a vast majority mentioned age, many coming from older workers who had applied for hundreds of positions, to no avail.

What happens to all those people who’ve worked their whole lives if Congress doesn’t pass jobs legislation, keeps chipping away at the safety net for jobless workers, and then jacks up the retirement age?

One weird thing here—or a thing that shows how thoughtless and out of touch many politicians truly are, even with basic self interest—is that baby boomers vote at high rates. If Congress won’t take care of their interests, what hope do the rest of us have?

Tags: Retirement, unemployment