By Rebecca Gordon

Washington Post headline reads: “A big problem for young workers: 70- and 80-year-olds who won’t retire.” For the first time in history, reports Aden Barton, five generations are competing in the same workforce. His article laments a “demographic traffic jam” at the apexes of various employment pyramids, making it ever harder for young people “to launch their careers and get promoted” in their chosen professions. In fact, actual professors (full-time and tenure-track ones, presumably, rather than part-timers like me) are Exhibit A in his analysis. “In academia, for instance,” as he puts it, “young professionals now spend years in fellowships and postdoctoral programs waiting for professor jobs to open.”

I’ve written before about how this works in the academic world, describing college and graduate school education as a classic pyramid scheme. Those who got in early got the big payoff — job security, a book-lined office, summers off, and a “sabbatical” every seven years (a concept rooted in the Jewish understanding of the sabbath as a holy time of rest). Those who came late to the party, however, have ended up in seemingly endless post-doctoral programs, if they’re lucky, and if not, as members of the part-time teaching corps.

For the most part, I’m sympathetic to Barton’s argument. There aretoo many people who are old and in the way at the top of various professional institutions — including our government (where an 81-year-old, under immense pressure, just reluctantly decided not to try for a second term as president, while a 77-year-old is still stubbornly running for that same office).

However, I think Barton misses an important point when he claims that “older workers are postponing retirement … because they simply don’t want to quit.” That may be true for high earners in white-collar jobs, but many other people continue working because they simply can’t afford to stop. Research described in Forbes magazine a few years ago showed that more than one-fifth of workers over age 55 were then among the working poor. The figure rose to 26% for women of that age, and 30% for women 65 and older. In other words, if you’re still working in your old age, the older you are, the more likely it is that you’re poor.

Older workers also tend to be over-represented in certain low-paying employment arenas like housecleaning and home and personal health care. As Teresa Ghilarducci reported in that Forbes article:

Nearly one-third of home health and personal care workers are 55 or older. Another large category of workers employing a disproportionate share of older workers is maids and housekeeping cleaners, 29% of whom are 55 or older and 54% of whom are working poor. And older workers make up 34% of another hard job: janitorial services, about half of whom are working poor. (For a benchmark, 23% of all workers are 55 and up.)

We used to worry about “children having children.” Maybe now we should be more concerned about old people taking care of old people.

Why are so many older workers struggling with poverty? It doesn’t take a doctorate in sociology to figure this one out. People who can afford to retire have that option for a........

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