Keep writing until final call
I wake up and my body tells me I can remember te Korean War. When I get mobile, my mind wants to write and my heart reaches out for spicy food and rock ‘n’ music. I’m too old to stay up all night and young enough to recall what can go on all night – or, most of it anyway.
My wish tyo to be able to keep writing until I get that final call from a Higher Power. My wife says “I live to write.” More appropriately, I write to live. After a lifetime as a journalist, I want to keep doing ot until I “get it right.”
Which brings me to an article sent to www.seniorresource.com/gender.htm
by someone named Ann Bannes, vice president of home and community-based services for St Andrew's At-Home Services, St. Louis non-profit servicing older adults and their caregivers (Abannes@standrews1.com).
In part, it states: “The aging populations' problems in the work force aren’t the same as the workplaces' problems with the aging population. The former is a problem of being forced out of the workplace over the past 15 years; the latter reflects the inevitable impact of baby-boomers wanting to retire, and the need of the younger workforce to care for a large population of frail and aging parents.”
It seems today's over-50 population can’t find "good" employment
Opportunities, yet one in seven Americans past 65 is working. It may seem a dubious statistic to those who were "downsized" and unable to find jobs comparable in compensation and challenge to what they did before they were in their 50s or early 60s.
To them the issues remain:
- Which of the one-in-seven working are under-paid or under-utilized?
- What percentage work because stock market losses or rising medical costs wiped out their nest-egg?
The article claims the “growing concern” in the workplace is two-fold”
- To corporate America, the large numbers of aging baby boomers (the ones who moved into middle and upper management after downsizing began in the 1990s) will create a skilled-employment shortage when their leading edge begins retiring in 2005 at the age of 60. What will corporations offer to keep baby-boomers working productively after 65? If many boomers are comfortable economically, how will they be lured back to the corporate world? Where will quality middle and upper management come from when high numbers of baby-boomers retire?
- Meanwhile, as corporations face the conundrum of enough skilled
employees they will face an annual cost estimated at $400,000 r every 5,000 workers to provide guidance, support, and care for elderly parents. This reflects time spent on the job managing parents’ problems by phone and via computer, and sick and family-leave days to tend to elder care issues.
The article concludes that “an employee-sensitive culture can provide the edge a corporation needs to succeed tomorrow. Sensitivity to the aging issues of present employees just might help break the anti-aging bias of the workplace and set a new ethic.