Business

In a Tight Labor Market, Retirees Fill Gaps Their Previous Employers Can’t

Soon after Ilana Benet retired from her job as a labor and delivery nurse, it hit her: She missed the babies. And her employer missed her.

Posted Updated
In a Tight Labor Market, Retirees Fill Gaps Their Previous Employers Can’t
By
Claudia Dreifus
, New York Times

Soon after Ilana Benet retired from her job as a labor and delivery nurse, it hit her: She missed the babies. And her employer missed her.

Benet, a registered nurse, had worked at Montefiore Health System in New York City for 26 years before retiring two years ago at age 60.

As a grandmother of 10, Benet wanted to spend more time with her family. But she realized — within weeks — that she wasn’t ready for full retirement.

Montefiore was ready to welcome her back. The hospital system developed a program to rehire some retired nurses after analysts noticed that almost half of the nursing staff was nearing 50. Although the hospital didn’t yet have a nursing shortage, managers wanted to prevent one, according to Maureen Scanlan, the hospital’s vice president of nursing and patient care.

Within weeks of leaving, Benet was back on the maternity floor, hired as a freelancer at $60 an hour — pay that she earns in addition to her pension.

These days, she puts in two 12-hour shifts per week. There are no restrictions on the number of hours she can work as a freelancer, but Benet thinks two days are enough. “When I’m done,” she said, “I go home and get to be a grandma again.”

At a moment when the unemployment rate is low, hovering around 3.9 percent, some employers are turning to their pool of retirees to fill holes in their staff.

“In a tight labor market, firms find recent retirees increasingly attractive,” said Kathleen Christensen, who funds research on aging and the U.S. labor market at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “Their skills are up-to-date, they possess critical institutional knowledge, and they can mentor younger workers.” “Hiring back recent retirees appears more common than at any other time since the Great Recession,” she added.

Gad Levanon, chief economist for North America at the Conference Board, said he has seen similar trends.

“There’s a labor shortage in many sectors, like construction and transportation,” he said. “The attitude toward employing older workers is changing because of shortages.”

For Montefiore, the way to address an aging workforce involved, in part, contacting the older nurses before they retired, offering them flexible options to stay on and an easy path back if they so desired.

So far, the program is modest, with perhaps three dozen retired nurses freelancing at four of Montefiore’s 11 health care facilities. But administrators there say they see benefits beyond the staff numbers.

“To retain nurses beyond their natural retirement age is valuable because experienced nurses have a wealth of knowledge,” Scanlan said. “It’s a loss when that level of knowledge retires. They can remain with us in different capacities. It may not be in the role they’ve retired from, but they all become mentors.”

Mentoring and training younger employees was a way back for Rick Quackenbush, a longtime line worker for National Grid.

For much of his working life, Quackenbush installed and repaired power lines for the company, an energy provider in New York state and New England. At 55, he retired, a decision he realized was a mistake.

Quackenbush, now 68, said the first two weeks at his home near Albany, New York, were “like a vacation. I fixed things around the house. Then, I started watching television and I thought, ‘If I’m doing this for the next five years, I’ll be dead.'”

To keep busy, he took temp jobs. At one, he ran into a former colleague, who mentioned that National Grid was bringing back retirees. Quackenbush moved quickly. He applied, was hired to supervise a group of younger linemen, and then transferred to a training center as an instructor.

He’s still there, teaching new recruits what he calls “the finer parts of doing line work and what makes the job safe.”

“We teach them all the parts that make the job safer,” he said. “It’s a joy.”

Today, Quackenbush is at National Grid full time. He’s back on the payroll and earns a regular salary and benefits. His pension, like those of all returning full-timers, has been frozen until he retires.

National Grid’s management stays in touch with retirees. Some are allowed to work part time. Others are taken on for short-term projects. When there are emergencies, as in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, retirees are called in to help restore service to affected communities.

The utility’s retired workers who return part-time are employed by an outside staffing agency. They join the team as contractors, which allows them to keep receiving their pension checks.

At some organizations, it is high-level executives who have come out of retirement.

Thomas Murphy, a construction engineer in Atlanta, helped the United Parcel Service erect some 70 buildings throughout the United States during his career at the company. In 2007, after he had risen to the post of coordinator of compliance and ethics for the company, he accepted an early retirement package.

“I was only 50,” he said, “but the package was generous. My health insurance would be paid until Medicare kicked in. I thought it was time to start something new.”

At first, Murphy, now 62, and his wife, Nancy, traveled. Then they started a small construction firm that as part of its mission trained disadvantaged youth in the building trades. But after a few years, the demands overwhelmed them. “Our retirement was exhausting us,” he said.

After shutting the business down, Murphy thought that regular full-time employment might be the best way to spend his senior years. But by then he was in his late 50s, and the difficulties he had finding employment frustrated him.

Eventually, through friends, Murphy heard about a program that UPS had organized to recruit retirees.

The internet shopping boom had driven huge growth for the delivery service. Management was seeking to bring back former workers, who, according to Malcolm Berkley, a vice president at UPS, “wouldn’t need much training because they’d done the job for 30 years.”

The day after Murphy applied, he was offered a position mentoring new construction engineers.

Today, he is the East region project engineering manager for the company and is co-managing the construction of what will be a large automated distribution center on the west side of Atlanta. But this time, Murphy is not on the UPS payroll. He works for a staffing company, Cortech.

For what can be as much as a 65-hour workweek, Murphy earns about $100,000 annually. It doesn’t interfere with his pension payments.

The strenuous schedule doesn’t bother him. “The work is enjoyable, and the money is nice,” he said. “People my age usually worry about burning through their nest egg. I’m able to build on mine.”

As with many of the unretired, Murphy finds the benefits of going back to work to be more than financial. Full retirement, after all, isn’t right for everyone. For some seniors, work gives meaning. Losing it can be devastating.

“There’s still gas in this tank,” Murphy said.

Copyright 2024 New York Times News Service. All rights reserved.