March 31-April 6, 2005

city beat

Retired, but Still Working

HARDEST WORKING MAN IN TRUCK-STOP BIZ: Though he's 67, James E. Brown still holds a job at the Walt Whitman Truck Stop in South Philly. "More people should hire senior citizens," he says. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Does a growing elderly workforce mean fewer jobs for the young?

by Doron Taussig

James E. Brown calls himself retired, but he still goes to work every day. The 67-year-old North Philadelphian, who bears the weathered look of a survivor, works as a janitor at South Philly's Walt Whitman Truck Stop. On a recent afternoon, he took a seat on a stool in the back of the stop's diner, lit a cigarette and said he was not the only retiree on the market.

"Older people won't admit it, but they enjoy working," he said. "More people should hire senior citizens."

Brown found his job through the mayor's Commission on Services to the Aging, a city agency that runs job-placement programs for older workers. In May, the commission will launch a computer-training program aimed at equipping those workers for a wider variety of jobs.

"We should never think of people as becoming obsolete," says Celeste Zappala, the commission's executive director.

The agency is intent on developing seniors as an employable group. It may be at the front of a social trend. As Americans live longer, many workers are staying in the workplace later in life, and many employers are proving willing to have them. According to published reports, the number of working Americans age 75 or older has increased 146 percent in the past 20 years. With festering uncertainty about Social Security and Congress gradually raising the retirement age, that trend is likely to continue.

Outfits such as Home Depot and Borders have teamed with AARP to recruit older workers, offering "snowbird specials" in which an employee could, for example, work her winters in Florida and summers here. Executives explained in The New York Times last week that they're planting seeds for future demographic changes: the baby-boomer generation will soon retire, and the generation that follows is smaller. The companies are trying to build relationships with older workers to fill labor needs a decade from now.

Local employers say demographics aren't the only reason to hire older workers. Dave Silverman, the owner of the Walt Whitman Truck Stop, employs several seniors, and his business is also in the Pennsylvania Hall of Fame of Champion of Older Workers. Silverman finds them more dependable than their younger competitors: "They understand what work means. They're dedicated, honest, and loyal."

The Bourse parking garage at 4th and Chestnut streets has also been honored by this hall of fame. Property manager Trace Stridborg oversees six employees, five of whom are "older." Stridborg prefers senior workers because, "It takes maybe a little experience to be courteous, to solve problems. You can't raise a family for 40 years without having to solve problems."

Both managers have found that certain stereotypes of older workers-- that they have high absenteeism or they're difficult to train — are more myth than reality.

"Their absentee rate is significantly less than other employees," Silverman says of his senior workers, while Stridborg has had "no problem" teaching computer skills to his employees.

For obvious reasons, older workers also have low turnover rates — they're not looking to move on up the ladder. Young people "sort of look down on working in a garage as a cashier," Stridborg explains.

Meanwhile, many seniors are finding that Social Security checks just aren't enough. Jessie Prentice, 63, works as a waitress at the truck stop. On weekends, she likes visiting her sister in Reading and, occasionally, her children in Atlanta. "I wouldn't be able to do that on no Social Security," she says.

As for Brown, some things he wouldn't be able to afford on Social Security alone are easy to list. "Rent," he says. "Clothing."

Add to this financial need the fact that many older workers get bored after retiring, and you've got a recipe for rising senior employment.

Should younger workers be worried? Melissa Orner, vice president of the Philadelphia Youth Network, a nonprofit agency focusing on youth workforce development, says increasing senior employment has not appeared on her radar. But any time a new group enters the labor pool, it's a potential threat to other workers (she recalls being concerned about welfare-to-work programs). The past three years, she says, have seen the lowest levels of summertime youth employment since the 1950s. While her program focuses on placing young workers in the sort of upwardly mobile, internship-type positions that seniors are unlikely to fill, she says, "there's certainly a lot of kids who go and get jobs on their own in the secondary labor market."

Michael Leeds, an economics professor in the Fox School of Business at Temple University, does not see cause for concern. While there may be individual circumstances in which older workers replace younger ones, he says, older workers are filling a labor shortage.

"Even now, you have fewer people entering the labor market," he says. "The unemployment rate is really quite low."

Nor does Leeds expect older workers to drive wages down. Though a drop in available workers might temporarily cause wages to rise, those wages would eventually be pushed back down by the market, he says, either by seniors working longer or by an influx in immigrants seeking new, lucrative jobs.

In other words, the threat posed to young workers by this development may be small. But for those youngsters who, through the sheer luck of the market, are forced to compete with him, James Brown has a message: Don't worry — your time will come.

"When they reach a certain age," he says through a smoky smile, "and learn certain things."