By Larry Keough
FSU Communications Group
Questions about employment for older Americans should be answered before Congress raises the retirement age as a deficit-reduction move, says a Florida State University expert on aging and Social Security.
"Raising the retirement age from 65 to 68 can increase what people pay into Social Security and decrease what they take out of it - providing they can find work," said sociology Professor Jill Quadagno, who holds the Mildred and Claude Pepper Eminent Scholar Chair in Social Gerontology at FSU.
Many Americans in their late 50s and early 60s are caught between a rock - forced to retire with or without a pension - and a hard place - with little prospect of re-entering the labor force, said Quadagno, who is also a research associate in FSU's Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy.
"Trying to dent the federal deficit on the backs of seniors with a bleak employment future could cause more harm than good," she said. "Under this scenario, unemployment among those in their 50s and 60s could necessitate additional entitlement programs, inflating the deficit."
About a third of men and almost half of women age 55-64 have been unemployed in recent years, Quadagno said. Many of them were employed by companies in declining industries, which averted layoffs by offering attractive early pensions to older workers, she said.
Quadagno said about one-fifth of white-collar professionals who retired at age 55 or older in the late 1980s have worked again in flexible employment, that is, part-time, contingent on short-term projects. Flexible employment, coupled with a partial pension from previous jobs, could provide older workers with the financial means to wait until age 68 before receiving Social Security benefits, she said.
And companies offering attractive pensions can protect the solvency of their trust funds when older workers find flexible employment. Pensions are reduced when the beneficiaries re-enter the work force.
But Quadagno said employers are reluctant to expand flexible employment to older workers for fear that such programs are more costly and older workers are more difficult to retrain than younger employees.
In practice, however, older workers tend to be retrainable, reliable employees who take few sick days, she said.
"Many older professionals are ideally suited for flexible employment, because they present a pool of skilled and experienced workers, " she said. "Older workers can be a valuable source for flexible-employment opportunities if employers can look past stereotypical beliefs that foster bias and discrimination."
"Something has to give if companies are forced to either deplete their pension funds or lay off older workers," Quadagno said. "Raising the retirement age before addressing employment is a risk that America can't afford to take."