Within a year of Johnney Pollan’s retirement, Dow Chemical asked him to come back. This time as a contractor.
With his pension after 31 years of work and his health-care benefits, he and his wife were living comfortably in East Texas. And he could devote more time to his hobby, archaeology.
Partners in Care is a New York-based home health aide training and placement service. Over 15 years ago, it partnered with the New York City Department for the Aging to enroll people over 55 in their program to become certified home health aides.
With a wave of veteran workers on their way out and skilled employees too few, the petrochemical industry in east Texas has turned to its retirees and a small community college to bridge the gap.
But he answered the call, and his retirement plans have been put on hold — for more than a decade now. Pollan was one of a few hundred people skilled in a propriety language used to run processes at Dow’s plants. Many of them retired at once, and the company was caught in the lurch.
“A lot of the expertise was going out the door,” said Pollan, 64. “And they found that they really needed it.”
There’s more to come. Of the 4,200 Dow employees in Freeport, about 40 percent will be eligible for retirement within four years.
Nationally, similar trends are emerging. Yet human resources experts, workers and executives from a range of industries say businesses are largely unprepared to accommodate an aging workforce or to cope with its eventual retirement.
“They are oblivious,” said economist Steven Sass of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
Many industries find themselves in a quandary. They often need older workers for their expertise, yet they also may need to accommodate their physical disabilities and their desire for more flexible schedules. And as workers stay on the job longer, they may need training in new technologies or work procedures.
In the past decade, the number of seniors in the labor force has grown nearly 60 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2018, the number of workers 65 or older is projected to climb to 11 million, from 6.5 million today.
Baby boomers are fueling the trend. Healthier and better educated than any previous generation, many plan to continue working, at least part time, well past traditional retirement age. Human resources managers say voluntary retirement nearly stopped after the stock market collapse in 2007.
“When do people choose to retire?” asked Karen Smith, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute. “When they are able to replace their income.”
So employers face a dual challenge. They have to keep older workers productive and then, when those workers do leave, find qualified people to replace them. In 22 industries — among them engineering, agriculture, real estate and health care — more than three in 10 workers are 50 or older, according to a 2007 study from the Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College.
“Suddenly, there’s this call that the baby boomers are retiring,” said Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “What did you think they were going to do? Stay until they die?”
“Companies are not very long-term-oriented,” he added. “They don’t spend much time worrying about what might be coming down the pipe in the future.”
Workforce planning
In a third-floor hotel conference room in Cambridge, Mass., near biotech labs and the buildings of MIT, several dozen human resources managers recently paid more than $2,000 each to learn more about workforce planning — how to make sure a business has the right people for the job now and in the future.
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