Want To Work Longer? Careful, Your Fifties Define Your Sixties

Part of the rhetoric on the new longevity is the prospect of purpose-filled elders enthusiastically working through their lengthening healthspans. A new book edited by two Harvard academics shows how much still has to change for this vision to get anywhere close to reality. In Overtime: America’s Aging Workforce and the Future of Working Longer, Lisa Berkman, of Harvard’s Center for Population and Development Studies, and Beth Truesdale, of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, offer both confirmation and wake-up call for anyone entering the second half of life.

Today, over half of Americans don’t work consistently throughout their 50s. Yet few talk about this reality – or even measure it. “That was the “aha moment” of our project,” notes co-editor Lisa Berkman, “discovering that many, many people won’t be able to work even into their 60s, never mind through them.”

Unemployment figures don’t include those who aren’t looking for work. Even before the pandemic, more than a quarter of Americans in their late 50s were out of the labor force. Yet this massive and growing population may become an ever more essential part of the workforce as the supply of younger workers shrinks and societies continue to age.

Overtime is a daunting picture of the current strongly negative relationship between work and age. The book concludes with policy recommendations both for companies and countries working to adapt to ageing societies. If we want to tap into the longevity dividend, it will need to be inclusive of both halves of those we call older – those who are working for pay, and those who, for a variety of reasons, aren’t. The book’s editors and cross-disciplinary contributors suggest solutions to crack the inter-related strands of health, work, family and care issues that determine when, how and if people can work – and get paid for it.

What if the 50s was to Q3 what the 20s are to Q2?

What The Defining Decade did for the 20s, this book should do for the 50s. The first book argued that the 20s should not be seen as a no-risk, extended exploration of ‘emerging adulthood,’ years of consequence-free wandering. The Defining Decade argued that what you did, learned and accomplished in your 20s would have a huge impact on the entirety of your Second Quarter (ages 25-50) – if not your whole life. Essential and important, forming the knowledge, networks and experiences on which subsequent decades are grounded.

The same, it seems, is true of the 50s. What you do in your 50s, how much and how steadily you are employed, is a huge determinant of your ability to work in your 60s, let alone later. And the earlier we understand this, the better able we may be able to prepare for it.

“Even people who start their 50s with a full-time, full-year job,” warns Truesdale, “if they lose their job, only 1 in 10 ever earns as much again.”

Overtime shares statistics showing steep declines in employment during the 50s. No matter your education and professional level, losing a job in your 50s makes you unlikely to regain a similarly paid and positioned level – ever. Conversely, of those steadily employed in their 50s, 80% were still employed in their 60s. This should invite any 50-year-old tempted to walk out the door to rethink.

Since one of the major policy debates in an ageing America is focused on raising the Social Security full retirement age beyond age 67, this book knocks the simplicity of that single-mindedness off its rocker. The reality behind the retirement age is that most people are retiring – or getting pushed out – much earlier than that[b4] . And once they leave, it’s much harder to get back in.

This is an idea that won’t be argued with by the many people I’ve interviewed whose attempts at finding a job post-50 were met with ageist walls of incomprehension. As though entering Q3 was like falling off an employability cliff. When for many, especially women, it could be some of their best career years.

The editors also contradict the perception that rising rates of delayed retirement are inevitable. While employment rates of older people have risen post Covid, they zoom out for some historical perspective and comparisons. In fact, for the past four decades, employment rates have been fallinf for middle-aged men. Today’s middle-aged men are approaching retirement with lower employment rates than earlier generations. For women, the picture is more ambiguous, but increases in American women’s employment rates in middle age have stalled in recent years. At best, tomorrow’s retirees aren’t doing any better, employment-wise, than yesterday’s.

Overtime highlights three reasons so many people leave the labor force in their 50s or early 60s:

1. Health – Contrary to some of the buzz around healthy ageing, corrects Truesdale, “major sections of the cohorts turning 40 or 50 now – especially groups with lower levels of education or income — are actually in worse health than their counterparts who were born two or three decades earlier were when they were in their 40s and 50s.” Inequality in health outcomes drives inequality in work outcomes. So while Americans with high levels of education and income are living longer and healthier lives on average, those without these advantages aren’t.
2. Care – Many people (and almost a third of women) in their 50s and 60s are shouldering a variety of caring responsibilities – again. After being more impacted than men by childcare in their 30s, they revisit the work/family balancing act while caring for their parents – and in-laws. If this hits in their 50s, it can disproportionately affect their work prospects for the rest of their lives. Workplaces are still unevenly providing flexibility for these roles and are not yet strategically managing, retaining and adapting to their older workforce.
3. Work – the nature of certain jobs creates the problems above. Stress and strain – physical and mental – accelerate people burning out and dropping out. Inflexibility of schedules and work organisation makes reconciling work and care responsibilities unnecessarily conflictual.

This leads Berkman and Truesdale to the conclusion that we need to de-silo our approach to age and work. Retirement policy = labour policy = family policy = health care policy. The inter-relatedness of the challenges of lengthening careers, corporate inflexibility and ageism, and the caring demands at different life stages, but especially in elder care in an ageing society context, are multiple and complex.

The editors outline some possible policy outcomes for both companies and countries.

FOR COMPANIES: Working Longer Will Take Better Work

To enable people to work longer, companies will want to design work better. Age is currently not on the agendas of most companies. As its strategic importance becomes ever clearer, employers will want to design sustainability strategies for longevity. Berkman and Truesdale suggest prioritising three levers[b5] :

• Control – autonomy, variety, some influence over schedule control, and paid leave
• Moderation in work demands – reduce time pressures and stress, unpredictability and extreme variability of hours
• Connectedness – design workplaces with supportive relationships and teamwork and non-toxic cultures and managers

While companies have made significant strides in offering mental health support and wellness programs during the pandemic, the requirement for sustainable work design is bigger. “How work itself is organized is fundamental to the solution,” insists Berkman. “Companies think about workplace organization all the time, they just don’t think about it in terms of producing health for workers.”

FOR COUNTRIES: Broaden the Labour Policy Lens

For countries, the book’s biggest invitation is to recognise that “retirement policy is labour policy,” and needs to be designed in tandem. Some of the key takeaways at the national level:

1. Retirement Age: Recognise that ‘working longer’ won’t work alone. More than half the US population is no longer employed at today’s Social Security full retirement age of 67, let alone tomorrow’s. The tradeoffs are between fewer benefits and older retirement ages. This could be tempered if Congress decides to increase Social Security revenue.
2. Retirement Savings: Make retirement savings as portable as people. Make saving for retirement automatic for all workers – not just the half of American workers who currently have retirement plans through their employers. Then let their savings move with them. This is currently available in very few countries, with Australia as perhaps the poster child for getting it right.
3. Disability Accommodation. Keep people with disabilities flexibly connected to work, while allowing workers time off to heal from new illnesses or injuries. Accept that older societies will have more people with disabilities working and innovate ways to design work around the reality – while at the same time providing financial support for those whose conditions make paid work difficult or impossible. The pandemic’s accelerated push towards working from home should help some white-collar workers whose jobs can be done remotely. Here technology should help drive flexibility and inclusion.
4. Life Course Integration: What happens in one stage of life impacts what happens later – from health and work to pensions and retirement. Often the fate of “prime-age” workers (ages 25-54) – and policy issues like minimum wages, paid leave, and workplace safety – are researched and addressed as separate from the fate of retirees. They need to be seen as a whole. Today’s middle-aged workers are tomorrow’s retirees.

The book is focused on the US, which Berkman says has sunk down the ranks of the international leagues on life expectancy. “Over time, virtually every other industrialised nation has overtaken us. We now sit at the bottom of all OECD countries in terms of life expectancy.” Now, despite its seemingly record low unemployment rate, the US may be silently sentencing large segments of its midlife population to economic redundancy. Rather than leveraging the potential of longer lives, it may be cutting them off at what could be the midpoint.

It will take a concerted public and private push to better leverage the skills and energies of this forgotten half of America’s 50+ population. The cost and consequences of not doing so, however, will not be as quiet as their quitting.