Mining the Golden Years : Older workers, prized for their experience, are being recruited to meet growing demands for temporary help.
Marjorie Cates hadn’t planned on starting over as a temporary receptionist at age 58.
But when she was laid off by Northrop Corp. from her job as a graphics coordinator, the ebullient, white-haired La Canada woman quickly discovered that Kelly Services, the temporary placement firm, was one of the few ready sources of employment for an older person with a narrow range of skills.
“I’m alone in the world and I need to earn my living,” said Cates, pausing amid a busy morning of answering phones and paging co-workers at the Los Angeles County March of Dimes office in Glendale. “At this point I take what I can get and make the best of it.”
Perfect Match
For Kelly Services, it’s a perfect match. Desperate--as are other temporary placement firms--to satisfy employers’ mounting demands for temporary workers, Kelly is reaching out to older people for help in filling the job orders.
“The working world needs these people,” said Charlotte Schwartz, a Kelly district manager in Portland, Ore., who describes herself as “65 and over” as she tours the country urging older workers to sign up with the Troy, Mich., firm.
Demographic trends have forced temporary placement firms to heap new attention on senior citizens. Young people are a shrinking portion of the labor pool, while the elderly are the fastest-growing portion of the population.
“The so-called ‘baby bust’ is upon us,” explained Thomas Anton, executive vice president of Kelly.
The result: To attract older workers, temporary agencies such as Kelly and Volt Temporary Services are sending recruiters to speak at meetings of retirees, working with the American Assn. of Retired Persons and other senior citizen organizations and holding special events aimed at the senior population.
In Los Angeles, Careers for Older Americans, a nonprofit job referral agency for people 55 and over, has been working with Volt and two smaller agencies to place seniors in temporary jobs. And another 20 agencies have pleaded with the organization for help in recruiting seniors, associate director Denise D. Jessup said.
Wealth of Experience
To the older worker, temporary agencies may offer training on new office equipment--word processors and personal computers, for instance--that wasn’t around during the senior’s earlier career. To the employer, they emphasize that an older worker may bring the kind of dependability, experience and resourcefulness that might be lacking in a younger temporary.
“One thing I’ll never understand is why companies ask people to retire at 55,” Schwartz said. “To me, they are letting go invaluable experience. The reason for it is they can get younger people at a lesser price. But how can you equate that? How long does it take to get a younger person up to that level of experience?”
In fact, many employers actively seek out older workers. About 40% of the firms that contacted Careers for Older Americans during a recent period said they preferred to hire older workers or sought employees possessing the reliability and knowledge associated with older people.
March of Dimes Director Anthony F. Giacalone said his experience with older workers such as Cates was consistently positive.
“They’re hard to ruffle and add a real sense of stability,” he explained. One-third of the organization’s staff of 40 in Glendale is 56 or older, he said.
Few Benefits
Critics say some employers want the best of two worlds. They slice their permanent work forces to the bone, jettisoning many older workers in the process. Then they restaff with temporaries--sometimes the same individuals they just forced out--who get few, if any, benefits and have no job security, even if their hourly pay is about the same as a full-time worker’s.
“We are seeing more and more part-
time job offerings that aren’t giving benefits and aren’t giving people the full income they need,” Jessup said.
Temporary workers in Los Angeles County earned an average of $7.81 per hour in September, 1987, according to a survey by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hourly wages ranged from an average of $4.31 for manual laborers to $8.28 for typists to $21 for computer programmers.
Cates--who earns up to $7 per hour as a temporary receptionist--said she has enjoyed the variety of assignments Kelly has offered her over the last four months. Among them: stints at an aviation company, an aerospace firm and an electrical supply house before her current monthlong posting at the March of Dimes.
But the pay, she said, is only one-third of what she earned at Northrop. And the work as a receptionist is hardly as challenging as the aerospace graphics jobs she’d held the previous 23 years.
“I would not want to do this if I were going to be at it for a full year,” said Cates, a New England native who sings in barbershop quartets and trained at the Pasadena Playhouse in the 1950s.
What helps, she said, is the boost she gets when her temporary employers praise her performance.
“Each place has said, ‘We’d like to have you back,’ ” Cates said.
Schwartz and Anton of Kelly say older people such as Cates who are working as temporaries to earn a living are a minority of the seniors, who make up 12% to 15% of Kelly’s work force of 500,000. Most, they said, are retirees looking for a little extra income or to escape the doldrums of retirement without being tied down to a full-time job.
“You can’t travel all the time,” Schwartz said. “How much golf can you play? How much television can you watch?”
WHAT TEMPORARIES GET PAID Average hourly earnings for a representative list of temporary jobs. Figures are for the Los Angeles-Long Beach area, as of September, 1987 (latest available). Computer programmer $21.00 Registered nurse 20.91 Craftsman 13.19 Licensed practical nurse 12.32 Legal secretary 11.10 Word processor 9.73 Typist 8.28 Bookkeeper 7.79 Motor vehicle driver 6.97 Nursing aide $6.41 Messenger 5.55 Stock clerk 5.41 Machine operator 5.10 Janitor 4.69 Kitchen worker 4.68 Laborer 4.51 Handler, cleaner 4.33 AVERAGE, ALL TEMP JOBS $7.81 Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
