The New York Times finds a compelling focus for the catfood commission's threats to recommend raising the retirement age.
At the Cooper Tire plant in Findlay, Ohio, Jack Hartley, who is 58, works a 12-hour shift assembling tires: pulling piles of rubber and lining over a drum, cutting the material with a hot knife, lifting the half-finished tire, which weighs 10 to 20 pounds, and throwing it onto a rack.
Mr. Hartley performs these steps nearly 30 times an hour, or 300 times in a shift. “The pain started about the time I was 50,” he said. “Dessert with lunch is ibuprofen. Your knees start going bad, your lower back, your elbows, your shoulders.”
He said he does not think he can last until age 66, when he will be eligible for full Social Security retirement benefits. At 62 or 65, he said, “that’s it.”
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A new analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that one in three workers over age 58 does a physically demanding job like Mr. Hartley’s — including hammering nails, bending under sinks, lifting baggage — that can be radically different at age 69 than at age 62. Still others work under difficult conditions, like exposure to heat or cold, exposure to contaminants or weather, cramped workplaces or standing for long stretches.
In all, the researchers found that 45 percent of older workers, or 8.5 million, held such difficult jobs. For janitors, nurses’ aides, plumbers, cashiers, waiters, cooks, carpenters, maintenance workers and others, raising the retirement age may mean squeezing more out of a declining body.
For more and more of the work force, sticking it out until they can get full Social Security benefits is a necessity. Wages haven't kept up with the cost of living for many middle class workers, and more and more companies have been freezing or completely ending pension plans--and that was happening in the years before the great recession began.
This is not news to Jim McGuire, 62, a ramp serviceman for United Airlines, who started lifting bags into airplanes 43 years ago. He has had rotator cuff surgery and separated a shoulder on the job.
“From 50 to 60 was a drastic change,” he said. “The aches and pains, the feeling that your back could go at any second. My hips are worn out. In a seven-day week, I take Advil five nights for the pain.”
Mr. McGuire said that he did not have a planned retirement date, but that he hoped to make it to 66. Since United’s pension plan was taken over by the government, cutting his benefits in half, he says Social Security has become a much bigger part of his future plans.
These are Alan Simpson's "greedy geezers." Or, as Atrios notes the people who are invisible to the Ruth Marcuses, the Villagers of the world. That includes most of the members of the catfood commission, and far too many members of Congress.