Workers Over 50 Hit Hard by Job Losses

The coronavirus has wreaked havoc on the U.S. job market and has been especially harmful to older employees, reports KNSI-FM in Minnesota. "Among workers 50 and older, 30 percent said they had lost income due to workplace closures or having to reduce their hours," said the AARP Foundation's Emily Allen. There are more than five million workers older than 55 in retail and another one million in food service, two industries that the pandemic has severely impacted. Allen said it can take older people twice as long to find new jobs as younger workers. "It may take them a while to understand how to navigate the new job market and how to navigate how to return to the workforce, building a resume, practicing for interviews, those kinds of things," she noted. The AARP Foundation cited the Back To Work 50-plus program, designed to help older men and women craft new strategies for returning to work. "A lot of times, that may mean they just need to understand what jobs will be in demand when things open back up," Allen said. "They may have been in a certain industry for most of their career. They may need to actually think about changing industries."