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Where Have All the Boomers Gone?
The pandemic has affected Boomers in the workforce in different ways.
The pandemic that laid waste to the American economy has led to an interesting paradox: Well-off Boomers started to disappear from the workforce not because they lost their jobs, but because they wanted to leave their jobs.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, the number of Boomers who retired in 2020 increased dramatically. In the third quarter of 2020, 3.2 million more Boomers retired than in the third quarter of 2019, according to the Pew Research Center. In Q3 2020, 28.6 million Boomers said they were now retired. A substantial number of Boomer retirees felt the detrimental impact of the pandemic. These unlucky working Boomers found that their employers were effectively using the economic downturn as a means of practicing ageism. Boomers were typically the first ones to get the axe when belts needed tightening as employers exhibited a preference for younger, less expensive staff.
Still, a different slice of the Boomer demographic has seen something of a silver lining in the pandemic. As reported by Entrepreneur.com, according to Bloomberg, 2.7 million Americans age 55-plus have said that “Covid-19 fatigue” is causing them to consider leaving the workforce earlier than they had planned. This group — mostly affluent white Americans — is well-heeled enough to think about…
