ABSTRACT
This chapter distinguishes between social policies intended to delay retirement (national in scope and fairly comprehensive) and policies intended to support work to later ages (piecemeal and underdeveloped). Comprehensive policies that acknowledge varying realities of different workers’ life-course trajectories are essential to support working to later ages and delayed retirement. COVID-19 pandemic labor market conditions have highlighted persistent gaps in policies for older workers. The 2008 global recession demonstrated that, once unemployed, older workers are at highest risk of becoming long-term unemployed (more than six months). The pandemic has magnified long-standing gender pay and pension gaps. Pre-existing problems arising from a skills–job mismatch in localized labor markets, globalization that has sent formerly domestic jobs overseas, and the gendered expectations surrounding family caregiving allow few good employment opportunities for many older workers. The intersectionality of varying social statuses—e.g, age, gender, race, and ability—combine with occupational status and employment trajectories to make later-life employment more possible for the “job-rich” and fraught with problems for workers in low-paid, physically demanding, precarious work. Ageist employment practices leave half of older Americans feeling pushed out of their jobs at the same time as many older workers must remain employed if they are to have employer-linked health insurance or income security in later life. To tackle such problems, employment policies must find ways to help workers of all ages, taking into account life-course circumstances that culminate in current labor-market experiences and retirement insecurities of different groups of older workers.
