Senators search for ways to keep boomers on the job
WASHINGTON — Javon R. Bea values the older employees at his network of medical facilities in Wisconsin and Illinois. To keep them on the job, he champions a program at his firm called Work to Retire that allows employees over 50 to put in fewer hours, pool jobs or work from home.
"I think the mature workers can actually relate to the patients better than our more impatient younger workers," Bea, president of Mercy Health System in Janesville, Wis., said at a U.S. Senate hearing Wednesday. "As a business we really think that we benefit, as well as the older workers benefit."
More employers need to follow Bea's example, according to testimony at the hearing of the Senate's special committee on aging.
A wave of retiring workers will weigh down economic growth in the coming years unless Americans save more and employers take steps to hang on to more of their older employees, experts said.
How the nation responds is a "critical question," said Donald L. Kohn, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, warning that the costs could "fall entirely on future generations."
A study by Fed economists projected that economic growth would slip toward the 2% range after 2010, about a point lower than the rate of the last decade, largely the result of meager growth in the future labor force, Kohn testified.
Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), chairman of the aging panel, introduced legislation Wednesday that would give employers a tax credit for establishing flexible work schedules that enabled older employees to stay on the job without losing healthcare or pension benefits.
"We can't afford to wait until the retirement wave is upon us," Kohl said. "We must encourage businesses to adopt policies now to attract and retain older workers as they are confronted with the coming labor force shortage."
Soaring costs for Social Security and Medicare are commonly cited as the biggest economic worries arising from the retirement of 76 million baby boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964.
But on Wednesday, lawmakers focused on a different side of the topic -- the toll all the retirements will take on the rest of the economy. The oldest of the post-World War II babies are now 61 and the rush to retirement will speed up dramatically in the next several years, draining population and skills from the workplace.
