Workable Solutions : Labor: Many senior citizens are returning to the job market, often for personal satisfaction--and employers are finding them a valuable resource.
Two years ago, at age 74, Walter Wexler decided he’d had enough of the 9 to 5 grind. He’d worked longer than a lot of people, he figured, and now it was time to retire.
Within 10 months, Wexler found himself before the appraising eye of a temporary employment agency counselor, restless and eager to get back to work.
“Ten months is a long time to do nothing when you’re my age. I just got tired of staying home,” said Wexler, a former circulation director from Ventura who took a part-time clerical job nine months ago. “I thought I’d better keep active. If I didn’t, I knew I’d get old twice as fast.”
Wexler seems to be in good company. Employment professionals say an increasing number of senior citizens in Ventura County are pulling out their interview clothes and looking for work. And they are discovering that the job market is less intimidating and youth-biased than in the past, say employment counselors. A variety of part-time positions, once held by younger workers, are now being offered.
“This is definitely growing,” said Fred Winter, an employment counselor with the Ventura Senior Employment Service, a nonprofit organization that connects job-hunting seniors with about 40 local businesses looking for office, clerical, food service, domestic, child-care and retail-sales workers. Winter said the service recently opened a second office in Ventura because of the increased demand for jobs by seniors and employers looking for seniors.
“There are a lot more seniors who use our service than five years ago,” Winter said. “But there also are a lot more employers who are willing to hire seniors than before.”
The Area Agency on Aging, a county office established 10 years ago to work with organizations and individuals interested in hiring seniors, has also been affected. Director Colleen House said more employers than ever call to ask about the availability of retirees.
“They’re recruiting to this population now, whereas they used to go to the youth,” House said. “That’s also reflected by the growing number of older people who are working.”
While there are no local statistics to confirm that more retirees are heading back to work, the national increase is significant enough to have grabbed the attention of economists.
Since 1985, the percentage of employed people 65 or older has increased from 10.4% to 11.5%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. What’s more, a 1987 report by the U.S. secretary of Labor found that seniors take about the same time to land a job as their younger counterparts, and that “the notion that older workers have a harder time finding a job is not clearly supported empirically.”
What has caused the growth of gray in the workplace isn’t completely clear. One popular theory, economists said, is that since 1985 there are 2.3% fewer youths aged 16-24--the age group that typically has taken the low-paid or part-time positions now being offered to seniors--and 0.6% more people age 65 or older.
“We don’t have any hard numbers to say that the increase in 65-plus workers is because of fewer teen-agers, though,” said John Stinson, an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C. “Our numbers don’t indicate that seniors are a substitute.”
Other possible contributing factors, analysts say, include a low unemployment rate, as well as increased advertising campaigns--including those by fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s--that spotlight seniors back on the job.
Local businesses, however, have a few reasons of their own, and issues such as declining labor forces or low unemployment rates are not topping their lists.
Lester Netherton, manager of Ventura Supertravel, said many of his employee headaches disappeared after he began hiring seniors to do his bookkeeping a few years ago. Younger workers, he said, were unable to grasp the concepts of regular attendance or punctuality and they often conveyed the impression that jobs were an unwelcome intrusion upon their social lives.
“I had problems until then,” Netherton said, adding that seniors, in his experience, “are more reliable and conscientious.”
Netherton’s current bookkeeper, 76-year-old Elaine Garrett, has worked for him part-time for two years. His only complaint today is that there aren’t more employees like her. “They’re not easy to find,” he said. “She comes early and leaves late. She never misses a day.”
Other companies have had similar experiences. Winter, of the Ventura Senior Employment Service, said businesses frequently call to tell him about difficulties they’ve had with younger applicants. “They call in and say sometimes the younger ones show up, and sometimes they don’t,” he said. “They have busy social lives and their skill levels are pretty poor.
“One thing the Bank of A. Levy told me is that when a lot of younger people come in, they can’t read, write or add,” Winter added. “They don’t have as much trouble with the seniors.”
Cindy Bayer, assistant vice president of employment for the Bank of A. Levy, which has 21 branches in Ventura County, confirmed that attendance among senior tellers is generally better. And seniors, she said, often beat out their younger competitors in math.
Many applicants fresh out of school “are used to hand calculators and they never develop those skills,” Bayer said. “People educated under the old system are used to that. People who have 35 years of work experience--sometimes it works to their advantage.”
Convinced they have tapped into a valuable resource, several banks in recent years, including the Bank of A. Levy and Bank of America, have created positions designed to attract older and re-entry workers. The “peak-time teller” position at Bank of A. Levy begun three years ago is designed for people who want to work no more than 17 1/2 hours a week and who don’t need medical benefits.
In addition to having set schedules that allow them to plan other activities, the hourly pay is between $2.75 and $3 higher than the rate for regular tellers, Bayer said.
Such an arrangement, employers believe, is appealing to seniors who want part-time positions that pay well, but don’t want their benefits cut. (Under current law, Social Security beneficiaries between 65 and 69 may only earn up to $8,800 a year in outside income without penalty. Generally, for every $2 over that amount earned, Social Security benefits are cut by $1.)
Many older workers remember the days when employers were neither flexible about wages and hours, nor particularly willing to hire seniors in the first place.
Garrett, 76, who has worked for the past two years at Ventura Supertravel, recalled a phone call she made four years ago to get a part-time job. The response, she said, was less than encouraging.
“I said I was retired and wasn’t a youngster. He asked me, ‘Well, how old?”’ When Garrett answered, there was a pause. “He said, ‘Well, that’s a little bit too old.”’
As the population ages and the children of the ‘40s and ‘50s head toward retirement age, the days when any employer could afford to harbor such an attitude may be numbered. The Area Agency on Aging projects that in demographically youthful Ventura County nearly one-fifth of the county’s population will be over age 60 by the year 2010.
When that happens, experts say, employers may be hard-pressed to fill positions if they don’t turn to retired citizens.
“My own opinion is that we will see employment and work redefined, as a larger percentage of the population gets older,” said AAA Director House. “Employers will have to make greater use of older people, because they’ll find their skill bank there.”
In addition to hiring more seniors, House envisions the day when employers will bend over backward to make the workplace more attractive to older employees. Whereby companies now may encourage seniors to retire earlier, Young foresees a time when there will be “the reverse of the golden handshake.”
Employers will become “more amenable to flex time, longer vacations and allowing people to go out of the work force for six months with the option to return,” she said. “Measures will be taken to encourage people to stay on.”
All of which sounds great to people like Wexler, who say that going back to work has been a fountain of youth, of sorts.
“When you’re home doing nothing, time has no meaning. You get up whenever, and then the day is over and you’re sleeping again,” Wexler said. “But now I feel young. I don’t plan to stop.”
Wexler paused for a moment and then let out a sigh. “I’ve been on vacation now for a week or so. It’s getting to me.”
