Older and reliable

After her husband’s death, Doris Pease needed time to grieve and piece together her life as a widow.

She sold her house in Nevada, paid off her husband’s medical bills and bought a mobile home in Pocatello, Idaho, to be closer to her brother. Pease, now 68, dug into her hobbies — reading, gardening and embroidering — but after about six years the funds from the home sale, and her peace of mind, began to run out.

“I was getting so depressed sitting around the house that I needed to get back to work,” she said.

For many older Americans, retirement is not a viable option; many are postponing retirement, while others are going back into the work force, driven by personal or financial reasons.

The trend is evident in the number of older workers — the number of people 55 and above in the work force rose to 22.7 million in May, up from 22 million in 2003, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The increase in older workers coincides with a shift in employers’ attitudes — while there has long been an aversion in corporate America to hiring seniors, who were deemed expensive or difficult to train, that view is changing at a time when the government is forecasting a significant labor shortage by the end of the decade.

The need to work can be explained in part by money problems — AARP estimates that 1 in 10 Americans age 65 and over lives below the poverty level, explaining at least part of the phenomenon. Though most seniors aren’t technically poor, many nonetheless struggle to make ends meet because of limited savings, expensive medications to buy or the loss of a spouse.

Others find employment critical to their mental well-being — contrary to how they expected to feel in their golden years.

“The money helps, don’t get me wrong, but that wasn’t the ultimate goal,” said Ray Clark, 68, of Springfield, Mass., who took a part-time job at the Basketball Hall of Fame because he found retirement boring.

Clark, who spent much of his life as a machine operator for a company that makes corrugated boxes, said he would stick with his current gig — a minimum-wage job — “until I can no longer do it.”

While older workers are well-known for such commitment, there is also the perception among would-be employers that they require considerable training, particularly in the area of technology, according to labor experts.

That’s why organizations that advocate for the elderly sponsor job training and placement services through a federally funded program called Senior Community Service Employment.

It was through this program, authorized by the Older Americans Act of 1965 and funded by the Labor Department, that Pease landed a job at Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare, gaining experience in health care and general computing skills.

Today she is employed by the American Red Cross, where she schedules blood donations and organizes events.

“Basically, I think they wanted somebody reliable that they could depend on,” Pease said.

That, it turns out, is what many U.S. employers are looking for these days and, to help find it, they’re turning more frequently to the growing pool of older workers, according to human resources executives and job-training specialists.

AARP recently started a program to identify job-seeking seniors and match them up with the right employers.

At Toys R Us Inc., executives are eager to bring more older workers for two key reasons, according to Jim Gorenc, director of staffing for the company.

The first is the aging of the U.S. population. Having older workers “opens up a channel for customers to be serviced by someone like them,” said Gorenc.

The other factor, Gorenc said, is that “there is a work ethic from a mature worker that is very strong,” and not as easy to find among younger generations.

Charlotte Lee, the director of Senior AIDES in Springfield, Mass., a municipal job placement program for older workers, said such private sector interest in seniors couldn’t have come at a better time.

Billy Joe Brady, 60, of Norton, Va., never intended to leave the labor force. But he lost his job in 1998 when the local coal company moved out of town and the thought of hunting for a job for the first time in 25 years frightened him.

Instead, Brady collected $1,300-a-month disability checks for a couple of years, while his wife, Linda, went to work for a nearby Holiday Inn.

But gradually Brady’s self-esteem began to deteriorate. “I kind of felt like I was sliding into nothingness and that didn’t sit well with me,” said Brady, who works at a nonprofit organization that assists people with disabilities to live independently.

“It feels good to get up every morning to say, ‘Well, I have to go to work,’.” Brady said. “I have a purpose every day. Not every day when I get up do I feel the best in the world, but I feel that if I get up and get started, that kind of goes away.”