This grant will support four integrated research projects on the role played by nontraditional work arrangements—defined as jobs that lack benefits and that have significant wage and hour volatility—in the labor market decisions of older workers. Led by Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, three of the projects focus on workers in their 50s and early 60s who may consider themselves too young to retire. The first project examines the extent to which the apparent rise in nontraditional employment for older individuals reflects the loss of traditional jobs to globalization and automation. The goal is to learn how the spread of these pressures to more industries could increase nontraditional work. To the extent that more older workers hold nontraditional jobs, the second project explores how these jobs are part of late-career employment patterns. Do these workers move back into traditional employment, for example—and, if so, after how long—and how often and for how long do they stay in nontraditional work for the remainder of their careers. The third project addresses the question of whether older nontraditional workers obtain access to retirement savings vehicles and health insurance through other sources, such as their spouses, public programs, or their own initiative. The fourth project focuses on an older group of workers—those in their 60s who are old enough to retire but are still working—and examines the extent to which nontraditional jobs help these workers improve their retirement security relative to retiring early.

Funds from this grant provide four years of continued support for a multidisciplinary postdoctoral fellowship program at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies (HCPDS) at Harvard’s School of Public Health. The Harvard fellowship program is designed to provide opportunities for seminars, mentorships, and speakers, with the goal of catalyzing a Cambridge-based research community for scholars of aging and work that will become part of the growing community of researchers focused on the intersection of aging and work. Grant funds will provide stipend support for two two-year fellowships along with subsidiary funds to support the fellows’ travel and research needs.

This grant funds work by Katharine Abraham and John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland and Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute to bring greater precision to our understanding of how to define and count the “alternative workforce,” and to gain deeper understanding of the roles the different types of alternative work arrangements play in older workers’ lives. Partnering with Gallup, Abraham and her team will field a nationally representative telephone survey of adults aged 18 to 80, asking them about their nontraditional work arrangements. The team will then create a new dataset by linking survey responses with administrative data from tax filings and household surveys. The new dataset will allow the team to probe how alternative work arrangements fit into the labor market behavior of older workers. Questions of interest include whether and to what extent alternative work arrangements are used during periods of traditional unemployment; whether they are a prelude to re-entry into the traditional workforce; the extent to which they are used to supplement retirement income, to offset the risk of 401(k)s, or to balance elder care responsibilities with the need to earn money; and what role the social aspects of work and its capacity to help structure one’s days play in the decision to take up an alternative work arrangement. These questions beg a more fundamental one: are these arrangements positive choices or options of last resort for older Americans? The created dataset will be made publicly available for use by other researchers and the project team expects the project to produce at least two peer reviewed papers, as well as a series of policy briefs and presentations aimed at both scholars and policymakers.