Tom Donahue uses the facilities at Forty Plus of New York to look for work.
Is there work after 50? Ghost of the Future
By John Arbucci
When Al Harris sums up his years of unemployment, he sounds like a character in a Charles Dickens novel.
“I’m the ghost of the future,” he said.
What Harris means is that his experience is a warning of what can happen to white-collar workers as they get older. He is educated and well-spoken. He has been a salesman, a partner in a small manufacturing company, and the building manager of a Lutheran church. But despite his years of experience, the only work he could find until recently was as a clerk in a bookstore. When he left that job at the end of May, he was earning $7.75 an hour, one dollar above the New York State minimum wage.
Harris, 63, of Queens, is one of the hundreds of thousands of men and women over 50 in this country who lose their jobs every year. While many find new employment and continue their careers with little or no interruption, others are not so lucky. Some find themselves trying to peddle outdated skills. Or looking for work in industries that have been drastically down-sized, leaving too many applicants vying for the relatively few remaining positions. Or feeling like victims of age discrimination, as if their years of experience are actually working against them.
Katherine S. Newman, a sociology professor at Princeton University, is the author of Falling From Grace, a study of downward mobility within the middle class. For most Americans, a job is more than just a source of income. “Our lives in the world of work so profoundly peg our identities,” she says, “that if you are cut loose from that peg, you are really lost.”
And to be lost, at a time when you thought your life would be settled and secure, can be simply terrifying.
Al Harris says: “I was more apprehensive than I’ve ever been in my life.” One of the things he fears most is that he and his wife would become dependent upon their children. “That terrified me,” he says.
Part of the difficulty is that the job market is very different than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Many companies have merged and then merged again. Whole industries have been exported overseas. The kinds of jobs Harris used to have don’t seem to exist anymore.
After years of fruitless searching using traditional strategies, he finally, through happenstance, found a job in an art gallery on Martha’s Vineyard.
Harris and his wife visited the Vineyard this past April. During a casual conversation with a gallery owner, it came up that Harris was looking for work. The gallery owner responded that she was hiring. The job would involve handing sales, customer service, and helping out with daily operations. One formal interview and three trial days later, Harris was on the payroll.
“It’s coincidence,” he says. “Serendipity. At my age I’m being paid more for what I know than for what I can learn. That’s very satisfying.”
Katherine Newman has observed that many older workers in today’s job market don’t seem to know the new rules. “If no one knows what jobs are safe,” she says, “or what career will provide a good future, that’s extremely frustrating.”
Which is the case even for people who have what appear to be impeccable credentials. Ellen Gottlich received her MBA from the Wharton School of Business in 1975. She worked at Unilever for 18 years, and was an associate director of market research there when she resigned for personal reasons in March 2001. The job market seemed good, and she was confident she’d find another job when she was ready to go back to work.
That was five years ago, when she was 49. Since then she’s had several consulting jobs and has done work for a not-for-profit organization. The consulting paid well, but she’s begun to feel she may never have a full-time job again. “I’ve come to the conclusion that every six months I will be looking for a job,” she says. “That’s the way the economy is today.”
It takes a toll on her in many ways. Ms. Gottlich and her husband separated more than two years ago, but she’s unable to divorce him because she depends on his job for health insurance. Her apartment needs new bathrooms, which she can’t afford, and her 1998 Volvo has more than 110,000 miles on it. She has no pension, and for years has been unable to contribute to her personal retirement account.
To help make ends meet she even considered selling health and beauty products out of her home. But there was a problem: “I’m not outgoing enough to approach total strangers and sell them products.”
She then found the consulting job where she now works. It’s a good fit and she enjoys it, but she says it’s not like having a permanent job. “No matter how involved I get, it’s always in the back of my mind that at some point it will be over.”
Even when a person does find full-time employment, it can offer a lot less money. Mark Klein of Hillsborough, New Jersey, now, at 53, earns about 30 percent of what he made before he was laid off by Lucent Technologies in 2001. “If you look in the want ads,” Klein says, “I’m not paid much more than a school-bus driver.”
Klein was part of the first wave of Lucent’s layoffs in 2001, so it was relatively easy for him to find another job. “I actually had another job lined up before I was off the payroll,” he says. “I had a nice two-, three-week vacation.”
That new job with T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, lasted about two years, at which point he was laid off again. This time there would be no soft landing. “By now the market was completely saturated with telecomm people.” He remained unemployed for more than a year. His wife’s day-care service – which she runs out of their home – enabled them to survive, but they had to make some tough adjustments.
Mark Klein and his wife gave up vacations, including visits to her parents in Florida. The Kleins have deferred maintenance on their house and waited more than a year before repairing the dent in the hood of their Ford Focus.
“My net worth, other than the appreciation of the house, has slowly gone down,” Klein said. “When you read the books about finding a job, they say you’ve got to work at it full time – eight hours a day – but after several months you get tired of banging your head against a brick wall. The enthusiasm and the optimism get replaced by discouragement.”
At first Mr. Klein was hoping to earn a salary comparable to what Lucent Technologies and then T-Systems paid him. Then he was willing to accept $20,000 a year less and relocate. Then $40,000 a year less, and he would do any kind of work. Finally, he said, “You’ll take anything as long as they’ll take you.” That anything job was in the hardware aisles of Home Depot. “When you get to Home Depot, you find a whole lot of people just like you.”
Mercifully, he was dependent on the Home Depot job for only one month when an acquaintance offered a lead – a small medical-equipment distributor needed a marketing director. Mark Klein took the job, which made better use of his skills, but it doesn’t allow him and his wife to stop cutting corners; their once comfortable life still eludes them.
Klein, Harris, and Gottlich have a lot of company. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 814,000 Americans beyond the age of 55 were unemployed and looking for work last year. Those are the official numbers. Ed Redfern, the New York State director of AARP, said that the actual numbers could be much higher because people who stop looking for work – or never started – are not included in the official statistics. “Some of our data suggest that if you add discouraged workers to the unemployed, it would double the unemployment rate.”
Some of the problems faced by older workers are common to everyone looking for work. Andrew Stettner is a director of the National Employment Labor Project, a research and advocacy group that focuses on unemployment and the working poor. Long-term unemployment, he says, “is a growing dimension of unemployment” for all workers, not just older ones. When jobs disappear in one industry during an economic downturn, they may not come back in the same industry when the economy recovers. It would be difficult, for instance, for someone who used to work in the telecom industry, which has shrunk, to get a job in a growing industry like real estate.
“Switching into new work is a big, big challenge,” Stettner said. That’s because when employers look at someone who wants to change careers, they see someone who will be forced to take a cut in pay. In the employer’s eyes, that person will then only be around for as long as it takes him or her to find a better paying position.
AARP’s Redfern said that many employers underestimate the capabilities of older workers. “Some of the misconceptions are that they’re not flexible to learn new things, they’re too expensive, and not embracing of technology.” He cites a study, paid for by AARP, which found that “ … the extra per-employee cost of retention and attraction of the 50-plus worker ranges from negligible to about 3 percent.” In return for that small increase, an employer gets someone who brings many extras to the table. “Mature workers are highly engaged, very productive, and very motivated to do the work, compared to younger workers,” Redfern says.
But he also notes some of the ways in which older individuals can become their own worst enemies when looking for work. Unrealistic expectations may cause them to reject the best available offer. “They may be holding out for exactly what they had before they left the workforce.”
Another problem with people who haven’t looked for work in many years is that they might not know how to look for a job now. Help can come from a variety of sources including the government, churches, and private career counselors. One organization, Forty Plus of New York, founded during the Great Depression, has been providing services to older unemployed workers for more than 65 years.
Richard Calderhead is the organization’s chairman. He has the bearing of a drill sergeant, and doesn’t allow his members to spend too much time brooding about their situations. “When we’re in here,” he says, “we’re in an action mode.”
That action involves polishing résumés, searching the want ads, and networking to find people that make hiring decisions. Yet all that action won’t necessarily result in a job at the same level and income as the one that was lost.
“It’s sometimes a shock for people to realize they got fired and are not ever going to connect at the same level they were on before,” says Calderhead. When that’s the case, it’s necessary to reconsider what kind of job one expects to find, and what one hopes to earn. It’s a ratcheting-down process that continues until expectations start intersecting with reality.
The job search is not the only area in which older unemployed workers have to be realistic. Equally important is the need to squeeze all extraneous spending out of the household budget. Ed Redfern says: “You have to assume you’ll be jobless for six months or more. Don’t expect unemployment [insurance] to see you through. Create a long-term budget, because it might not be a short-term process to find the next job.”
An AARP study in 2004 showed that, on average, it takes almost 26 weeks for an older worker to find a new job. That’s half a year. While some people find jobs in less time, others require more.
“One of the reasons you’re seeing long-term unemployment is that people need to work,” says Andy Stettner. “It’s harder for people to retire if they lost a job at 50 or 55 when they expected to work into their 60s.”
People need to work not only for the income, but also, of course, for the benefits, especially health insurance.
“A big help to people would be to insure their healthcare benefits,” Stettner said. “Unemployment insurance was conceived when losing your wages was a big deal. Now it’s as big a deal to lose your health insurance as it is to lose your job.”
Stettner was careful not to paint too bleak a picture, though. “I think the good news is that older Americans are continuing to work,” he says. Also there have been some improvements in the laws – for example, older people being allowed to work and collect Social Security at the same time. About half the states used to have laws that prevented people who collected Social Security from collecting unemployment when they were laid off. Working with AARP, Stettner’s group has reduced that to a handful of states.
It’s not simply a matter of fairness; it’s about giving people the help they need so they can get back on their feet. “If you could have assistance to pay for health care while you’re out of work, and then for the first few months you’re back, that would really help people,” Stettner said. He also recommends that the government invest in programs to train people for jobs that exist today because “there’s certainly more that can be done.”
