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Business Experience, Experienced Business Professionals, Global Knowledge Base, Talent Bank, Working in Retirement
While exploring the many articles on Forbes.com we came across this very interesting article by Daniel Fisher
America’s Silver-Collar Capitals
In explains that in many American cities, senior citizens are still working hard well past retirement age.
He states…………
About 17% of Americans aged 62 or older work. In the Washington, D.C., area that figure is more like 30%. Why the difference?
“It’s all the retired federal workers,” says Joel Reaser, senior vice president at the National Older Worker Career Center just across the Potomac from the Capitol, in Arlington, Va. Federal workers don’t just retire after their public-service stint is over at age 53 or so. They go back to work as consultants or find other careers.
A heavy concentration of government and educational jobs seems to be a connecting thread among America’s Top 10 Silver-Collar Capitals. The Washington area ranks first, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey program, with an unemployment rate for seniors seeking work below the national average at around 4.9%.
Following Washington is Anchorage, Alaska, a perennial leader in over-62 workers with 29% employed. Once again, government appears to be the reason: According to a 2009 report by the Alaska Labor Department, state and local government employed the highest percentage of Alaskans aged 55 to 64, and schools reported as much as 15% of their workforce was 65 or older. It can’t hurt that people who actually do quit working after age 62 also probably move to warmer climes.
Madison, Wis., another educational and government center in the frigid Upper Midwest, came in third with 28% of the over-62 population still working. It was followed by the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk region of Connecticut, which has a high proportion of white-collar executives and consultants, at 27.6%. The Trenton-Ewing area, home to New Jersey’s capital, came in fifth at 26%.
Unlike backbreaking work like digging ditches or pounding nails, government jobs can employ workers for decades after normal retirement age. Reaser, 70, retired after 18 years with the American Association of Retired People. Now he oversees a program that puts some 700 fellow retirees to work at federal agencies. Some are in their 90s.
“There’s a very large number of retired federal workers that go off and consult and work for federal agencies,” Reaser says. The Department of Defense, he says, “has one of the largest concentrations of contractors.”
The contrast between urban areas and the rest of the country is stark. Census Bureau statistics show that 21% of the population aged 62 or older was employed in the 183 metropolitan areas with populations above 250,000, compared with 17% nationwide. Those percentages ranged from 30% in Washington to 4% in several Puerto Rican cities.
Highlighting the importance of government, 6 of the top 10 cities with more than 10,000 workers over the age of 62 were state capitals. All, with the exception of the Bridgeport-Stamford area in Connecticut, had unemployment rates among retirement-age workers who wish to remain in the workforce below the national average of 9.1%.
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