Baby boomers are increasingly working for longer—causing a ripple effect on the supply of jobs available for up and coming workers. Some, like LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, are hoarding their roles for as long as possible. Others are “unretiring” after briefly kicking up their feet and deciding it’s not for them. New research suggests working from home could be to blame for the trend.
The not-for-profit firm Smart Energy GB recently surveyed 2,000 Brits and found that nearly 70% of over-60s are currently working in hybrid roles. The rest have managed to retain the pandemic habit of working from home every day.
Not having to tackle the daily commute is helping them stay in jobs that they otherwise may have retired from. Not only is their work-life balance so much better that they’re less stressed and keeping their jobs, but they’re also so energized by their new working pattern that they’re starting side hustles on top of their nine-to-fives.
In fact, nearly 40% of baby boomers said that they’ve taken up a side gig, with tutoring being the most popular choice.
The study even claims that, thanks to remote working, “today’s generation of sixty-somethings have been able to prepare for retirement better than their predecessors”—that’s because a quarter have been able to take up new interests and hobbies that they would like to have taken up in retirement, but now while they continue to work from home.
Without the added grind of commuting, baby boomers essentially have the best of both worlds; they can retain their current income while also taking up gardening, walking and yoga.
While they say having these new hobbies will eventually make giving up their jobs easier, it’s clear that they probably don’t plan on retiring any time soon: Nine in 10 say they are happy with their careers, 66% are less stressed, and 94% feel like they have a new lease on life.
Unretiring: a global trend
The research comes as a growing number of retirees are dusting off their suits and returning to work.
In fact, a survey of more than 6,300 U.K. adults for Standard Life, part of the nation’s largest long-term savings and retirement business, found that 14% of baby boomers and late Gen Xers have already “unretired”—and a further 4% are considering it.
While 16% of women over 55 years old are planning a career return, this figure rises to nearly a quarter of men—some 21%.
And it’s not just in Britain that people are working well beyond retirement age. Across the pond, the number of those who have continued to work past 65 in the U.S. has quadrupled since the 1980s, according to the Pew Research Center.
Now, almost 20% of Americans 65 and older are employed, nearly double the share of those who were working 35 years ago. In total, there are around 11 million Americans 65 or older who are working today, accounting for 7% of all wages and salaries paid by U.S. employers. In 1987, they made up 2%.
It’s not that they’re missing the buzz of the office: Many older Americans and Brits are worried they won’t be able to afford the retired life they dreamed of. So instead of puttering around the house, they are working for longer to grow their pension pot, or taking up part-time gigs to sustain a better standard of life—and clearly, thanks to working from home, it's not as tiresome to do so as it was for previous generations.
“I’ve got decades ahead of me, knock on wood,” Renee Stanton, a 61-year-old IT worker who is scaling back her hours to chase her lifelong passions, previously told Fortune. “I’m funding my ski addiction now.”
