Officially, almost all of us will stop working by our mid-sixties, and those of us lucky enough to have pensions will be able to draw them - but the reality is likely to be rather different.
Many people to continue to work well into their seventies. This army of elderly employees rarely appears on the official records and is one reason the employment statistics are less reliable than they should be.
Apparently the government economists were surprised when the so called headline jobless rate in the United States climbed back up to 9.1%.
What's going on? The answers are mixed but it is clear that one of the problems in calculating America's unemployment problems is the numbers themselves. It all depends on who you count, after all. My suspicion is that it is the official statistics are incomplete.
My evidence is what I call the Little Old Motel Lady. Over the past year I have been travelling doing research on a book. I have gone to libraries and archives all across the country and that means I have become a connoisseur of cheap motels.
Twenty-five years ago, when I started out, motels did not have restaurants and most still don't.
There might be some vending machines. They might even offer you a free cup of coffee in the morning and a stale donut. I used to travel with a jar of peanut butter and a box of crackers in my briefcase because once you hit a library you rarely have time for lunch.
Ah, but no longer. There are, according to one industry estimate 128,488 motels in America and the vast majority now offer a full breakfast for free in the lobby in the morning.
And I mean a full breakfast, cereals, juice, hot waffles, eggs, sausage and you can even wrap up a bagel to take with you to the library.
And presiding over this free motel breakfast is at least one little old motel lady. It is her job to get up at four in the morning, drive to the motel, and set up the breakfast room, get the coffee percolating, the eggs cooking, the fruit laid out and from 6am until 10am she bustles about cleaning up, refilling supplies and generally being cheery.
Then she cleans up and goes home.
Every little old motel lady I talked to over the past year has told me the same story: she'd had to retire from her old job, she lives alone, is on Social Security and Medicare, and even with her pension payments, she still needs more money than she had planned for.
So she has gone back to work for the minimum wage and if she is lucky and works for a big motel chain, she has some basic health insurance benefits too.
She confesses to being afraid of driving through the streets in the dark of night and the work is non-stop hard, but it's all she's can get and she is making the best of it.
The corollary to the Little Old Motel Lady is the Little Old Man Wal-Mart greeter, the old-timer in the blue vest who gets in your way when you go to Wal-mart or some other big discount chain and tries to tell you about the special sales when you just come in to buy a single item.
If you look for us you will see us being guards at office building security desks, collecting money at parking lots, we're the friendly voice at the catalogue sales order phone.
Is this a national trend?
I don't know but I can tell you that I am 71 and I know of no-one between the ages of 65 and 75 who is not working at some job or other, and many are working full-time.
Oh, we are all getting Social Security and Medicare, and paying taxes on those benefits, thank you very much. But even those of us who saved a nest egg find we need to be working to keep pace with rising costs and those unforeseen surprises that one should have foreseen, but didn't.
My point is I don't know if the government economists are counting on, or are even aware of us, because the phenomenon of the working older citizen is fairly recent.
On the one hand, we are working at jobs that didn't exist 10 years ago and on the other hand, we are under pressure to work for less money than we used to command.
These may not be the golden years we were promised, not by a long stretch, but we are tough old birds and we are still contributing and we need to be counted.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13926752
Little Old Motel Lady.
Little Old Motel Lady.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Re: Little Old Motel Lady.
I thought there would be more interest in this topic, seeing as most of us are "of a certain age."
"You have to suck it up sometimes and do what a 17-year-old would happily do and be happy about it," That statement could be misconstrued.
A media relations manager until she joined the millions of unemployed Americans two years ago, Romanaux spent the spring building contact lists and fetching lunches as she tried to keep alive her chances of resuming full employment.
"You have to suck it up sometimes and do what a 17-year-old would happily do and be happy about it," she said of her recent stint with a public relations firm in New Jersey.
Once the domain of high school and college students, internships are more common among older Americans who are struggling to find jobs and keep their skills up to date in the worst labor market in decades.
"A lot of adults who are either returning to the workforce or have been laid off in the recession are looking for places and ways to build a resume and fill a gap between jobs," said Margo Rose, founder of HireFriday, an online job search advice website.
"The last thing you want to do is look the interviewer in the eye with a blank stare when they ask you, 'What have you been doing for the last year?'"
Data is scant on the number of older interns but labor economists, internship recruiters and graduate school career officers agree the number has been on the rise.
"There has definitely been almost an explosion of this kind of thing," said Liz Ryan, of LizRyan.com, a career advice website. She says she had never been approached by mid-career clients seeking help securing an internship before 2008.
"In 2008, I had about 20 of them," she said.
That increased to 36 annually in 2009 and 2010.
Phil Gardner, research director for the Collegiate Employment Research Institute, which analyzes initial employment at Michigan State University, said the number of graduates taking internships "ballooned last year" before easing off as the labor market improved in early 2011.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/ ... FK20110630
"You have to suck it up sometimes and do what a 17-year-old would happily do and be happy about it," That statement could be misconstrued.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Re: Little Old Motel Lady.
I am lucky to be in a position where I won't have to work when I reach the age I have decided my Super funds will keep me in the life style I want.
If I am VERY lucky, I will secure an even higher rate of Super in around 18 months which will mean I will retire on more money PA than I presently earn.
I plan to do OK when I retire. If I do any work in my 70s it will be because I want too.
If I am VERY lucky, I will secure an even higher rate of Super in around 18 months which will mean I will retire on more money PA than I presently earn.
I plan to do OK when I retire. If I do any work in my 70s it will be because I want too.
Bah!
Re: Little Old Motel Lady.
Speak for yourself pal...Gob wrote:I thought there would be more interest in this topic, seeing as most of us are "of a certain age."
Why is it that when Miley Cyrus gets naked and licks a hammer it's 'art' and 'edgy' but when I do it I'm 'drunk' and 'banned from the hardware store'?
Re: Little Old Motel Lady.
Yeah, there's nothing people who have hit fifty love to talk about more than getting old....I thought there would be more interest in this topic, seeing as most of us are "of a certain age."
Re: Little Old Motel Lady.
The picture looks like an insane mutation of Debbie Reynolds and Betty White...
Why is it that when Miley Cyrus gets naked and licks a hammer it's 'art' and 'edgy' but when I do it I'm 'drunk' and 'banned from the hardware store'?
Re: Little Old Motel Lady.
Speak for yourself, Junior!Lord Jim wrote:Yeah, there's nothing people who have hit fifty love to talk about more than getting old....I thought there would be more interest in this topic, seeing as most of us are "of a certain age."
Your collective inability to acknowledge this obvious truth makes you all look like fools.
yrs,
rubato
Re: Little Old Motel Lady.
Given the chance I'll die at my desk...
Sometimes it seems as though one has to cross the line just to figger out where it is
Re: Little Old Motel Lady.
"... Many people to continue to work well into their seventies. This army of elderly employees rarely appears on the official records and is one reason the employment statistics are less reliable than they should be. ... "
Someone needs to research how government employment statistics are actually determined before blathering in print and pulling 'facts' out of his ass. Someone else needs to read for cogency before spreading blather even more widely.
yrs,
rubato
Someone needs to research how government employment statistics are actually determined before blathering in print and pulling 'facts' out of his ass. Someone else needs to read for cogency before spreading blather even more widely.
yrs,
rubato
Re: Little Old Motel Lady.
Given the chance I'll die right after saying "hey, I wonder if this stuff is unstable to shock".keld feldspar wrote:Given the chance I'll die at my desk...
yrs,
rubato
Re: Little Old Motel Lady.
'Cha, I'm looking forward to that last big bolt of man-made lightening through the heart.
We have a Chief at the unit, no THE Chief, who has been 'working' at the Camp for almost twenty years. In fact, it's named after him, because he's worked so hard for our detachment, since the big downsizing of the nineties.
Technically, he's retired, but he comes to nearly every drill in uniform; holds a staff position and hobnobs with nearly every officer in our chain of command. (He'll do that even if he doesn't like the guy; I love how he's so old school, he'll gladly tell you who's the biggest SOBs) It's perfectly legit; the military has a billet called 'permissive orders', meaning if a service member wants to contribute without pay; and the unit still wants his input; then he can still wear the uniform proudly, and be given the respect of his rank.
Come to think of it... he must be in his mid-seventies by now. Maybe, I'll check on that when we get together to work on the Moffett Field Museum project later this summer. (he seems to think I'm the unit's finest welder.)
I wanna be just like him when I grow up.
We have a Chief at the unit, no THE Chief, who has been 'working' at the Camp for almost twenty years. In fact, it's named after him, because he's worked so hard for our detachment, since the big downsizing of the nineties.
Technically, he's retired, but he comes to nearly every drill in uniform; holds a staff position and hobnobs with nearly every officer in our chain of command. (He'll do that even if he doesn't like the guy; I love how he's so old school, he'll gladly tell you who's the biggest SOBs) It's perfectly legit; the military has a billet called 'permissive orders', meaning if a service member wants to contribute without pay; and the unit still wants his input; then he can still wear the uniform proudly, and be given the respect of his rank.
Come to think of it... he must be in his mid-seventies by now. Maybe, I'll check on that when we get together to work on the Moffett Field Museum project later this summer. (he seems to think I'm the unit's finest welder.)
I wanna be just like him when I grow up.
