Okay, so the Department of Labor’s employment statistics for September were pretty gloomy.

However, for older workers the situation is actually considerably worse.

That’s according to a blog post from the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School.

Although the DOL’s numbers for September indicate that overall unemployment held firm at 5.1 percent, it actually dropped slightly among those aged 55–64—from 4 percent in August to 3.6 percent.

That represents 945,000 older workers who are out of a job.

But wait, said the post. The situation is worse than that.

A combination of wage stagnation, a smaller workforce, and a lot fewer new jobs than expected meant that the DOL’s September statistics weren’t exactly greeted with wild cheers of enthusiasm.

But for older workers, the numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Economists know, said the post, that those numbers are much cheerier than reality indicates. For one thing, those numbers include only those who have been job-hunting in the past four weeks.

If you add in people who are working part time because they can’t find a full-time job—termed, in the blog post, “involuntary part-time workers,” that ups the total of unemployed older workers by another 167,000.

Read: Graying workforce a boon to employers

Next, you have to add in the people who’ve just given up looking because there’s nothing out there for them—termed “discouraged workers” in the post. That adds another 196,000 to the total.

So now you’re up to 1,308,000, an increase of 28 percent over what the DOL stats tell you.

“Going back to 2014,” said the blog post, “this real unemployment rate for workers 55-64 would be up to 30 percent higher.”

But wait—there’s more.

Even that higher number isn’t a true indication of how bad it is for older workers.

People who can’t find a job at all, or have settled for something part time or that pays a really low wage, have the “option” of retiring.

But this isn’t something to be desired, since it further worsens the financial situation of the older worker.

Being pushed into retirement, older workers are in danger of facing downward mobility throughout their old age, it said, because they’ve had to draw on Social Security and their retirement savings earlier than planned.

If the retirement age is raised, it will only make matters worse, since there still won’t be jobs for a host of older workers being told they have to stay in the workforce longer before they can count on any money to live on from Social Security.

Instant Insights /

Older workers at higher risk than employment stats indicate

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