The Stalled Jobs Recovery Pushed 1.1 Million Older Workers Out Of The Labor Force

Owen Davis, Bridget Fisher, Teresa Ghilarducci and Siavash Radpour

No 2021-01, SCEPA publication series. from Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA), The New School

Abstract: An examination of the status of older workers in the fourth quarter of 2020 reveals three highlights: After a partial recovery between May and August of 2020, older workers' labor force participation rate fell continuously, reaching its lowest point of the recession in January. Roughly 1.1 million older workers exited the workforce between August and January due to the pandemic recession; older workers' unemployment rate fell in January 2020 by 0.7 percentage points but the decline was driven by unemployed workers leaving the labor force rather than finding jobs; and since October of 2020, the decline in employment for Black, Hispanic, and Asian older workers was more than twice that of white older workers. Policy recommendations include Congress facilitating older workers' return to work with aggressive anti-age discrimination enforcement and expanded unemployment benefits. Congress must also lower the Medicare eligibility age to age 50 and make the program “first payer†to lower the cost of hiring older workers.

Keywords: older workers; recession; COVID-19; coronavirus; downward mobility; poverty; unemployment; wages; involuntary retirement; retirement; 401k; Medicare; Older Workers Bureau; racial disparities; disparities; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J30 J38 J58 J60 J88 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/jobs-report ... t-of-the-labor-force (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:epa:cepapb:2021-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SCEPA publication series. from Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA), The New School Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bridget Fisher ().