Job Prospects Look Hot for ‘Geezer Boomers’ in 2020
Older workers, often pushed out the door amid the corporate layoffs of the 1980s and 1990s, are likely to emerge in coming years as hot prospects in the job market.
That’s one of the main conclusions of a new study by the Hudson Institute, an influential think tank, focusing on major trends expected to shape the work force through the year 2020.
Starting shortly after the current decade ends, “employers are going to have to make a 180-degree paradigm shift from the 1980s’ downsizing mentality, when the urge was to slim down and collapse the managerial hierarchy,” said Richard W. Judy, a coauthor of Hudson’s Workforce 2020 study, during an interview Friday in Los Angeles.
Instead, said the 64-year-old Judy, employers will overhaul their workplaces and employment practices to find ways to hire and retain aging baby boomers--or, as he calls them, “geezer boomers.”
The 158-page study by Hudson, a conservative nonprofit group based in Indianapolis, is expected to carry substantial weight among big employers and public policymakers. It is a follow-up to Hudson’s ballyhooed 1987 study, Workforce 2000, which predicted a substantial influx of women, minorities and immigrants into the labor force and helped galvanize workplace diversity programs across the country to deal with the demographic changes.
On that score, the new Hudson report forecasts a continuing, albeit gradual, increase in women and minorities in the workplace. It predicts that the portion of the work force consisting of minorities will edge up from 23% in 1994 to 26% in the year 2005. Likewise, the percentage of women is expected to inch up from 46% to 48% over the same period.
Meanwhile, the new report also hews to previous warnings that employers increasingly will struggle to find workers with badly needed, technologically up-to-date job skills.
The mismatch between the low skills of many of the nation’s job seekers and the growing demand for highly trained employees will be particularly acute in Southern California, Judy said, as a result of the continuing influx of poorly educated immigrant workers.
“You’re going to have unemployment problems . . . as far as the eye can see,” he said.
Judy, a Harvard-trained economist and former businessman, said some of the thirst for skilled employees will be eased by increased automation or by shifting work overseas. But on top of that, he predicted, employers will lure aging baby boomers back to work with higher pay, flexible schedules and, where possible, increased use of telecommuting.
So far, however, Judy acknowledged that most big companies haven’t recognized the assets that older workers provide.
“Not one HR [human resources] department in 500 has begun to think along these lines yet,” he said.
That point was seconded by J. Burke Sabel, president of 40 Plus of Southern California Inc., a nonprofit group that helps laid-off managers and executives find new jobs.
“Employers have accommodated young mothers and families, but I’ve seen nothing yet legislatively, or in informal things that companies do, to try to attract or retain older people,” Sabel said.
At the same time, Sabel said, older managers who demonstrate to potential employers that they are flexible, up-to-date in their skills and reasonable in salary demands “have a fighting chance,” in the current job market.
Sally E. James, executive director of Career Encores, a Los Angeles nonprofit group that helps older workers find jobs, said she hasn’t seen “any real pickup in demand” for her clients. She said age discrimination “still is an issue” but, like Sabel, added that prospects are better for older workers with up-to-date skills.
Many employers, James said, want “experience and dependability, and all those good things they say about older workers. . . . But there’s still the fear they [older workers] will cost more, so we’re caught in a bind.”
Judy said part of the impetus for increasing employment of older workers will come from the aging baby boomers themselves. Many will grow bored with retirement, he said, and others will need the money.
“They haven’t saved enough, and Social Security benefits are going to be eroded one way or another,” Judy predicted.
For employers, he said, the coming trend will present risks and management challenges. One of the problems: More older employees in the workplace may mean fewer promotion opportunities, and more frustration, for younger staffers.
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Work-Force Shift
As the percentage of Americans in the 25-64 age group shrinks, workers age 65 and older are expected to become more valuable to employers.
Population ages 25 to 65:
1995: 51.6%
2030: 47.4%
*
Population ages 65 and older:
1995: 12.6%
2030: 20.2%
* Sources: Hudson Institute; U.S. Census Bureau.
