Employer Perceptions of Older Workers: 2019 Survey Results

Today, men on average retire at 64 and women at 63, and they can expect to spend about 20 years in retirement. But if Americans continue to retire as early as they do today, many will not have adequate income once they stop working. That is, many older people need to work longer to ensure a secure retirement. American workers appear to have gotten the message. Over the past three decades, the share of people who say they plan to work past age 65 has increased from 18 percent to 45 percent. The problem is that nearly two in five workers end up retiring earlier than planned. To the extent that these premature retirements reflect employer resistance to older workers, the prescription to work longer will be hard to achieve. The question, therefore, is the extent to which employers are willing to hire and retain older workers. To shed some light on the question, this brief, based on a recent paper, reports on a survey of employers conducted in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey captures employersÕ perceptions of the productivity, costs, and net value of their older workers relative to their younger workers. Since this new survey replicates a similar 2006 effort, it also allows a comparison of employer perceptions over a period when technology has evolved and the older workforce has grown. The discussion proceeds as follows. The first section summarizes what we know about older workers Ð their basic characteristics, productivity, costs, and employer discrimination against them. The second section describes the 2019 survey and reports the results. The third section compares the 2019 results with those for 2006. The final section concludes that, overall, employers say they find older workers as attractive as younger ones despite their higher perceived costs, and the 2019 results show a notable improvement in employer perceptions of older support staff and production workers Ð as opposed to professional workers Ð since 2006. Given the pandemic, though, these results might turn out to be a high-water mark in employer attitudes towards older workers.