Unemployment Down but Overall Job Growth Remains Anemic

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The AARP Public Policy Institute has released a new report on unemployment. Some of the findings are:

About 66,000 fewer persons aged 55 and over were unemployed in January than in December, as the unemployment rate for this age group fell from 6.9 percent to 6.7 percent.

The improvement in the unemployment rate was concentrated among older men; both the number unemployed and the unemployment rate increased among older women.

After falling in December, average duration of unemployment for older jobseekers rose in January to 44.4 weeks. Half (50.5 percent) had been out of work for 27 or more weeks, somewhat fewer than in December.

The number of older involuntary part-time workers barely changed in January. However, considerably fewer older persons wanted a job but were not looking for one because they were discouraged about their job prospects.
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Record number of pensioners still working | CARDI : Centre for Ageing Research and Development in Ireland

By Harry Wallop, Consumer Affairs Editor, The Telegraph - United Kingdom

A record number of people are still working beyond the age or retirement, according to official statistics, which suggested the recession has forced people to work far longer than they used to.

Nearly one in every eight men – or 11.7 per cent – of men aged 65 or over, and 12.3 per cent of women aged 60 or over are still working, according to the Office for National statistics.

These are the highest rates since records began and compare against rates of between 7 or 8 per cent throughout the 1990s.

The figures suggest that thousands of pensioners are going back to work to fund their slim incomes, or that they are not in a financially strong enough position to retire in the first place. Some are also actively choosing to work longer, because of better health and a desire to keep active.

They are the latest data to demonstrate how the recession has changed the face of Britain's workforce, leading to far more part-time workers and older workers, while leaving many more young people out of work.

The ONS figures also showed that the average age of retirement has significantly increased in recent years and hit a new record. The average age for men was 64.7 years during 2010, up from 63 in 1996. Women left the workplace when they were 62.5 years old, on average – a full two years after the official retirement age, and up from 60.6 in 1996.

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National Health Spending Growth Held to Record-breaking Low... American Medical News

By Doug Trapp, amednews staff

The most recent economic recession slowed the growth of national health spending to 4% in 2009 -- the slowest rate since at least 1960. Patients delayed elective care and limited out-of-pocket spending, in part because millions of people lost private health coverage.

However, the percentage of the nation's gross domestic product devoted to health care increased to 17.6% in 2009, a full percentage point higher than in 2008, because health spending grew at a faster pace than the economy as a whole. Overall health spending reached $2.49 trillion, according to an annual report on national health spending by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary, published online Jan. 5 in the journal Health Affairs.

"The slowdown was widespread among all health care goods and services," said Anne Martin, CMS economist and report co-author.

But the recession -- which officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009 -- particularly affected physicians, dentists and nursing facilities, and it did so faster than in previous recessions, she said.
...

The two major exceptions to restrained spending increases in 2009 were retail prescription drugs, which rebounded from historically low growth in 2008, and home health care. Drug spending growth was driven by higher drug prices and increased utilization, partly because of the influenza A (H1N1) pandemic.

Patient out-of-pocket spending experienced a historic deceleration in 2009, growing by only 0.4%, or 2.7 percentage points slower than in 2008. This was driven partly by the first decline in dental spending since at least 1960 but also by slower growth in spending on physicians and clinical services, nursing care and other sectors of the health system, the report found.
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Many Seniors Living in Poverty Due to Recession

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After the numbers were revised, the 2009 Census revealed that there may be millions of more American citizens living in poverty than originally thought. Those who are aged 65 and over appear to be especially affected by the economic downturn, with poverty rates nearly doubling to 16.1 percent, according to The Associated Press.

The Western region of the nation had the highest rate of residents living in poverty at 19.2 percent. The Midwest had the lowest rate at 12.5 percent.

The news source suggests that the impoverished elderly population underscores the need for the government to strategically plan for aging baby boomers and seniors. One way to correct this problem is to install additional safety measures in the form of old-age benefits or reform Medicare and Social Security systems.
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Employment and Aging: Using Large Scale Data To Ask, “Who Works?” | Aging In Action

by John Davy on December 21, 2010

The so-called Great Recession has changed how Americans view work, and not just due to our 10% unemployment rate. Attacks on social security and pensions, the disappearing social safety net, and the need for many older adults to support younger family members (at a life stage when both had perhaps once expected that support would flow in the opposite direction) has delayed or ended retirement for many Americans. At the same time, job prospects for the long-term unemployed are sufficiently poor—which, as we recently discussed, particularly afflicts older adults—that many are forced into undesired, unfunded retirement.

In our recent article on employment and aging, we discussed why older adults struggle to find work, compared to younger cohorts. This may lead one to ask: what are the factors that lead older adults to search for new work? Clearly, unemployment, the loss of pensions, and the need to support spouses, children and grandchildren all lead individuals to take on new employment. Beyond individual circumstances, however, are there structural factors that influence who works? What can we learn about differences between communities, classes, ethnic groups, and regions in terms of which older adults seek out and take on work?

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• Marcia Kerz: Let's Bring Aging Americans Into the Information Age (huffingtonpost.com)
• Stress in Older Adults (yourmindyourbody.org)
• ICAA Research: The 50+ Population Envisions Their Future Lifestyle as Active and Involved (prweb.com)

TIME GOES BY | The Future of Today's Elder Workers

by Ronni Bennett

Unoubtedly you saw the news last Monday that the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) – the group of economists who read the tea leaves to determine the state of our economy – announced that our great recession officially ended more than a year ago, in June 2009.

Snark Alert: that must have been a relief to 57-year-old Patricia Reid, a college-educated business analyst unemployed for the past four years.

On the same day as the NEBR announcement, she was profiled by The New York Times in a story about middle- and late-aged workers who fear they may never work again.

That's not hyperbole; I learned how real it is even before the economy imploded. Back in 2004-05, I spent a year fruitlessly banging my head against a wall of age discrimination. From my shortened resume and a telephone interviews, 20-something hiring managers thought I was hot stuff, but they quickly backtracked when they saw me in person.

There were still plenty of jobs back then – my young colleagues who were caught in the same layoff I was found jobs in six or eight or ten weeks but not me. I cannot imagine how awful it must be for 50- and 60-somethings looking for work now.

I had no idea then how lucky the timing was when what turned out to be my last job ended. When I gave up looking for work after a year, I was 64, only one year from being eligible for Medicare and two years from full Social Security.

Although I had spent three years with no income during two bouts of unemployment over the previous seven years, had cashed in most of my 401(k) and was tens of thousands of dollars in debt, what I did have was my home in Manhattan which by then was worth about six or seven times what I had paid for it 23 year earlier. And houses were still selling.

Today, most of the middle- and late-aged unemployed don't have the options I had. Many, like Patricia Reid, are years from Medicare and Social Security. They have lost their homes to foreclosure or the value has plummeted, often below what they owe. If they had any savings left after the 2008 crash, they have decimated it to pay living costs. As has been widely reported, those who can find a job are working at salaries far below what they were previously paid.

But those are just words you've read in the news a zillion times. Here is what it means for real life old age:
When they do reach full Social Security age, their benefits will be substantially lower than if they had been able to continue the usual trajectory of their careers.

Those with no choice but to take early Social Security at 62, will see even smaller monthly checks.
Having lost all or a great deal of their savings in the crash or to pay the bills during their unemployment, they will have little or no income in addition to Social Security.

If they lost their home to foreclosure, they will need to rent for the rest of their lives and that won't be easy. Due to so many forced from their homes, rents are returning to premium levels in many cities.

If their mortgage is under water, not only will they see no equity after years of payments, they will owe a substantial amount even if they can sell in today's marketplace.

So, many who did all the right things to prepare for their old age will be living hand to mouth, scrambling to pay for the basics of life every day for the rest of their lives, which can be 25 or 30 years. Is it any wonder across-the-political-spectrum rage at Wall Street salaries and bonuses does not subside?

News stories lament the predicament of recent graduates who cannot find a first job. I feel their pain, but they do have 40 or 50 years to build a nest egg that older workers do not. And aside from that New York Times piece last week, there is nary a word about the impoverished old age millions of older people are now stuck with, without recourse. Even if they found a reasonably well-paying job today, there are not the years left in their work lives to repay their debt and recoup their losses.

Nevertheless, most Republicans, tea partiers and some Democrats want to cut Social Security and Medicare.
What brought on my imagining the future of these soon-to-be elders was Saul Friedman's Gray Matters column on Saturday.

He wrote of Ohio Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur's bill, HR 4318, which would authorize the president to re-establish the CCC, a program that put millions of young men to work during the Great Depression. Those young men were doing mostly physical labor. Kaptur's bill eliminates the age and gender limits, and keep in mind that for every project involving manual labor, there are related support jobs that older people can do.

To me, this a no brainer. We are in desperate times. Young kids just out school can delay their career dreams a few years (as they did in the Depression) to earn some money while helping rebuild the nation's infrastructure, and it would be a lifeline for older workers who otherwise have few options.

I can't think of a better way to spend the next “stimulus” now that the federal government has so munificently helped out Wall Street workers.

Maybe your congressperson doesn't know about Marcy Kaptur's bill. You might want to inform him or her which you can do here in the right column under the header, Get Involved.

TIME GOES BY | The Future of Today's Elder Workers

Average retirement age has increased in Finland

Image by Bishwo Ghimire via Flickr

from HELSINGIN SANOMAT INTERNATIONAL EDITION Somewhat surprisingly, the average age of retirement in Finland rose from 59.4 in 2008 to 59.8 last year, regardless of the ongoing recession and rising unemployment.

Experts have been rather taken aback by the fact that the average age of retirement in Finland rose noticeably from 59.4 in 2008 to 59.8 last year, in spite of the ongoing recession and rising unemployment figures.

In comparison, the pension age in 1999 was below 59 years.
The pension age keeps rising, as the rules have been changed and as people also live longer.

The increase as such is in line with the forecasts made following the major pension reform of 2005 that introduced a so-called flexible retirement age from 63 to 68 years. The objective of the pension reform was to encourage employees to stay at work longer.

However, a severe economic decline hit the country, and news stories on senior employees being urged to take retirement were reported from various parts of the country. At the same time, it has been said those employees suffering from burnout have left the workforce prematurely since they have been granted disability pensions.

This development has nevertheless not been reflected in retirement figures - at least not yet.

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