Will Inflation Keep Older Workers in the Workforce?

The price of everything is spiralling which means all of the calculations that people made about retirement may need to be re-calculated.  That might mean staying in the workforce longer or maybe returning after you have exited it. Whatever decisions people make will have wide consequences for the economy and the labor market – read […]

Episode 38: How Do You Reinvent Yourself After a Pandemic?

The pandemic may be ending, but that does mean that workers are headed back to where they were in the spring of 2020. In some cases, their positions have been eliminated and they are going to be forced to reinvent themselves. In others, their jobs may be the same but they themselves have changed in […]

Why the K-Shaped Recovery Will Not be Kind to Older Workers

I have been talking and writing about the K-Shaped economic recovery for a while now. Basically, some sectors and individuals are going to be in favor over the coming years and some are not, with the split between the two getter ever larger. In many cases older workers, unfortunately, are resolutely going to be on […]

Episode 25: How Can We Connect the Different Generations at Work?

Spurred by social media, intergenerational warfare seems to be on the upswing, including in the workplace. And, given the conflict and the idea that generations are working against each other we can lose sight of the fact that we could potentially gain from each other unless we make a concerted effort to do so. Our […]

So Maybe the Baby Boomers Will Never Retire (Ok with You Millennials? No?)

It is almost like an urban myth: we were supposed to get a wave of baby boomer retirements that were going to make it a seller’s market for younger workers. And it is happening – except that it is apparently more like a splash than a full wave. So it boomers are not going, what […]

Who Needs a Recession When You Have Demographics?

After this Globe and Mail column came out, I had a friend call and ask whether he should re-jig his portfolio to get rid of his auto stocks. The piece is about demographics, and specifically about the implications of the fact that people spend differently over their lifetimes (spoiler: as you age you are more […]

You’re Not Old, You’re Perennial

This is my latest article for the Globe and Mail..this time on ‘Perennials’ as older workers are sometimes called. Those over 55 now comprise about 23 per cent of the U.S. workforce and 21 per cent of the Canadian one, which should not surprise anyone. Perennials now have a higher labor force participation rate than […]