CLEVELAND – Helen Romig couldn’t afford to retire when she was forced out of work last year, and finding a job she liked wasn’t easy.
“My husband kept saying, “You’re 60. You’re not going to find anything,”‘ said Romig, who lives in Concord Township. “But I told him that’s only a number, and I’m a good person and a hard worker.”
Now she has proved him wrong.
Every day for two weeks in April, she attended a “job club” in Euclid, Ohio, offered by the Senior Employment Center, a nationwide federally funded program that teaches older adults all the fine points of conducting a sophisticated job search.
By the end of April, Romig found something.
When a new Wal-Mart opens next month in Chardon, Romig, who spent nearly 20 years managing a small Mentor deli, will be the bakery manager.
She’s among millions of older Americans still working – a group that is growing, even among those 75 and older, a Plain Dealer analysis has found.
Romig has gone from no-tech to high-tech, learning to take inventory with a hand-held computer and to use an automated machine to glaze doughnuts.
“I’m having a wonderful time,” she said.
The free sessions cover resume-writing, job interview techniques, finding “hidden” job openings, filling out applications on the Web, figuring out what work you’re best suited for, overcoming low self-esteem, and even how to find transportation to the new job.
The center also runs a program placing people over 55 who meet certain income requirements into training positions at nonprofit or government agencies. There they can improve their marketable skills while earning minimum wage. This program is funded by the Older Americans Act.
About half the 186 participants in the Senior Employment Center’s job club found jobs with an average hourly wage of $12.79 during the last federal fiscal year.
Of the 239 seniors who had training assignments at nonprofit or government agencies during that period, 43 got permanent jobs with an average hourly wage of $8.71.
They joined nearly 3 million more Americans between the ages of 60 and 69, who were working last year compared with a decade ago, according to a Plain Dealer analysis of federal labor statistics.
A large part of the increase is the growing older population. But almost 1.5 million would have been expected to quit working, using the 1995 retirement rates.
So while the number of all seniors in their 60s increased 16 percent in 10 years, the number in the work force grew almost three times as fast, or 46 percent.
Even among seniors 75 and older, those working grew 21/2 times as fast as in the past decade than the increase in that age group.
The job club trainer/employment counselor at the Euclid center, Nina Talley, believes there’s a way around obstacles that confront older workers.
It’s not easy to overcome what she calls “a toxic work environment,” especially when many older workers believed they would work for the same company until retirement.
“This is about change and metamorphosis,” Talley said.
JL END JAFFE
(Susan Jaffe is a reporter for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at sjaffe(at)plaind.com)
AP-NY-06-06-06 1414EDT
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