Ad Hoc, Limited, and Reactive

Abstract

AbstractAbstract: The economic and social consequences of population aging depend in large part on how employers respond to an aging workforce. Although previous research offers aspirational suggestions about what management and labor organizations should do to help older workers, remarkably little is known about what they are actually doing to manage an older workforce. We use both survey data and in-depth qualitative interviews at manufacturing firms to explore the organizational response to workforce aging in the United States and Germany. We find that organizations do not see workforce aging as a major threat to human capital. As a result, organizational responses are largely ad hoc, limited, and reactive. They tend to focus on strategically important workers, thus increasing occupational inequalities in retirement flexibility. However, we also find that older workers in Germany have more flexibility in later working lives than those in the United States due to institutional differences in worker representation, working time arrangements, and social policy, demonstrating that productive responses to workforce aging are possible.