When Jim Johnson turned 65 last spring, the executive vice president at Securian Financial Group could have joined several colleagues who decided to retire. But when the company asked him to stay in charge of its group insurance division, he realized he wanted to keep working.
New census figures show that Johnson isn’t a rare case. The Twin Cities metropolitan area ranks fourth in the nation in percentage of seniors working past age 65.
Of Twin Cities residents in their late 60s and early 70s, more than one in four _ 27.4 percent _ are working, according to 2006 figures released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau. Among the 20 largest metro areas, only Washington, D.C., Boston, and Dallas-Fort Worth have higher work force participation by seniors.
Minnesota State Demographer Tom Gillaspy said there are two distinct forces causing seniors to work longer. Many have failed to adequately save for retirement, and fear that Social Security doesn’t provide enough to live on. The other main factor is a lack of skilled workers in many fields, especially for executive positions that require extensive training.
For many, it’s also a way to avoid all the idle time that comes with retirement.
“I’m better at work than I am at golf,” said Johnson, who has been at Securian for 44 years and heads a group that has grown at an 18 percent annual growth rate over the last 10 years. “I like what I do and I’m having fun.”
The aging workforce is a national phenomenon. The national workplace average for the 65-to-74 age group was 23.2 percent in 2006, up nearly four percentage points from 2000. Minnesota’s senior workforce increased at a nearly identical rate in the same period.
Gillaspy said retirement itself is a relatively new concept to the American workforce, and that people are still learning how to plan for it. Before the Great Depression and the establishment of the Social Security Administration, all but the very rich worked until they couldn’t any longer.
In the 1950s, Gillaspy said, workers retired on average when they were 66 or 67. By the 1970s, the average age was down to 63, where it remains.
“The average retirement age hasn’t changed, but we’re seeing more people staying in the workforce,” Gillaspy said. “We anticipated this would start to happen between 2005 and 2010” when the leading edge of the baby boom generation started to hit retirement age while the size of high school graduating classes hit a peak for that generation.
“This will have an impact as fewer young people come into the workforce,” he said.
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