Older & jobless - U.S. recovery's forgotten story

A writer at Reuters says millions of older workers - 45+, 55+, 65+ - are suffering from lack of work, lower wages, and age discrimination.

That kind of 'age' discrimination is tough to prove. 

Yes, employers want workers with skills. 

What is likely happening is that the older job seeker's resume reveals a great deal, especially the age of that candidate. 

A resume that shows what skills a worker possesses must also reveal when those skills were acquired. 

Desirable skills and mature work habits often develop over time.  Unfortunately, it is relatively easy to filter out older workers simply from examining their resumes. 

Why would employers avoid hiring older workers? 

Costs. 

So, apart from valuable skills, 50 somethings and those older bring more experience, but with that they often bring along costly health related issues that grow larger over time. 

The complaints about not finding workers with skills is a false complaint. 

It is about paying for those skills plus the attached fear that the health costs of that worker might cost too much.   PB

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From columnist Mark Miller at Reuters.com:

Six years after the Great Recession ended, jobless older workers are the forgotten story of the economic recovery.

U.S. employers are creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs every month, but millions of older workers who want a job cannot find work.

The economic data documenting the problem is clear.

So is one of the most important causes: age discrimination.  Consider the government jobs report released late last week...

If you add in workers holding part-time jobs who would rather be working full time, and unemployed workers who have recently given up on seeking work, the jobless rate for older workers last month was 8.7 percent...

Further, if you add jobless workers who gave up looking after more than four weeks, the 55-plus unemployment rate is a whopping 12 percent.

Looked at another way, 2.5 million older Americans want a job but do not have one.

Age discrimination is illegal under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967.

But most of the complaints filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission focus on age-bias terminations rather than hiring - simply because hiring discrimination is so difficult to prove.

Yet two-thirds of older workers believe age discrimination occurs in the workplace, according to a 2013 survey by AARP...

[In another] recent study ... researchers sent out 40,000 dummy job applications that included signals on the job-seekers’ ages, and then monitored the response rates.

They measured callback rates for various occupations:

1. workers age 49-51 applying for administrative positions had a callback rate 29 percent lower than younger workers
2. it was 47 percent lower for workers over age 64.

...when older displaced workers do find new jobs, they typically go back to work with about 75 percent of their former pay.

These income disruptions play havoc with retirement plans...

Lost income in the decade leading to retirement can cut into future Social Security earnings by reducing the credits used to calculate a worker’s benefits.

It also can force workers to file for benefits early, sharply reducing lifetime benefits...
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Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-miller-unemployment-idUSKCN11E297