When Geri Morris was forced into retiring in 1998 from the Greenville Housing Authority (GHA) in Greenville, South Carolina, she was at the top of her game in every facet: pay, responsibility, performance, and work ethic—often putting in 12-hour days and loving every minute of it.
Her only “crime” was that she had reached the age of 79, and someone in the GHA decided that she should retire after 31 years—despite the action being unlawful.
“She didn’t realize the power she had to fight the injustice, so she didn’t,” said her son Henry J. Morris in an interview with The Epoch Times. “But I often wonder what would happen in the same circumstances now, since age discrimination in the workforce isn’t as common as it used to be.”
And it’s going to become a lot less common.
The U.S. population continues to age, and seniors are soon going to be the largest age group in the nation. Employers will not only be inclined to keep many of them for essential jobs—such as accounting, insurance, medicine, law, media, education, hospitality, and tourism—they will likely find that an older workforce is the ready-made answer to ongoing labor shortages, high turnover, and the closest they’re ever likely to get to long-term job loyalty.
“The increasing need for older workers in the U.S. is primarily the result of two factors: the general aging of the U.S. population, and, a nationwide labor shortage that emerged in the aftermath of the 2020 pandemic,” Joseph Von Nessen, research economist with the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business in Columbia, South Carolina, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“And although there are several major contributing factors that have helped create this labor shortage, the biggest is the retirement of the Baby Boomers.”
The wave of retirees, however, coupled with a paucity of younger workers to replace them, has left significant gaps in many professional areas—with more expected soon.
For example, the first baby boomers—born between 1946 and 1964—qualified for early retirement benefits in 2008.
Since then, approximately 35 million have retired or reached retirement age. According to U.S. Census Bureau projections, about 12,000 people in the United States turned 65 each day this year. That’s another 4.4 million people who reached the traditional retirement age of 65 in 2024.
And, the Census Bureau is projecting that older adults will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history by the year 2034.
“The first Baby Boomers reached 65 years old in 2011,” said Luke Rogers, chief of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Branch, in a 2020 report. “Since then, there’s been a rapid increase in the size of the 65-and-older population, which grew by over a third since 2010. No other age group saw such a fast increase.”
So the question now is: Are most retirees over the next decade simply going to be living out their growing life expectancy in some form of senior living facility, or are they going to continue to be a vital part of the workforce?
Von Nessen, for one, is betting on the latter.
“The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics specifically projects that between 2022 and 2032, the number of people in the labor force over the age of 55 will increase by 2.7 million—or 7.1 percent,” he said.
“By contrast, the number of people in the traditional ‘prime working age group’ of 25-54 is only expected to increase by 5.2 percent over the same time period. Thus, older Americans will become a bigger part of the U.S. workforce.”
Dwayne Bell is an indication of this new direction.
Bell, 75, started his own consulting business, Bell-Consults LLC, on Daniel Island, South Carolina, after more than 50 years in the construction and engineering business in upstate South Carolina.
“At this point, I’m not sure I’ll ever retire in the conventional sense,” Bell told The Epoch Times.
Bell is far from an exception.
According to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of October this year, 37.9 million people over the age of 55 were part of the workforce, including 20.4 million men and 17.5 million women.
Based on 2023 findings by Pew Research Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., older adults are projected to account for 57 percent of labor force growth through 2032.
In the report last year, senior PRC economist Richard Fry concluded that the trend is partly because “employment among men ages 25 to 54 has been sinking for decades.” The report says, “workers ages 75 and older are the fastest-growing age group in the workforce, more than quadrupling in size since 1964.”
Von Nessen pointed out that this older population is already either outpacing, or on the verge of outpacing, every younger group in the nation. That includes Generation Alpha, born between 2010 and 2024—the first generation to be born entirely in the 21st century—which won’t begin seeing the workforce until the early 2030s.
This indicates that a major part of the next U.S. workforce will end up resembling at least a few of the previous ones.
“An aging population means that the average age of the workforce will also likely increase over time,” Von Nessen said.
“And a strong labor market, coupled with an aging population, implies that the size of the senior workforce is likely to continue to grow in the coming years in ways we didn’t expect even just a short time ago.”
