Older-worker unemployment

Older-worker unemployment is not simply the absence of a job late in life. In the book, it is part of a wider reversal: people who once might have expected to retire instead face age barriers, depleted savings, insecure work, and the need to keep earning. Some cannot find employment despite years of experience; others accept physically demanding seasonal jobs because their retirement income cannot support them. The result is a late-career economy in which being willing to work does not guarantee a job, and getting one does not guarantee security.

A Fraying Promise of Retirement

The growing number of older workers signals a change in the meaning of retirement. Nearly nine million Americans aged sixty-five and older were still employed in 2016, a 60 percent increase over the previous decade. Economists expected the number and the proportion of seniors in the workforce to continue rising. Although most older Americans still regarded retirement as a time for leisure, only 17 percent anticipated that they would not work at all in later life. The book links these figures to a larger reversal in retirement security: successive generations, beginning with younger baby boomers, were increasingly less able to retire without a drop in living standards.

The familiar three-legged model of retirement—Social Security, private pensions, and personal savings or investments—had become less dependable. The Great Recession destroyed assets for many households, while savings had already been declining. Since the 1980s, employers had increasingly replaced defined-benefit pensions, which promised a continuing monthly payment, with 401(k) plans that relied more heavily on workers’ contributions and investment decisions. The shift transferred more financial risk from employers and public systems onto families. For older people who had lost savings or lacked a substantial pension, continued work was less a chosen encore than a response to the possibility of running out of money.

That risk accumulated over a lifetime, and not evenly. The book notes that more than one in six older women living alone were below the poverty line in 2015, and that elderly women were nearly twice as likely as elderly men to be poor. Female Social Security recipients received, on average, $341 less per month, reflecting lower lifetime payroll contributions; women were still earning about 80 cents for every dollar earned by men and were more likely to provide unpaid care. Linda May’s own history included raising two children and later living with and helping her mother, who developed aggressive brain cancer. Such care could narrow the time and income available for paid work, with the consequences carried into old age. At sixty-two, Linda May began collecting Social Security earlier than she thought she should have, because the benefit was so small that waiting seemed unlikely to make a meaningful difference.

Experience Meets Age Barriers

The book’s examples show how a long work history could fail to translate into later employment. Patti DiPino had spent fifteen years as a bookkeeper for a Denver construction company before being laid off when it closed in 2009. Around the same time, she lost her home in a difficult divorce and moved into her motorhome. Believing that three decades in office administration would count in her favor, she submitted thousands of online applications over several years. None produced a job. Her experience did not protect her from the labor market’s poor reception of an unemployed woman in her fifties.

David Roderick’s experience exposed a different version of the same barrier. After teaching chemistry and oceanography at California community colleges, he built an ecotourism business and worked as an English Language Fellow for the State Department in Jordan. He later received offers for teaching jobs in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, but both were withdrawn when administrators realized he was over seventy and exceeded regional age limits. At the same time, his retirement cushion had been damaged much earlier: after a divorce, he had cashed out a sixteen-year teaching pension, which amounted to $22,000 to be divided with his first wife instead of growing with the state’s contribution. His later work was shaped not by a lack of training or professional accomplishment, but by the disappearance of financial security and the narrowing of opportunities.

Patti’s next foothold was seasonal warehouse work. When the book’s narrator met her at an Amazon warehouse in Coffeyville, Kansas, she was fifty-seven and stowing merchandise on the overnight shift. She earned $10.50 an hour and was grateful for the pay, but did not want to spend her earnings at the company employing her. She urged people to buy from local businesses, describing a widening gap between the rich and workers who were becoming poorer. Her job offered income without resolving the conditions that had sent her looking for work in the first place.

Work That the Retired Cannot Refuse

Seasonal jobs could absorb older people who needed wages, but they could also ask bodies to perform work better suited to younger workers. At seventy-seven, David Roderick sold Christmas trees with his wife at the San Mateo Event Center. For eight to ten hours a day, six days a week, he carried trees as long as nine feet and lifted them onto customers’ vehicles. He enjoyed selling them, but described the cutting and hauling as work for a very young person. The team included other retirees. The job demonstrated the contradiction at the heart of late-life employment: older workers might be valued for showing up and working hard while still being expected to endure demanding physical labor.

Older employees were also visible at Adventureland, where a seventy-seven-year-old former recruiter spoke proudly of colleagues working despite age-related disabilities. She recalled an eighty-six-year-old employee, a wheelchair user assigned to count with a clicker at the water park, and a one-armed ride supervisor. An operator at the Tornado rollercoaster was eighty-one. These examples show older workers continuing to contribute in varied roles, but the book also records the limits of optimism about work in old age. Retired postal carrier and pastor Steve Booher, sixty-eight, died in an on-the-job accident while helping passengers leave the Raging River ride. The conveyor belt started prematurely; he fell from the loading platform and fractured his skull. The ride reopened the following day, and regulators later required safety upgrades and imposed a $4,500 fine. Continued employment could bring purpose or wages, but it could also expose older workers to serious workplace hazards.

Displacement and the Search for a Way Forward

Peter Fox’s experience illustrates how economic change could push an older worker out of a career without providing a viable retirement. At sixty-six, after twenty-eight years in San Francisco’s taxi industry as a driver, dispatcher, medallion holder, and manager, he had been squeezed out by Uber. He could no longer both pay rent and eat. He hoped to sell his medallion and use the estimated $140,000 after taxes to retire, but the city-brokered market had little demand, and he remained on a waiting list. Within six months, he had moved into a white Ford E350 van he called the Pelican and was looking for workamping jobs. At a recruiter’s table, he explained that he had been forced into retirement and needed to make money. The phrase captured the difference between choosing to leave work and being pushed out of a livelihood without the means to stop working.

For Patti DiPino, warehouse wages likewise sat alongside a hope for something more durable than a sequence of jobs and temporary places to live. She did not want to wander indefinitely. She imagined a permanent community where seniors could build gardens, produce methane and fuel, share a kitchen, and preserve food. The plan drew on practical knowledge she believed older people already possessed, including canning. She died at sixty; the book reports that she had been receiving radiation treatment for cancer. Her death closes the account of her job search without suggesting that employment itself had repaired the insecurity surrounding it.

Peter Fox, too, looked beyond the next job. He wondered where people went when they became too old to camp or live in a van, and imagined roving medical teams, way stations, or a nonprofit for aging vehicle dwellers. When asked about his own future, he could offer no settled plan, only the hope of not getting old or dying and the possibility that a niece and nephew might take him in if circumstances became desperate. Together, these accounts make older-worker unemployment more than a question of hiring. It is a condition shaped by accumulated losses, age limits, retirement systems that transfer risk to individuals, and the thinness of support when work or health finally fails.