Magdalena McCloskey is far beyond the age when most of her peers have retired, but she continues to work part-time, both out of financial necessity and a desire to stay engaged.
That is, when the senior softball team she manages doesn’t require the 87-year-old to leave town for an away game.
She was a nun with the Sisters of Loretto from age 19 to 36, when she left the order to marry Don, a former priest. The couple had two children in the Pacific Northwest and moved to Denver in 2000.
McCloskey taught and tried her hand as an entrepreneur for several years. When Don became ill and died in 2015, she was working at Walgreens to provide financial support. In June 2017, she started working as a caregiver at Home Instead Senior Care.
“It was never a goal to retire,” McCloskey said. “We both came from religious professions, and we didn’t have retirement savings.”
McCloskey isn’t following a conventional path through life. She recently took up boxing, on top of her softball team, and obtained another degree at age 85. But she is part or a rising wave of people who are blowing past the signs to retire at age 65 or 67.
For four hours on Mondays and Fridays, McCloskey cares for an Arvada couple, one who has dementia and the other Alzheimer’s. On occasion she will stay overnight with clients and in what has become a speciality, she will assist people in their final hours.
“Older workers bring to the job their experience, their work ethic, their appreciation for life and their willingness to contribute,” said Bill Dahlquist, who owns two Home Instead franchises in south Denver.
Employees there must be able to lift 25 pounds and show an aptitude for the job, but aside from that, age isn’t a barrier to getting hired. Of the 230 employees Dahlquist and his wife have on staff, a quarter are over age 65.
“It is always about the person,” Dahlquist said.
A National Press Foundation seminar in Washington, D.C., earlier this year explored the topic of why Americans are working longer.
“The population is getting older, fertility rates are quite low and people are living longer,” said Richard Johnson, director of the program on retirement policy at the Urban Institute said during the seminar.
Johnson and other speakers at the program, sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, provided several reasons for the change in the labor landscape:
- A larger share of jobs today are in less physically demanding white-collar or service occupations, making it easier for older workers to stay on. Also, today’s older adults are more educated than their parents and grandparents, making them more likely to be holding higher-skilled jobs.
- Pension plans, where the employer was responsible for ensuring payments in retirement, are disappearing, leaving more workers responsible for their own finances as they age. Stagnant wages, two severe stock market crashes since 2000 and a lack of savings have all contributed to underfunded nest eggs. One solution, if it is available, is to keep working.
- A tightening labor market the past few years has left employers more open than in the past to the idea of retaining more experienced workers, who often are the first to go in a layoff. About 10,000 Baby Boomers a day are reaching the retirement age of 65 in the United States. When they leave, they take with them years of valuable expertise and insight.
For most of human history, people worked until they died, usually at a much younger age than today. Leisure in old age was considered a luxury only the well-off could afford. But that changed during the last century at the same time improvements in health care extended lifespans.
“There is a substantial capacity to work longer if we wanted to,” said Courtney Coile, director of the Knapp Social Science Center at Wellesley College.
In 1910, the age at which half of the men were no longer participating in the workforce was 74. By 1940, it was down to 70 and it got all the way down to 62 in 1995. But it is now back up to 65 and moving higher, noted Gary Burtless, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.
Across a variety of measures, the “retirement wave” peaked in the early 1990s for both men and women and is moving back the other way. Americans are working longer, about 2.5 years more on average today than they were in the early 1990s, Coile said.
How did retirement become the norm, and why is it being delayed today? The federal government introduced Social Security in 1935, creating an important safety net for older workers. More corporations began to provide pensions following World War II. Medicare became available in 1965, addressing the need for health care coverage.
In those initial post-war decades, workers were able to accumulate more wealth and the poverty rate among the elderly dropped. In short, more people could afford to retire in their 60s.
But in last three decades, Social Security benefits have became less generous, corporate pensions have largely gone away and the typical family has found it harder to get ahead and build wealth, Burtless said.
But not all of what is driving the delay in retirement is negative. Today’s older adults are healthier and living longer on average. If they can continue in an established career, they can make more money than prior generations.
Home Instead does a survey asking those approaching retirement age if they expect they will have to start working again. In 1995, only 14 percent thought they would. The most recent survey found more than half expect to jump back in at some point.
“The idea of what retirement would be like has changed,” said Dahlquist, who adds there is a lot of discussion of what it means to retire, but very little on how to “unretire.”
But several things can block people from working longer. Chief among them is poor health. Then there are the physical demands required in certain jobs, age discrimination and the need to care for relatives, a role often taken on by women.
“People with health problems are not working longer,” Johnson said.
Older workers are also vulnerable to layoffs during economic downturns. During the last recession, they faced much longer bouts of unemployment than younger workers when they lost their jobs, said David Neumark, a professor of economic at the University of California Irvine and an expert on age discrimination.
“When a 60 year old loses a job, they may just retire,” he said.
Tom McElhinny, a metro Denver resident, found himself hunting for a different line of work four years ago after his long-time business partner passed. But in his early 70s, he been repeatedly rejected, even for basic retail and service jobs.
“There is a huge amount of insincerity out there,” said McElhinny, adding he was told straight out at one interview that “we like to hire younger workers.”
McElhinny said he has a younger wife who is self-employed, so finding another job isn’t so much about money. He wants to get out of the house, stay physically active, and feel like he is contributing.
Shorter work weeks, allowing part-time workers to maintain health insurance coverage and more flexible work arrangements all could help keep older workers engaged.
“Most people could work longer, but some can’t. If you design policy, you must consider both groups,” said David Weir, director of the Health and Retirement Study at the University of Michigan.
Lucille Ruibal Rivera of Denver gave early retirement a try after a 34-year career as a clinic administrator at Denver Health. But that only lasted a few weeks, until she answered the call to set up the Clínica Tepeyac, where she stayed more than six years as head of human resources.
She retired again closer to a more normal retirement age, 64, in the summer of 2017 –- sort of. She continues to work as a freelance photographer, a business she started in 2008, the first time she retired. In May, she became executive director of the Chicano Humanities and Arts Council, a nonprofit art gallery.
“I will keep going until the Lord says stop,” Rivera said.
Big strides in preventing and treating cardio-vascular disease have contributed to most of the gains in longevity, said Jay Olansky, professor in the school of public health at the University of Illinois in Chicago, speaking at the NPF seminar.
Improvements continue to come in the treatment of cancer and diabetes. But after that, dementia and Alzheimer’s remain unassailable barriers that will block future advances in longevity, Olansky predicts.
People are living longer, but society could soon reach the limits of how long people can work as more seniors fall victim to the various forms of dementia, where cures are nonexistent.
But older workers say staying employed has helped their mental health and kept them sharp by providing a purpose in life and the ability to stay independent.
“I feel needed and feel that I’m contributing,” McCloskey said. “You can be an advocate for your clients. I will do it indefinitely, as long as it doesn’t interfere with my social life.”
