No Jobs for Old People!

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Updated 9 years ago

Have you lost your job under the pretense of a reorganization or been told that your position was being eliminated? And just find there are no jobs for old people?

It’s a Baby Boomer’s nightmare. One moment you’re 45-ish and moving up, the next you’re 50-plus and suddenly, shockingly, moving out — jobless in a tough economy.

Too young to retire, too old to start over.

You’re the wrong age at the wrong time.

And you are not alone - millions of workers in their 50s and 60s are drifting into the perilous intersection of unemployment, underemployment and retirement.

As an older worker, your job search will be hard and you might face age discrimination.

Baby Boomers too often believe that when employers look at their lengthy résumés, they will automatically see how special they are.

"It's so hard to find a job. They look at you and think you're too old, and they don't call you back" - said M., a nice lady with a beautiful gray hair. "I get very nice rejection letters, but the bottom line is, we're in a bad economy and I'm 65 years old. The market out there is not good."

While unemployment rates for people nearing retirement are lower than for young people who are recently out of school, once out of a job, older workers have a much harder time finding work.

In a tight labor market, mature workers have found that their age can count against them.

Instead of moving toward a comfortable retirement, many people are in their second or third year of a miserable job search.

Once you are long-term unemployed, nobody calls you back.

As one might say - the longer any worker is unemployed, the longer one tends to stay unemployed.

Businesses hesitate to hire people who have not been working.

There’s this perception that if you’ve been out of work for seven months, there must be something wrong with you.

Workers 50 and older face a hurdle that younger peers don’t: how to overcome negative stereotypes that paint them as much more expensive, out of touch with technology and less productive.

Joblessness among men and women 55 and older had reached its highest level since the government began tracking the rate in 1948.

According to a 2014 Merrill Lynch Retirement Study, 72% of preretirees want to work in their retirement years, and 47% who have retired have worked or plan to work.

Yet 4 out of 5 Americans over 50 say that they are going to have to delay their retirement plans and work well into their golden years.

The recession has hit older workers "in their retirement security core in a way that other recessions haven't," says Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

More and more people are coming out of retirement, people who had been in retirement five, six, seven years — because they're concerned they won't be able to live on their income any longer.

The Boston College study found that 40% of older workers rated their situation as poor.

Slightly more than half said they or their families had had to forgot medical care.

Nearly one in three had more credit card debt than retirement savings.

“They should know the problem is not with them but with a system that has treated them like a commodity that can be discarded,” said David L. Blustein, a professor of counseling, developmental and educational psychology at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. “I try to help clients get in touch with their anger about that. They shouldn’t blame themselves.”