Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job
Read Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job Online
Authors: Elizabeth F. Fideler
Praise for
Men Still at Work
“Should you work beyond ‘normal’ retirement age?
Men Still at Work
answers important questions and offers encouragement for people who want to remain in the workforce for years . . . or decades.” —
Douglas Goldstein
, Profile Investment Services
“I, like many elders I know, am still working because I love what I do and I feel I have knowledge and experience to offer anyone interested. It’s a beautiful thing to be a musician still able to perform, compose, and educate at the age of eighty-seven. This is a must-read for someone looking for a road map.” —
Jimmy Heath
, professor emeritus, Queens College; jazz saxophonist, composer, and arranger
“We will need to know more about the labor force involvement of Americans over age sixty-five—because this segment of the population will continue to grow, because this stage will represent a greater portion of our lives, and because this group will increasingly impact our economy and culture. Elizabeth Fideler offers us engaging and highly readable stories of men who continue to work while the majority of their cohort has retired, which complements her earlier study of working women in this age group. These accounts remind us of the importance of meaning and engagement at work, and not just for the elderly.” —
Jerry A. Jacobs
, University of Pennsylvania
Men Still at Work
Professionals over Sixty and on the Job
Elizabeth F. Fideler
Rowman & Littlefield
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:
From AGING WELL by George E. Vaillant, M.D. Copyright © 2002 by George E. Vaillant, M.D. Used by permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
From BORN TO RUN: A HIDDEN TRIBE, SUPERATHLETES, AND THE GREATEST RACE THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN by Christopher McDougall. Courtesy of Random House.
From TOWNIE: A MEMOIR by Andre Dubus III. Courtesy of W. W. Norton Company.
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
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10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2014 by Rowman & Littlefield
All rights reserved
. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fideler, Elizabeth F.
Men still at work : professionals over sixty and on the job / Elizabeth F. Fideler.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-2275-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-2276-2 (electronic) 1. Older men—Employment—United States. 2. Professional employees—United States. 3. Retirement age—United States. 4. Age and employment—United States. I. Title.
HD6280.F53 2014
331.3'980973—dc23
2013040402
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Chapter 2: Perspectives on Aging and Work
Chapter 4: The Employment Situation for Adult Workers in the United States
Chapter 5: Over Sixty and on the Job
Chapter 6: Where Older Men Work
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to all 156 professionals who completed my survey, especially the thirty-three men who so generously gave their time for in-depth interviews and profile editing as well as those who forwarded the survey on my behalf to older working men around the country.
Many other people offered strong encouragement for the project and helped to recruit survey participants, including: Charles V. Willie, Mary Coleman, Barbara Resnek, Carolyn Kiradjieff, Allan Shedlin, Sam Klaidman, Richard Winslow, Henry Field, John Willett, Jeremy Freund, Richard Eisenberg, Ruth Winett, Ann Kaganoff, Sharon Caballero, Gayle Rich, Judith Zorfass, Vernise Cardillo, Elise Savage, Maxine Greenwald, Ann Arvedon, Esther Novak, Ann Chuk, Linda Nilson, Barbara Millis, Diane Sasson, Judith Stames-Hamilton, Nancy Weibust, Katherine Eyre, Elaine Cooke, Mary Antes, Jean Canellos, Judith Mir, Patricia Hartney, Lisa Shapiro, Lila Packer, Richard Pomerance, Tom Lazarus, Andrew Fogelson, and Louis Nemser.
Research progressed faster with help from the Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College and John Collins III and Marcella Flaherty at Harvard’s Gutman Library.
Sarah Stanton, Kathryn Knigge, Lisa McAllister, and colleagues at Rowman & Littlefield worked their publishing magic.
My husband, Paul, gave up his home office and moved to the dining room (my office) so I could finish the book. For that sacrifice and for his unwavering support, I am forever thankful.
1
Introduction
Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.—David McCullough, Historian
Wall Street is said to be buoyant. Corporate profits as a share of national income are at a record high last seen in 1950. At the same time, job growth remains stalled and 700,000 layoffs are anticipated as $85 billion in automatic cuts to the federal budget (“sequestration”) kick in.
1
In this thorny context, it is remarkable that labor force growth rates for older men and older women, taken separately or combined, are greater than for any of the younger groups participating in or endeavoring to participate in the US workforce. This phenomenon can be explained only partially by Americans’ greater longevity and by the arrival of the leading edge of the baby boomer cohort in the senior ranks. There is far more to it.
Men Still at Work: Professionals over Sixty and on the Job
shows how older men are prospering in the paid workforce, particularly those who are well educated and in professional jobs, despite the recession of 2007–9 and the economic downturn that has persisted in its wake. (The recession may have ended and the stock market appears to have recovered, yet employment has not rebounded to former levels, home foreclosures are still numerous, and credit remains extremely tight.) Older men are the
second
-fastest growing segment of the US labor force because the participation rate of older females is even higher. This book highlights important factors that are sparking this phenomenon and influencing the timing of retirement for older men. It uncovers their reasons for opting to work well past conventional retirement age, for example, contributing experience, know-how, and institutional knowledge, not just making money (which some excel at doing)—and tells how they balance the demands of work, family, and the wider community with personal interests and needs
.
And, throughout, it makes a special point of comparing the genders on such measures as career field, length of career, time out for caregiving, employment status, and earning power. It identifies similarities and differences in the careers of older men and women—in particular, who and what influenced or encouraged them along the way and what motivates them to continue working. In so doing, it continues the narrative presented in
Women Still at Work: Professionals over Sixty and on the Job
.
2
Many well-known American men work past conventional retirement age. Composer Elliott Carter, who died recently at 103, worked almost to the very end of his life. Seth Glickenhaus, a ninety-eight-year-old money manager who started his career on Wall Street as a messenger, is in the process of selling his advisory firm to a firm led by retirement money manager Marvin Schwartz, who is a mere seventy-two. Tom and Ray Magliozzi of
Car Talk
and
Good News Garage
fame are seventy-six and sixty-four, respectively, and still working even though they are not making new radio shows. Framingham’s Danforth Museum of Art recently featured the work of ninety-year-old Bostonian John Wilson, the sculptor whose bronze bust of Martin Luther King Jr. stands in the Rotunda of the US Capitol. (On Inauguration Day, President Obama paused in the Capitol Rotunda in front of Wilson’s dignified bust of Dr. King.) More than half of the members of the US Senate are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, including Chuck Grassley, eighty, and Carl Levin, seventy-nine. Forty-seven of the senators age sixty or older are men and twelve are women.
A completely random list of prominent older working men might well include: novelist Herman Wouk, ninety-eight; architect I. M. Pei, ninety-six; folksinger, songwriter, and environmental activist Pete Seeger, ninety-four; former POTUS, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and human rights advocate Jimmy Carter, eighty-eight; economist Paul Volcker, eighty-six; pop and jazz singer Tony Bennett, eighty-seven; business magnate Warren Buffett, eighty-three; stage, television and film actor James Earl Jones, eighty-two; author, historian, narrator, and lecturer David McCullough, eighty; country music singer-songwriter and film actor Willie Nelson, eighty; neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, eighty; economist, author, and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, seventy-nine; journalist, commentator Bill Moyers, seventy-nine; chef, television personality, and author Jacques Pepin, seventy-seven; blues singer and guitarist Bobby Rush, seventy-seven; actor, director, screenwriter, and author Alan Alda, seventy-seven; associate justices of the US Supreme Court Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, both seventy-seven; bandleader and jazz pianist Eddie Palmieri, seventy-six; columnist and political commentator Mark Shields, seventy-six; sportswriter and novelist Frank Deford, seventy-four; professional football and soccer team owner Robert Kraft, seventy-two; Vice President of the United States Joseph Biden Jr., seventy; Mayor of New York City Michael R. Bloomberg, seventy-one; political commentator David Gergen, seventy-one; humorist, author, storyteller, and radio personality Garrison Keillor, seventy-one; and violinist Itzhak Perlman, sixty-eight.
Less well known but equally impressive are the men who bypass retirement simply because they enjoy their jobs and want to keep working full time or part time. Income is certainly important to them, but they believe that there is more to life than making money. Or they agree with the late Pulitzer Prize–winning editor and columnist Eugene Patterson, who lived to age eighty-nine according to his personal edict: “Don’t just make a living. Make a mark.”
3
Each individual has his own reasons for continuing to work, whether driven by financial or familial circumstances, or dreading what will happen if he stops—perhaps long-term unemployment or permanent joblessness, perhaps unrelieved lassitude. Here is what keeps Marc Mosko on the job. Mosko, a teacher of graduate courses in business management, marketing, creativity and design who also has a start-up company, told his daughter: “I work at age seventy-four because I don’t know how to stop, and I don’t like being too tight with money. Social Security does not start to cover the bills. But most important, work (if you are doing what you like to do) is very satisfying. So I continue teaching and am working hard at building an eBay business from home. This year it is starting to pay off as I am gathering a following of customers and learning how to buy better.”
Then there is ninety-three-year-old Newt Wallace of Winters, California, who published the local weekly,
The Winters Express
, from 1946 until 1983 when he passed the baton to his son. After that, Newt Wallace wrote columns for a time and began delivering the newspaper in the Winters business district. He has been delivering the paper ever since because he enjoys connecting with people he knows and, in the words of the March 3, 2013,
New York Times
feature story about his long tenure, “keeping a finger on the pulse of a town after a life in journalism.”
The longest-serving state legislator in Wisconsin is eighty-five-year-old Fred Risser, who has been in politics nearly sixty years. He was one of the seniors interviewed by Ina Jaffe for National Public Radio’s “Working Late” series in February 2013 to emphasize a point: the paycheck is welcome, but their real reason for working is
they want to and they can
. Working past retirement age has become “the new reality.”
4
Even before
Women Still at Work
was published in June 2012, I had been contemplating a companion volume that would be about older men choosing to continue working. Then, at a book party thrown by my husband and children to celebrate
Women Still at Work
, several men in their seventies challenged me to write about them. “What about me? I’m still working,” was the refrain. It didn’t take arm twisting to get me started. By July I was in the first phase of data collection. To ensure comparability, I revised only a few items from my survey of women to facilitate the change to men. I circulated it via e-mail and regular mail to colleagues and friends and to the women who had responded to the original survey, asking my contacts to complete the survey (if sixty or older, male, and still working for pay) or to refer or recruit other men who might be interested in participating in the project. Again, the survey snowballed and responses came from all over the country. This methodology, known as “snowball sampling” for obvious reasons, produced 156 respondents. Virtually all professionals, they are well-educated high achievers still working and still enjoying good health and abundant energy. Notably, these older men are quite similar demographically to the 155 older women identified by the earlier survey.
With most of the surveys in hand, I completed the second phase of data collection in the fall and winter of 2012–13 by conducting hour-long interviews (mostly by telephone and some in person) of a subset of thirty-three men, or 21 percent of the survey respondents. To ensure comparability of interview data, the questions for men were essentially unchanged from the protocol I had used for interviewing women. The individual profiles based on those interviews serve to put a face on the statistics about older workers; achieving that goal is the primary purpose of both books. With increasing numbers of older workers delaying retirement and remaining in the paid workforce—the share of employed Americans past sixty years of age is over 10 percent and climbing
5
—it is important to learn not only the dimensions of this “new reality” but also what forces are driving the trend and what gets factored into the older worker’s decision-making process.
A few caveats about the study are in order. First, and most obvious, my focus is on
men
. Naturally, women often come into the picture, for example, when discussing national and population and labor market trends, calling on the retirement research literature, and comparing findings about older working men with findings drawn from my research on older working women.
The second caveat concerns age—here it is sixty and older. While it is not at all unusual for men who are sixty to sixty-four to be working, I recruited them for the survey to include the oldest of the baby boomers (who have just started to reach retirement age). And, again, I needed to use the age parameters that I had chosen for my study of older women to obtain comparable data. (A longer discussion of what “older” means follows in chapter 2.)
Third, respondents for this study had to be in the
paid
workforce. Men who were doing volunteer jobs (unless they also held a paid position) were not eligible. This is not meant to slight volunteerism. Far from it. My fellow trustees on the board of the Framingham Public Library and I (as board chair) devote countless hours to civic improvement, and as I have discovered, many of the surveyed men contribute their time and energy as volunteers in their communities, too. Sociologists draw the distinction between
work
—expending mental and physical effort to perform a task—and
occupation
—performing a job in exchange for a wage or salary. The point being that work can occur outside of formal employment and without remuneration, for example, on behalf of the family or the community. Having stated the technical distinction, however, I will blur the two definitions by referring to that sort of unpaid work as volunteering and rely on the popular connotation of
work
to describe a job performed in exchange for a wage or salary.
Fourth, the findings discussed in
Men Still at Work
do not represent and cannot be generalized to the population of all older male workers. This is due to the chief drawback of snowball sampling: the survey does not reach all socioeconomic groups. As sociologist Sarah Willie acknowledges, snowball sampling fails to attain diversity when a survey circulates among people who share many characteristics, such as education level, jobs, race or ethnicity, religious affiliation, and so on.
6
My survey identified older men engaged in a broad spectrum of occupations, living in different geographical regions, and having different religious affiliations, who nonetheless tended to be white men with similar socioeconomic status. To be sure, the respondents from minority groups (8 percent of the total of 156 survey respondents) share impressive advanced degrees and professional status with their white counterparts. The populations not represented in this book are poorly educated men, employed in low-wage, low-skill, high-turnover jobs, who are often obliged to continue working when they are older out of economic
necessity
. In contrast, my survey respondents are all at least above average financially after many years on the job and fortunate to be in a position to
choose
whether to retire or continue working.
Sarah Willie’s study of the college experiences of alumni—all black males and females, who attended either Howard University or Northwestern University and had similar experiences to her own—raised the question: would subjects be more forthcoming with an interviewer of similar race or ethnicity? Willie found that she needed to send potential interviewees letters of introduction explaining her qualifications and her intentions. She found that “their willingness to proceed with the interview and their candor during the interview were in very large part based on whether they believed I was trustworthy and empathetic, and those characteristics were connected to the knowledge that we shared a similar racial experience.” Willie’s reflections made me wonder whether potential respondents would be suspicious of a researcher whose race, ethnicity, or gender differed from their own. Fortunately, in addition to the letters of introduction I myself sent out, several friends (who are mentioned in the acknowledgments) ran interference for me, calling or writing to potential survey respondents and interviewees they knew well and reassuring them about the soundness of both the researcher and the research. This helped greatly in obtaining participation.
Fifth, while the question of whether to retire comes up throughout the stories in this book,
Men Still at Work
is neither a book about retirement nor a guide to decision making in the senior years. I acknowledge that retirement is a long-desired choice for many people, for there are many, many valid reasons to exit the workforce—such as physical, economic, or personal reasons—as well as numerous alternative ways to find enjoyment in one’s senior years. With that in mind, let me point out that the purported lure of retirement is precisely what makes the phenomenon of men and women choosing to delay it and continue working so intriguing. Among the options available to a senior male who wants to remain engaged and productive, how viable is the
worker
role? The next chapter contains an array of perspectives on aging and work to help answer that question.