Older workers are much less likely to be unemployed than younger workers. But when old people do lose their jobs, they’re likely to be out of work for much longer than their spring-chicken counterparts.
We have written before about the extraordinarily high unemployment rates facing America’s teenagers. In February, for example, the jobless rate among 16- to 19-year-olds was a whopping 25 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis, whereas for workers over all it was 9.7 percent. For workers over age 55, it was just 7.1 percent.
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Here’s a chart showing the average duration of unemployment for jobless workers in seven different age groups. (Note: The Labor Department does not adjust these numbers for seasonality, so I’ve plotted a 12-month moving average for each age group.)
Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsIn the chart you can see that the average unemployed person over age 65 has been out of work about 70 percent longer than the average teenager.
That gap in duration of joblessness has also been growing over the past year:
Why are older workers spending so much more time unemployed than their younger counterparts?
A few possible reasons:
1) Younger people are more likely to drop out of the labor force entirely if they can’t find work. Perhaps they can rely on parents or other relatives to support them. Whatever the rationale, if they’ve dropped out of the labor force, they no longer count as unemployed, and so they stop racking up weeks of unemployment.
2) Older workers may be more likely to have been laid off from industries that were in permanent (not just cyclical) decline, such as manufacturing or (gulp) journalism. These industries have in recent years been shrinking through attrition — i.e., not replacing their older workers when they retire — so they have been gradually getting grayer. Once the recession hit, some of their relatively older employees got the ax, and there are few similar job opportunities for them to turn to.
3) Related to #2, older workers may be less open to retraining for a new career, or to taking a job below the status and pay of the job they had lost, than younger workers. It’s one thing to be told you have to work your way up from minimum wage when you’re 25. It’s a different thing when you’re 65.
4) Employers might discriminate against older workers, perhaps because they falsely assume that #3 is true or that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
5) Younger workers may also be more likely to move to a new place for a job since they are less likely to own their homes. This gives them more flexibility in what jobs they can apply for.
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