Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (12 page)

Although hiring in this country has picked up somewhat—nearly every industry except state government added jobs—most of the gains are coming via low-wage and part-time jobs.
21
The economy is still not generating enough jobs to replace what was lost in the Great Recession.
22
Some states, such as Nevada, California, Michigan, North Carolina, and Florida, have been especially hard hit by unemployment. Although the majority of jobs lost in the downturn were middle-income jobs, highly educated, salaried professionals (who supposedly have an advantage over people who lack college degrees and hold midskilled jobs) are by no means immune to layoffs. The BLS Current Population Survey provides a comparison of unemployment rates in 2000 and 2011, by
gender
and
educational attainment
, illustrating the worsening employment picture for well-educated men and women alike.
23
As shown in figure 4.3, between 2000 and 2011, the percentage of unemployed men with college degrees jumped from 1.8 to 5.2 percent, and the percentage of unemployed men with advanced degrees went from 1.4 to 3.25 percent. In the same period, the percentage of unemployed women with college degrees jumped from 2.2 to 5.1 percent, and the percentage of unemployed women with advanced degrees went from 1.5 to 3.4 percent.

Figure 4.3

Unemployment Rate, by Gender and Education, 2000–2011, Selected Years and Education Levels Only (in percentages)

Source
: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey. Adapted from Economic Policy Institute, “Unemployment Rate, by Gender and Education, 2000–2011.”
The State of Working America
,
12th ed
.
(Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2012). Retrieved February 11, 2013, from
http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/jobs/table5
.4.

Unemployment data from the same source sorted by
education
,
race
, and
ethnicity
reveal additional evidence of disparate impacts.
24
As shown in figure 4.4, between 2000 and 2011, the unemployment rate among white college graduates grew 2.7 percent; among Hispanic college graduates it grew 4.4 percent; among Asian college graduates it increased 4.3 percent; among black college graduates the increase was an even greater 5.4 percent. In the same time period, advanced degree holders fared somewhat better: unemployment grew 1.7 percent among whites, 2 percent among both Hispanics and Asians, and 3.6 percent among blacks with advanced degrees.

Figure 4.4

Unemployment Rate, by Education, Race, and Ethnicity, 2000–2011, Selected Years and Education Levels Only (in percentages)

Source
: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey. Adapted from Economic Policy Institute, “Unemployment Rate, by Education, Race and Ethnicity, 2000–2011.”
The State of Working America
,
12th ed
.
(Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2012). Retrieved February 11, 2013, from
http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/jobs/table5
.3.

Prior to the federal ADEA of 1967 employers could justify establishing a termination policy based on older worker age, productivity, cost, and the need for an objective process. The ADEA not only prohibits discrimination against workers age forty and older in hiring, promotions, wages, or termination of employment and layoffs, as of 1978 it raised the protected age to seventy and in 1986 it also abolished most mandatory retirement, with the exception of certain employment categories. Some types of employment can terminate early due to physical requirements in job performance (constituting a bona fide occupational qualification, or BFOQ, usually involving safety), such as police work, firefighting, and commercial airplane piloting. Another exception applies to top (highly compensated) executives who are at least sixty-five and entitled to a company retirement benefit, that is, a plan or plans equal in the aggregate to at least $44,000 per year. Meeting those criteria, law firms and some other sectors of the corporate world have made it a practice to mandate retirement when an executive attains a designated age. In the process, they are putting out to pasture highly educated and experienced professionals. Somewhat to my surprise, one fellow, a self-employed long-term care advisor, told me that he favors mandatory retirement. He states a popular argument for mandatory retirement, along with a caveat that suggests why he is nonetheless still working at age sixty-nine: “I feel that it is not in the best interest of seniors to hold jobs that should be filled by younger people. I am in favor of a mandatory retirement age. However, unless the social contract is improved, I am engaged in wishful thinking.”

Some professionals turn to consulting work after mandatory retirement. For example, a sixty-five-year-old former executive at Ernst and Young is now a consultant and expert witness for accounting and auditing matters. Another man, Walter Arensberg, whom you will read about next, was only sixty-two when the Inter-American Development Bank’s mandatory retirement policy ended his job as chief of the Environmental Division at the bank. Since he wanted and needed to keep working—he was still putting two children through school—he began consulting. Three years later, he landed a full-time position in social risk management for the Social Capital Group of Peru. Now seventy-three, he divides his time between Washington, DC, and Latin America. Thanks to the Great Recession, he expects to keep working for another five years or so.

Profile: Walter Whitman Arensberg

When the Inter-American Development Bank’s mandatory retirement policy kicked in for Walter Arensberg in 2003, he was only sixty-two. “It was too early to be retired, and I was still putting two children through school,” he recalls. Determined to keep working, Walter took up independent consulting in his area of expertise—complex public and private sector programs and projects involving environmental planning and management, program evaluation, policy development, and institutional capacity building and community engagement. After three years of freelancing and what he describes as “constant scrambling,” he wanted to find something that would be more stable. In 2006 Walter joined Social Capital Group (SCG) of Peru as a managing director.

SCG was founded in 2000 to address complex social issues associated with extractive industries and large-scale infrastructure projects. With more than one hundred professionals in its offices in Peru, Brazil, and Colombia, SCG works with private and public sector clients engaged in exploration, development, and operation of oil and gas projects, mining, industrial enterprises, hydropower, large-scale infrastructure development, and regional and watershed management programs. While the majority of SCG’s clients are private companies, the firm has also worked with the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and the Inter-American Development Bank.

In addition to running SCG’s North American office in Washington, DC, Walter oversees projects in Colombia and Panama and markets SCG’s social risk management and due diligence services to international financial institutions interested in investing in Latin America. He helped open SCG’s Colombian office about two years ago and travels there every month or so for four to five days to oversee its work. “I meet with clients and visit communities, going into the field to observe and evaluate the potential social impacts of a potential mining operation or a hydro-electric dam, for instance. In Peru, our firm is involved in resettling some two thousand families from a truly Dickensian mining town to a brand-new settlement for workers and their families. They will have new houses, schools, and other essential facilities, partially funded by the Peruvian government. It took nearly two years of discussion for our team to earn the community’s trust and obtain its consent for the resettlement process.”

Now seventy-three, Walter lives in two separate worlds and is comfortable in both. His home base and office are located in Washington, DC, but he works primarily in Latin America, and enjoys switching into another culture and speaking Spanish all day long. The language comes easily to him because he moved from Pittsburgh to Havana at the age of six and lived there steadily until he was fifteen and was shipped off to boarding school in Exeter, New Hampshire. “My father came back from wartime naval service in the South Pacific in 1946 and took a job in Cuba. I learned Spanish playing with my friends in the streets and attending a bilingual school. Our family relocated to Washington, DC, in the fall of 1960 after the new Castro government took over the school where my mother worked,” he explains. “I felt fortunate to grow up in Cuba even though I was really an outsider—a blond American kid transplanted from Pittsburgh to a Latin country in the Caribbean. Among other things, it taught me, an American, that I wasn’t the center of the universe.”

While still an undergraduate studying political science at Harvard College, Walter became a contract interpreter for the State Department. The job involved showing foreign visitors around town and serving as their interpreter. “I learned to deal with a wide variety of people and I began to develop some of the core listening and communication skills I still call upon in my current work for SCG.” After graduation in 1962, Walter had an Inter-American Cultural Convention Fellowship that took him to Colombia for a year of study where he attended the University of the Andes and made many friends. Those connections are still useful today when he is knocking on the doors of Colombian government and business contacts.

From 1966 to 1969 he had what he considered the perfect job as an evaluation officer for the Peace Corps. He assessed Peace Corps programs firsthand in Honduras, Ecuador, Venezuela, Chile, and Panama, as well as volunteer training programs in eastern Kentucky and the Dominican Republic. “This was a truly formative experience: the evaluation process required extensive field interviewing, building trust, researching and analyzing programs, and writing critical reports—all skills that I have used ever since.”

For a brief time Walter worked with John Gardner’s National Urban Coalition as a community organizer before landing a more permanent position with the international architectural and planning firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in 1970. With the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act, the firm, which had become involved in urban land use, transportation, and redevelopment projects, needed staff who could work with urban communities on environmental and social impact assessments. Some of these projects included a highway on the West Side of New York City, the Big Dig in Boston, the Northeast Corridor High Speed Rail Improvement Project, and housing master plans in Ecuador and Chile. During a paid leave, Walter took a master’s degree in urban planning at Harvard and became a partner in the firm in 1978. While in Cambridge, he met and married his wife and the couple returned to Washington, D
C.

By 1987, Walter had moved on to the World Resources Institute (WRI) as deputy director for WRI’s Center for International Development and Environment. Then, nine years later and still in Washington, he became chief of the Environmental Division at the Inter-American Development Bank, the primary multilateral lender to Latin America and the Caribbean. His career was interrupted when the bank’s mandatory retirement policy forced him to leave after seven years. “That was nine years ago. I definitely wanted and needed to keep working, so I tried consulting and finally landed the SCG job.”