Understanding the Aging Workforce Defining a Research Agenda (2022) / Chapter Skim
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The effects of these inequities accumulate over the life course, affecting health and determining the resources and opportunities available for retiring or reducing employment in later life. Thus, transitions between work and retirement reproduce and reinforce social and economic inequality at older ages, and their effects are further compounded by the additional, well-documented effects of age discrimination.
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The study will focus on the individual-level human capital and demographic characteristics associated with decisions to continue working at older ages and on the social and structural factors, including workplace policies and conditions, that inhibit or enable employment among older workers. The National Academies appointed the Committee on Understanding the Aging Workforce and Employment at Older Ages to carry out this task.
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Moreover, little is known about how recent declines in health at midlife and younger ages, particularly among those with less education, will affect labor force participation and worker needs for accommodative practices in the future. A further explication of the key research questions and data collection needs within each of these three areas is described in greater detail below.
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Workplace Policies and Practices That Affect Work and Retirement Older adults are more likely than younger people to express preferences for specific work conditions, such as flexible work schedules or paid leave, and they report willingness to delay retirement or return to the labor force if such conditions were available. Workplace practices, such as flexible work schedules, the introduction of accommodative technologies and innovations, and worker training programs have been proposed as ways to improve the retention of older workers, but the effectiveness of these practices has not been empirically established.
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Research that includes such covariates (e.g., optimism, personality, support, intersectional identities) will likely clarify and isolate the relationships among perceived workplace discrimination, health, and labor force participation.
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The processes that structure unequal work and retirement pathways at older ages do not begin at age 50. Research that adopts a life course conceptual lens could promote a better understanding of disparities in later adulthood by underscoring the cumulative impact of the multilayered embeddedness of lives in ongoing biographies and in historical and institutional environments.
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Although social networks play an important role in labor force participation and employment opportunities among younger workers, less is known about how these social mechanisms function with advancing age, as social networks retract, especially when individuals are pressed to retire or if they live in communities with few employment opportunities. National-, state-, and local-level organizations are institutions that can help older adults build social capital.
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Informal unpaid caregiving also follows identifiable, patterned pathways; that is, the intensity and duration of providing care to family members often conflicts with employment and often leads to part-time work and forced retirement. The interrelationship between caregiving and labor force participation is dynamic and complex as they jointly play out in later life.
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. As members of this cohort have entered conventional retirement ages, they have developed new retirement patterns, with more remaining in or returning to the labor force at older ages, leading to higher rates of labor force participation than in previous generations (U.S.
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The specific charge to the National Academies was stated as follows: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will undertake a study that will review and as sess what is known about the aging workforce in the United States, identify gaps in current knowledge and data infrastructure, and make recommendations for future research and data collection efforts. The study will focus on the individual-level human capital and demographic characteristics associated with decisions to continue working at older ages; and on the social and structural factors, including workplace policies and conditions, that inhibit or enable employment among older workers.
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