OLMIS

by Nick Beleiciks
Published Jul-8-2010

Retirement nest eggs saw huge losses due to the financial meltdown and resulting stock market turmoil during the Great Recession. This caused some older workers to delay retirement or consider returning to the workforce even if they had reached the traditional retirement age of 65. News articles covering the topic feature stories of retirees moving back into the workforce. In 2009 and early 2010, the unemployment rate for workers 65 and over reached highs not seen since at least World War II, the earliest data on record, suggesting 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 2.5 percent in 1999 to 3.8 percent in 2009. The percent of older workers getting new jobs has grown slightly, increasing from 2.2 percent of new hires to 2.9 percent of new hires over the same time period.

There is not yet enough data to determine if retirement-age workers returned to the workforce as a result of the financial meltdown. But we can see where such workers were employed during the recession by looking at Local Employment Dynamics (LED) data from 2009.

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 61,800 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 natural resources and mining industry. The industry filled an average of 1,551 jobs with older workers during 2009 - the most of any industry and 27 percent of all older-worker hiring. Employers in the professional and business services industry also filled a large share of their jobs with older workers. About 13 percent of the newly hired workers in the professional and business services industry were age 65 and older.

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 http://lehd.did.census.gov/led/.