Just a week away from turning 101, Jayne Burns has recently started catching social media fame over another interesting part of her career — on most mornings, the centenarian drives herself 20 miles to the Mason, Ohio fabric store where she's worked for the last 26 years.
Burns started her job cutting fabric at Joann Fabric and Crafts after the death of her husband in 1997 and still works there four shifts a week.
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"I enjoy talking to everybody I work with and meeting the customers who are very nice even if some of them are surprised to see me at the cutting table," Burns recently told CNBC in an interview.
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Centenarian Has This Piece of Career Advice For Younger Workers
Burns first started getting social media attention in 2021 when a co-worker in her 20s started posting videos of them together at the store on the ByteDance-owned platform — one video of Burns and Maggie HusVar was viewed more than 9 million times and received 2.1 million upvotes.
In her interview with CNBC, Burns gave younger workers like HusVar some career advice — born in 1922 and turning 101 on July 26, she spent the majority of her career as an accountant but turned to fabric-cutting after trying and not being able to stay retired.
For younger workers, Burns advises seeking out co-workers who are "friendly and kind" — that has been what kept Burns' shifts from feeling like work throughout all these years.
She told the news outlet that the "best jobs" throughout her career all also happened to have the best co-workers.
Working as a fabric-cutter while finishing her degree at Thomas More University, HusVar emerged as one of Burns' closest friends at work — the former first showed Burns TikTok during a coffee break.
'Staying Busy Keeps You From Focusing on Your Aches And Pains'
In other videos of the two of them together, Burns and HusVar dance in the fabric store's break room and chat about her memories as a young woman in accounting.
"Staying busy keeps you from focusing on your aches and pains," Burns said. "It makes it easier to keep going."
Burns does not attribute any one thing to helping her live a long and fulfilled life but said that definitely "working has helped" her stay occupied and have something to get up for during difficult life periods.
In the summer of 2022, another 100-year-old from Brazil set a Guinness world record for the longest time spent working for a single company.
Fellow centenarian and fabric worker Walter Orthmann began working for Santa Catarina-based textile company Industrias Renaux S.A. in 1938 and has not stopped yet.
Earlier this June, Orthmann posted an Instagram video of himself returning back to the factory after a vacation. Similarly to Burns, Orthmann receives a lot of satisfaction from his work and did not consider retiring.
But while work helps some find fulfillment and stay active, many older citizens are pushing back retirement primarily for financial reasons — numbers from several studies show high rates of people "coming back" from retirement after finding that their savings do not stretch as far as they planned.
