UMaine Center on Aging Secures Grant for Workplace Safety Study
Contact: Len Kaye, (207) 581-3483; Sandra Butler, (207) 581-2382
George Manlove, (207) 581-3756
ORONO — With Maine’s aging workforce laboring well beyond traditional retirement age, researchers at the UMaine Center on Aging and the state Department of Labor want to know if employers are prepared for the expected ballooning of older workers still on the job.
The Center on Aging recently received a $7,500 grant from the Harvard-National Institute for Safety and Occupational Health (NIOSH) Education and Research Center at the Harvard School of Public Health to conduct a pilot study that’s expected to lead to a more comprehensive assessment of how to better prepare the workplace for aging workers. The results of the study should to be of interest to state government policy-makers and national organizations that advocate for older Americans.
Researchers Lenard Kaye, director of the Center on Aging, Sandra Butler, an associate professor of social work, and Kristin Nadeau, a research associate and graduate of the UMaine social work graduate program, conducted interviews with nearly three dozen people, employers and employees from five industry categories.
“This is a topic that really interests people and interestingly, there has been very little that’s been done on it nationally,” says Ruth Lawson-Stopps of the Bath-based Occupational Health Association and a member of the Maine Occupational Research Agenda (MORA). MORA is a consortium of health and occupational professionals working under the wing of the labor department to oversee the study.
“There are some changes that are happening demographically, and it’s startling that very little work has been done” on Maine’s aging labor force, Lawson-Stopps says.
Kaye and Butler, both published authors and authorities on gerontology, wonder if employers are prepared for thousands of baby boomers who will remain on the job into their late 60s and 70s.
“Research shows older workers (age 55 and older) are likely to be working longer as opposed to the past, when most people retired at age 65 or earlier,” Kaye says. “That’s a pronounced reversal of previous trends in the last 20 years.”
A downturn in the economy, significant losses over the last decade in the value of stock market-based retirement accounts and the fact that many aging baby boomers are healthier these days, suggests, Kaye says, that “we need to prepare for expanding numbers of older workers in the workplace, and that makes this sort of research all the more timely and relevant.”
As Kaye, Butler and Nadeau analyze their data, they are finding that most employers value the wisdom, experience and dedication of older workers. Older workers tend to have fewer on-the-job injuries than their younger counterparts, although older people tend to take longer to recover from an injury than a younger worker.
Studies show that older workers also tend to have repetitive motion and back injuries while younger people tend to have more hand and eye injuries, a likely result of older workers being more careful as they become familiar with their jobs and their bodies.
“The focus of this current research is on workplace health and safety,” Butler says, “so the state can make provisions to assure a safer workplace as the labor force changes.”
Among the questions researchers asked in the pilot survey was “how they saw themselves as workers at age 30 as opposed to today,” Nadeau says. “We are asking them if they feel if their health and safety needs have changed as they’ve aged.”
Kaye adds that, “in a sense, we also want to determine if an employer is making changes and encouraging them to stay in place or, not so subtly, to move on.”
The five industries the Center on Aging is looking at in the pilot study are healthcare, shipbuilding and repair, public schools, grocery stores and state government — all categories the department of labor identified as having more injuries among older workers than many other industries.
“The demographics show that before too long there are going to be some shortages of younger workers,” says Lawson-Stopps. “It means we really need to look at these older workers. A concern we have is this is going to be a large segment of the population as the baby boomers are getting older; it will be an enormous segment of the population.”
Those concerns are supported by department of labor data, which projects growth of a whopping 63 percent increase (48,000 people) in workers between age 55 and 64 from 2000 to 2010, yet only 10 percent growth in younger age groups, according to senior economic analyst Glenn Mills, in the labor market information division.
Maine’s workforce of people 55 and over was about 100,000 in 2,000, nearly 15 percent of Maine’s labor force of about 689,000 that year. Mills says that although the data is four years old, the projections remain accurate, with the numbers of older workers multiplying.