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When a study revealed that three quarters of workers ages 50–62are working in jobs that have neither retirement plans nor healthinsurance, retirement expert Dr. Alicia H. Munnell, director of theCenter for Retirement Research at BostonCollege, thought at first there was something wrong with thedata.

But what's wrong is what will happen to those older workers inretirement. According to a New York Times report, that demographic of workers is heavilypresent in "nontraditional" employment—jobs withoutbenefits. Nontraditional includes not just Uberdrivers but freelancers, consultants, and many other occupations —those who don't get paid if they don't work.

The revelation was news to Dr. Munnell, who is quoted in thereport saying, "I thought everyone had traditional jobs duringtheir 50s. I was super surprised by it."

But the toll that those nontraditional jobs will take onworkers' retirement is heavy, the study found, as it explored theconsequences of nontraditional jobs for workers in that agegroup.

How much of a toll those benefitless jobs will take onretirement income depends on how long people in that age groupspend in them. But it can cost them as much as 26 percent of theincome they would have had in retirement compared with people whospent their 50s and early 60s in jobs that came with full benefitpackages.

The difficulty of finding traditional jobs for that agedemographic, coupled with the likelihood of being shed in favor ofa younger employee whose salary is considerably lower, is nudgingmore and more older workers into the gig economy, but while suchjobs provide income when otherwise none is to be had, they canexact a toll in other ways.

In fact, for workers who manage to spend most of their olderworking years in traditional jobs, with occasional ventures intothe gig economy, retirement income only suffers by about 6 percentrather than the 26 percent faced by those who work innontraditional jobs for those last years of their careers.

And with money often in considerably shorter supply than intraditional jobs that come with benefits, it's not as if gigworkers can stretch their incomes to save for retirement or forkover premiums for health coverage.

"I was not only surprised, I was also saddened" by the research,Munnell said in the report, adding, "The results mean that peoplehave to worry about getting protections on their own, and that theyhave very unpredictable work lives."