more older people continuing to work past retirement age, says new report

Construction companies may not see employees in their 60s and 70s working at high elevations, but the jobs of project engineers, superintendents, estimators, and inspectors may still be populated with Baby Boomers.
According to a new report issued by the Congressional Budget Office, there are more people in their senior years making up an active part of the nation’s workforce than ever before.

Roughly 40 percent of people born between 1939 and 1966 were holding down full-time jobs last year, a percentage that has remained roughly constant since the depth of the Great Recession in 2010.

The report, Employment of People Ages 55 to 79, also revealed that older people with more education tend to continue working longer than those with less education, and that more workers of both genders had college degrees in 2018 than in 1990.

At the same time, such workers, says the report, were not as numerous in blue collar positions, because those jobs “tend to have greater physical demands than other jobs and workers in those jobs tend to retire earlier.”

People are also working well into their 70s because they’re feeling better: “From the mid-1990s to 2018 the health of people ages 55 to 79 improved substantially, reflecting gains in self-reported measures and longevity,” says the report.

“Improvements in health affect employment because healthier people are physically able to work longer and because life expectancy might induce people to spend more years working in order to finance retirement.”

The good news behind the trend is that “more employment is associated with higher gross domestic product and higher tax revenues, including more payroll taxes that fund the Social Security trust funds.”

But, warns the Congressional Budget Office document, “the increase in employment may push up spending on Social Security benefits over the long term if more people delay claiming benefits past the age at which they are entitled to begin claiming them.”

By Garry Boulard

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