Our Graying Workforce

As baby boomers approach retirement age, Minnesota employers are mapping ways to tap their experience - and to accommodate those who want to stay on the job.

Dorothy Williams is 82. Brett Robertson is 17. When it comes to doing food demonstrations, managers at Kowalski's Market in Eagan consider them something of a dream team. The intergenerational pairing began about 10 months ago and has generated more sales than anyone expected. They work to make their display tables show off product packaging, giving customers more insight into what they are sampling.

With many older workers looking to hold onto their jobs during tough economic times or joining unemployment lines after being laid off, the outlook for companies is complicated. How best to tap their experience? And what, if any, accommodations will a worker need as he or she approaches, say, age 70?

The graying of the population means significant changes for the labor pool. In Dakota County, the number of workers age 65 and older is expected to quadruple from 6,000 in 2005 to 24,000 in the year 2035. According to the Office of the State Demographer, older workers will increase from 2 percent of the county's work force to 9 percent. Statewide, the number will increase only slightly more modestly from about 3 percent to 8 percent of the labor pool.

Fritsch said her committee had once envisioned focusing on finding ways to incorporate baby boomers into civic life as volunteers. They speculated that many boomers would begin retiring en masse in 2011, when the first boomer turns 65, and would be looking for something to keep them occupied. The economy may have thrown a wrench into those plans.

"As the economy began to turn, we realized a lot of the people we thought would be retiring would have to be postponing that, because their 401(k)s or 4013(b)s just took a nosedive, and they weren't going to be able to retire with the same kind of income," Fritsch said. "We thought the wisdom of older adults, added to all their idealism from the '60s, would make the perfect force to make a difference in their community," she continued. "But right now, their focus has to be surviving this economic downturn."

Large companies such as Securian Financial Group in St. Paul and Goodrich Sensors and Integrated Systems in Burnsville are taking the silver tsunami seriously. Goodrich forecasts losing that as much as 50 percent of its work force may retire within the next five to seven years.

In response, the company plans to experiment with a raft of incentives to get employees to stay on board, if only on a part-time basis or for short-term projects. Among them are flexible workdays and workweeks, on top of work-from-home arrangements.

Similar strategies are in place at Securian, where nearly a fourth of all employees are age 50 or older, said Maggie Jensen, a company spokeswoman. Securian, which sells insurance and financial products, offers 10 hours of free retirement planning to employees age 50 or older, as well as their spouses. Jensen said to keep or accommodate employees who might otherwise retire, they've also turned to "job sharing" - a single job split between two people.

Smaller companies and municipal employers, too, are looking at ways to leverage the experience of folks who, a generation ago, might have disappeared from the labor force. Randy Johnson, director of parks and recreation for Apple Valley, hires about 40 older workers each summer to help with parks maintenance and the city golf course.

The older workers are paired with college-age employees, allowing the veterans to serve as mentors. "We encourage them to share skills," Johnson said. "I think the younger workers learn a lot about work ethic. ... What we've found is the seniors we've hired, most of them are what you would call semi-retired. They still want to get out of the house three or four days a week." "They kind of learn a lot about what's going on in the world today," he continued. "They talk technology. They talk sports."

The Office of Management and Budget, which prepares a federal budget proposal for the president, noted that unlike most previous recessions, the percentage of men age 65 or older in today's national work force has increased. Unemployment among that age group has also gone up, a sign those who have been laid off are still looking for work, instead of accepting their lay-offs as a cue to retire.

Martha McMurry, a demographer with the Minnesota State Demographic Center, said it has been decades since companies have dealt with such issues. But given how uncertain retirement portfolios can be, the percentage of older workers in the labor pool was expected to climb even before the recession hit.

"Two major reasons are the shift away from defined-benefit pension plans and the fact that women now entering their 60s have a lifetime history of high participation rates," McMurry said.

Source: Pioneer Press, Frederick Melo, 12/1/09