Age and the Labor Market

Abstract

Americans are legitimately concerned about the changing nature of employment relationships in our society. One focus of this concern is whether opportunities for productive work will continue to be available to successive cohorts of workers as they begin to reach old age. For the generation of American workers who are already close to or beyond traditional retirement ages, this issue plays out in their day-to-day experience as well as in the pages of the daily press and in business periodicals. However, despite the apparent level of popular interest in this subject, academic researchers have yet to produce uncontested evidence that changes in the labor market are as dramatic as those described in recent press reports. This is particularly true with regard to the fate of older workers in a restructuring economy For example, the suspicion that employer cutbacks disproportionately affect older workers is a widespread belief and a thesis advanced in some academic literature (Calasanti and Bonanno 1992; Sum and Fogg 1990). However, existing empirical studies and reviews provide conflicting evidence and less than overwhelming support for this assertion. And there are other missing pieces in the recent empirical literature on the changing nature of job security in our society. There is little systematic information on how trends in older workers’ employment situation compare to those of younger people, and even less is known about how trends in perceptions of job security differ between older and younger workers.