OLMIS

by Nick Beleiciks
Published Jan-30-2009

Retirement nest eggs have taken huge losses because of the recent financial meltdown and resulting stock market turmoil. This has caused some older workers to delay retirement or consider returning to the workforce even if they have reached the traditional retirement age of 65. News articles covering the topic feature stories of retirees moving back into the workforce. In November 2008, the national unemployment rate for workers 65 and over was 4.6 percent, the highest it has been since the late 1970s, which suggests that more older workers are now out looking for jobs.

The aging of the workforce did not begin with the financial crisis. Workers age 65 and over increased their share of total jobs from 2.3 percent in the first quarter of 1998 to 3.6 percent in the first quarter of 2008. The percent of older workers getting new jobs has been fairly stable though, increasing from 2.1 percent of new hires to 2.6 percent of new hires over the same time period.

It will be about a year before sufficient data are available to see if retirement age workers really did return to the workforce as a result of the financial meltdown. Until then, the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) first quarter of 2008 data (the most recent available) can show us what industries are likely to hire them.

Table 1 shows the number of jobs by industry that were held by workers age 65 and older and each industry's share of these jobs. The table also shows the number of jobs that were filled by new hires who were age 65 and older and each industry's share of these jobs. New hires are workers who are hired by an employer for whom they had not worked at any time during the prior year. The new hire rate is the share of new hires that were workers age 65 and over.

Older workers are most likely found in the education and health services industry. Of the nearly 58,600 Oregon jobs filled by workers age 65 and older, 22 percent are in the education and health services industry. However, workers age 65 and older are more likely to be hired by employers in the professional and business services industry. The industry filled 987 jobs with older workers during the first quarter of 2008, the most of any industry and 17 percent of all older-worker hiring. Employers in the natural resources and mining industry filled a larger share of their jobs with older workers. About 9 percent of the newly hired workers in the natural resources and mining industry were age 65 and older, the largest share of older new hires in any industry.

Information about the age composition of Oregon's workforce is from Local Employment Dynamics (LED) data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. To explore and use the data available from LED, visit  lehd.did.census.gov/led/.