Unemployment is at its lowest since 2008, and if 200,000 more jobs are added to the economy when the March numbers come out Friday, it will mark the 13th month in a row of upbeat numbers — especially for older workers, who can cheer 4.3 percent unemployment rate in February.
But the rosy reports may be masking the long, hard road back from the Great Recession for the country's 55-plus workforce.
"The unemployment numbers are misleading, missing some key issues older workers are facing" says Gary Koenig, vice president, financial security for AARP's Public Policy Institute.
It is releasing a study Monday that reveals what Koenig calls "a far more complicated picture of older workers," where more than half of older jobseekers surveyed were long-term unemployed, that is out of work for more than 6 months, in 2014. Even among those who were able to find work, Koenig says, many were "forced to settle for jobs they weren't necessarily seeking, were more likely to be working part-time, and often earned less with health or retirement benefits that were not as good as the job they had before."
The portrait of the older worker still struggling to recover, eight years after the recession began, comes from an extensive AARP survey of a diverse group of nearly 2,500 Americans, ages 45 to 70, all of whom had experienced unemployment at some time or during multiple periods over the past five years. (Half of the respondents were working at the time of the survey, 38 percent were unemployed, and 12 percent had dropped out of the labor force.)
Chris Morris's saga is typical among the participants in the AARP questionnaire. The 57-year-old drove a box truck for The Hartford insurance company for 21 years until his job was outsourced five years ago. Fortunately, he had also been moonlighting as a shuttle bus driver at Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, north of Hartford. And now he drives the bus more or less full-time, but without benefits.
"A big part of the job is tips," he says. "It's a bit of a struggle."
Morris relies on his retiree medical benefit from his previous job, but says it's expensive so he doesn't use it unless he has to and puts off going for his annual physical and other elective medical care. "The only benefit I have from my current job is my proximity," says Morris, who lives near the airport. "I don't have to commute."
A little over half of the AARP respondents who were working had changed occupations. "We don't know whether that's a result of wanting a new challenge or perhaps more likely, in order to find a job," says Koenig, who notes the long-term unemployed were significantly more likely to shift to new occupations than the short-term unemployed.
"The biggest takeaway," says co-author Lori Trawinski, "is that the reemployed were more likely to have searched more aggressively and more immediately after losing a previous job. Networking was key. Among the most effective action people had taken to get a job was to contact employers directly and use personal contacts."
Clearly, there's no one roadmap to finding work after 55 and plenty of barriers. "When the period of unemployment for the older worker goes on and on," says Elizabeth Fideler, research fellow at Boston College's Sloan Center on Aging & Work, "they become very discouraged. At the same time, some employers are not even willing to look at a resume of someone who's been out of work for a long time. So it's a double whammy." Fideler's advice to boomers who want to extend their work years: "hang on to your job if you love it."
Still, despite all the struggles the AARP survey respondents faced over the past five years, Trawinski was struck by how bullish they seemed about the future. Asked if they had financially recovered from their unemployment experience, nearly half of the reemployed and unemployed people said they expected to, but to date, had not. Said Trawinski: "That kind of optimism was surprising."
Richard Harris is a freelance writer, based in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at rlharris05@gmail.com.