50-Plus Workforce Woes

Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.

  Career Development   Talent Management  

In the parlance of our day, young is cool and old is, well, uncool--but tolerated and respectfully acknowledged. Turn 50, and you’ve passed your prime; cross 60, and it’s time to get your affairs in order as you prepare to hang up your spurs and retire. It was not, as many people thought, a privilege of age and wealth--but a post-World War ll phenomenon, a product of the New Deal’s Social Security Administration.

Social scientist Robert Atchley contends that the institution of Social Security, set up during the Great Depression, was created to reduce poverty and to “lure (older) people out of the workforce.” The government’s goal was to give scarce jobs to younger workers with families. The result, according to Atchley, was a devaluation of older workers. “Now we have this image that people over 65 are kind of worthless in any kind of productive sense,” he says.

And while Social Security is the largest source of income for most Americans over 65, it was never meant to be “the only source of income when you retire,” according to the Social Security Administration. That’s assuming that you have the financial wherewithal to actually retire. By 2005, Americans were spending more than they earned. The Brookings Institution, a respected Washington D.C.-based public policy organization, reported that the U.S.…

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