Older Unemployed Rate Growing

March 5, 2010 The number of people age 55-plus without a job grew from 490,000 at the start of the decade to 2.1 million last December, according to an AARP analysis of government data on older workers released Thursday. 

To make matters worse for boomers and other older adults, the amount of time it took to find work was devastating—35 weeks in December 2009 compared with 19 weeks in January 2000. In February 41% of all unemployed workers had been out of work 26 weeks or more according to this morning's employment status report from the BLS.

“Things were very different at the end of the decade than at the beginning,” says Sara Rix, a strategic adviser at AARP who conducted the analysis. But even though 2009 was “a really bad year,” she says, more older people are in the workforce today, a trend that she says will continue because of an aging population.

Workers age 65-plus flooded the labor market over the decade. In January 2000, only 13 percent of workers were 65 and older. In December 2009, their numbers grew to 17 percent. By contrast, the labor force participation rates for those age 16 and older fell from 67 percent to just under 65 percent.

Though workers 65-plus found it easier to find work, they also wound up on the firing line. Some 479,000 were out of work last December, a huge increase from the 143,000 jobless workers in January 2000. Likewise, the unemployment rate among that age group shot up to 7.2 percent last December from 3.4 percent in January 2000.

Workers age 16 and older also saw their jobless rate jump from 4 percent at the start of the decade to 10 percent in December.

“The last decade has spelled disaster for millions of older workers who have lost their jobs, seen their retirement savings diminish and had their health care costs continue to skyrocket,” says Nancy A. LeaMond, AARP executive vice president. “The recession has only made this bad situation worse, as the statistics show clearly that older workers who lose their jobs stay unemployed longer than other groups.”

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