Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
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It's tempting to imagine that the retirees now going back to work are on a bit of a lark. Seen through the distorting lens of stereotypes, they may appear just to have gotten a little bored with a schedule-free life. Maybe they want to meet new people or reconnect with their old crowd.
But that outlook, as an AARP official testified in prepared remarks at the Minnesota Legislature last year, is unconnected to reality. "It is a privileged worldview," said Kate Schaefers, volunteer president of AARP Minnesota, "that assumes … older adults have cushions of savings to draw upon, with earned income just icing on the cake."
Indeed. And speaking of cake, there may be some who won't feel properly retired until they have the kind of going-away party that was a normal part of pre-pandemic workplace culture. But it's a safe bet that most who return to the workforce are acting out of necessity, not whimsy.
Perhaps their retirement savings are invested in funds that have performed poorly during the recent market turbulence. Perhaps they were among the roughly half of families that had little or no retirement savings to start with. After all, many of the people who left the workforce during the early days of the COVID lockdown did so not by choice but because their jobs simply disappeared. The graph of employment figures in March 2020 is a virtually vertical line, straight down to April.
The fortunate ones are those who needed only to speed up their retirement timetable by a year or two, perhaps accepting a buyout along the way. They may even have had employer-funded pension programs waiting for them. But those with less luck had only unemployment insurance to count on, plus Social Security.
And in Minnesota, a further shock lay in wait: a provision that reduced the unemployment checks of some who were receiving Social Security payments. That feature of state law was finally repealed effective this summer, but the repeal was not made retroactive. For many, the damage was done.