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Over the past five years, full-time workers 55 and older have seen healthy pay gains after adjustment for inflation, while those under 55 have suffered losses.
The pay increases for those 65 and older help explain why seniors' labor force participation is rising. In the past 12 months, more than 30% of people 65 to 69 were either working or actively looking for jobs, up from 25% five years earlier. In the world of labor force stats, that's a big change. Participation rates were roughly flat for 25-to-54-year-olds and fell more than 3 percentage points for those 16 to 24.
Much of the hiring of older workers is coming from industries at risk for mass retirements--electric utilities, oil companies and aerospace and defense contractors, for instance. Such sectors are the "canaries in the coal mine," says human capital researcher Eric Lesser, an associate partner at IBM's Institute for Business Value, who predicts the demand for older workers is likely to spread across the economy.
Source: BusinessWeek, July 2, 2007
