USA Today

June 9, 2005

 

Retirees back at work, with flexibility
Many also spend fewer hours on the job

By Marilyn Elias

re-tire (ri-tîr') v.: 1. to go away, retreat, or withdraw ...

That might be Webster's definition, but as the first of America's 79 million baby boomers reach age 62 in 2008, they are going to change the meaning of the word.

Boomers are likely to continue working, either part time or full time, as consultants or by setting up their own companies, surveys show. They want a "flexible" workplace that lets them take extended sabbaticals, then work intensely for shorter periods of time. They want to "phase-in" retirement by working fewer hours as they near 65, or after. They might change careers, go back to school, volunteer. They're not quite sure yet.

They do know they don't want to keep working like dogs, as they've been doing. Yet, they don't want to hit the golf course full time, either.

"I work very hard, and would I like a few years off? Yes," says Ken Dychtwald, 55, a psychologist and gerontologist. "But would I love to never work again? No, that's not my dream. And it's not the dream of our generation."

In a 2001 survey of boomers, 80% said they were planning to work past 65, at least part time, according to AARP.

Many will do it because they have to; they need the money, AARP says. This generation has every expectation that they will live longer than the previous one. Yet, few have saved enough money for 30 years of full retirement.

But there's a second reason they have for wanting to keep working, according to the survey: "Desire to stay mentally active."

"Boomers are going to redefine what we think of as aging. We'll reject the term 'aging' or 'elderly,'" says Deborah Russell, AARP director of economic security. "Many boomers want less responsibility; they've done the management thing. They're looking for more meaningful work, to hone their skills, to still contribute -- but to have flexible work options."

Going, then coming back

Doreen Bellino of Woburn, Mass., retired from Mitre, a government contractor, in 2001 when she was 58 years old.

But, "I'm not really retired-retired," she says. She's kind of retired.

When she left after 25 years in the human resources department, her bosses asked her to come back as a consultant. The company was starting a new database, and "since I had been in benefits so long, they needed someone with the memory of how things were done."

She came back for three days a week. Now, it's about one day. "Oh, it's fantastic," she says. "I'm a jewelry beader, it's a hobby. And I play a lot of golf."

Joyce Montgomery of Detroit retired from her job as a counselor at a children's home a couple of years ago when her husband, Johnny, retired.

"We traveled a little bit, but I got tired of sitting around," she says. "I wanted to come into the workplace to be around people."

She applied at CVS Pharmacy for part-time work. She was thinking 10, maybe 15 hours a week. Now, she works full time.

"They look at seniors like it's not a person who needs to work, so you can really depend on them" because they like their work more, Montgomery, 58, says of her new employer.

And she agrees. "It's not like my (old) job, where it was a bill-paying job. You had to go every day to keep the house together and raise your kids. That was a must. This is not."

Ronald Thompson of Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., spent nearly 40 years working for The Aerospace Corp., a non-profit company that supports the Defense Department's space program. He retired in July 2002. One month later, he was back.

He's part of a "casual retiree" program at the company and now works about 1,000 hours or half a year. "I thought I'd have been playing golf or fishing or doing some hiking now," he laughs.

But the firm's Milstar satellite communications program was near completion. He had been principal director when he retired. He wanted to see the project through.

Bellino, Montgomery and Thompson aren't boomers; they're a bit older.

But they're part of what Dychtwald, author of Age Power: How the 21st Century will be Ruled by the New Old, calls the "guinea pig generation." They're testing out phased-in retirement and phased-back-in working lives in advance of the big wave behind them.

"It's like in exploration; the scouts see it first. They may fall off the cliffs, but we're getting to see them experiment with retirement," he says. "We boomers have an advantage."

It wasn't until the 1960s that the American vision of retirement came to be the "golden years" of playing golf and sitting beachside, he says. The combination of a booming middle class after World War II, union-backed pensions and the growth of entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare led to a generation of financially sound seniors.

Before that, you essentially worked until you died.

"It's a relatively fascinating notion of the second half of the 20th century that retirement is a wonderful thing and that you are entitled to be happy, no matter how long you live," Dychtwald says.

Numbers worry employers

American business is facing a massive retirement of workers over coming decades without the padding of a big generation to fill their shoes. The number of workers ages 45 to 64 is going to jump 52% by 2010. But the number of workers ages 35 to 44 -- those in prime position to replace the boomers -- will drop 10%, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Demand is expected to far exceed the U.S. labor force as the mega-generation retires, according to the Employment Policy Foundation in Washington, D.C. "We've got a looming labor shortage, and I don't think we can get enough labor overseas," says Janemarie Mulvey, EPF chief economist.

In small but growing numbers, companies are beginning to offer programs to keep and lure older workers. Some have been doing it for years.

Monsanto has a Resource Re-entry Center with a database of retirees who want to work part time, full time or on special assignment. After a six-month retirement, they can join. The program, started in 1991, has 300 people in the database, with about 200 on assignment now at 12 Monsanto operations nationwide.

"We have (workers) in every area you can imagine, from very technical research to IT to sales to distribution to accounting to auditing," says Deb Lebryk, director of external relations for Monsanto, which is headquartered in Stamford, Conn. "We even have an individual who has considerable interest in travel who does audits across the world. She's been to Brazil, Argentina. She'll call us and say, 'I'm in Antwerp. Any work you want me to do?'"

Mitre offers phased-in retirement with fewer hours or fewer workdays and has a corps of "reserves at the ready" -- retirees who'll come back to work on specific, short-term projects.

Mitre, with headquarters in Bedford, Mass., and McLean, Va., is a government contractor that manages federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and the IRS. It started the retiree program in the early 1980s because it became concerned that it could lose too much institutional knowledge as its workforce retired.

"A lot of the work we do requires folks who have been there, done that," says Bill Albright, director of quality of work life and benefits. In fact, 40% to 50% of the hires the company makes each year are over age 40; the average age of employees is 47, and it "creeps up each year," he says.

The company also needs the expertise of people who have worked in industry or government. "We have to be able to get inside our clients, to understand their culture, their technology, their operating systems," Albright says.

The Aerospace Corp., based in El Segundo, Calif., is another government contractor that worries about continuity. It has 40 to 50 employees in its workforce of 3,500 who are over age 70, says Charlotte Lazar-Morrison, director of human resources. The Aerospace Corp. allows workers to "try out" retirement by taking a leave of absence and then returning to work. It also has the "casual retiree" program that Thompson is part of.

"With this contingent workforce, you can use it as you need it," says Lazar-Morrison. "It's a great surge mechanism for high-demand times."

CVS had a different problem. It realized in the early '90s that its workforce didn't reflect the U.S. population. It was too young, and turnover was too high. Only 7% of its workforce was over 50. "We want our stores to mirror the customer, so we needed to hire older people," says Stephen Wing, director of government programs for CVS, headquartered in Woonsocket, R.I.

It went on a campaign to hire and retain older workers. Now, 17% of the workforce of about 150,000 people is over 50. It gives workers flexibility on hours, days and the jobs they do. A pharmacist might become a pharmacy technician; the work is good, but less demanding. Or employees might move south part of the year, but still have a home in the North.

One woman in that position said she'd have to quit. "Well, we have stores in Florida and up north, I told her," says Wing. "She can transfer back and forth."

Companies, he says, are going to have to become more flexible if they want to get and keep the best employees.

That's the kind of talk baby boomers like.