February jobs report brings some cheer for older workers

“It has been several generations since we were concerned about poverty among the nation’s elderly,” says Christine Owens, executive director of NELP, which advocates for the unemployed in Washington. “But, because of what’s happened the last several years – sustained long-term unemployment and declining housing values – we face the possibility of seeing an increase in economic hardship among older workers in fifteen or twenty years.”

Although many more older workers are getting jobs, Ms. Owens cautions that there is no indication the job surge is helping the long-term unemployed worker. “This could be people who have been out of work for shorter periods of time,” she says. “And, we don’t know what kind of jobs they are going back to – I suspect they may be going into jobs that pay less.”

In fact, despite the improved numbers over the past few months, employment specialists say the older worker still faces an uphill climb. Chicago-based outplacement specialist John Challenger of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, one of the major obstacles older workers face when looking for work is discrimination.

“It has dissipated but there are still stereotypes of older workers that affect hiring managers’ decisions,” says Mr. Challenger in an interview. “For example, ideas that they have less energy, creativity, or flexibility or are more expensive, those sorts of things,” he says.

Another Chicago jobs expert, Phil Rosenberg of reCareered.com, says he sees signs of discrimination in terms of older workers’ difficulties in getting interviews. Mr. Rosenberg regularly polls people he is working with on the response rate to their resumes.

“The majority of people get a response rate of 1.5 percent to 2 percent,” he says. “But, people who are 50 plus get less than 1 percent, about half.”

Rosenberg thinks one of the key reasons is that hiring managers prefer to hire someone they can support and mentor. “It makes them look more valuable to their organization,” he explains. “And, they are much more uncomfortable with someone who is a generation older than them.”

Bonnie Ornitz, a 50-plus worker who has been unemployed for more than 8 months, thinks her difficulty in finding a job might be attributed to several factors, including her age. “I believe it is held against me although I don’t have any actual proof,” says Ms. Ornitz, who works out at a gym and has lots of energy.

Another factor, she thinks, is that she made a “decent” salary when she was working. She says that means if she were to take a job for considerably less money, she would leave if something else were to materialize. “They know if I get in and something in my salary range opens up, I am out,” she says.

Ornitz, who is an IT professional, says the long period of unemployment is very frustrating.

“I’ve been working for 30 years and this has never happened before,” she says, adding that she is still steadily sending in job applications from her home in southern California. “It’s really getting offensive.”

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