Too Old to Keep Working, Not Enough Money to Stop

At 70, Walter Carpenter juggles two physically taxing jobs. In the winter, he works at a ski resort restaurant in Vermont, lugging heavy loads. In the summer, he is an attendant at a state park with a swimming beach, a job that has him trudging through sand and heat. Both are tough on his arthritic knees, which he has put off replacing. 

His bills won’t let him retire anytime soon, even as working becomes increasingly difficult for him. Carpenter knows that if he pushes himself too hard, the results “could be disastrous or fatal,” he said. He worries: “Will my body hold up? Will my heart hold up?”

Carpenter’s questions speak to a growing reality. Across the country, more seniors are staying on the job, often without enough retirement savings to step away. And for aging workers, every shift carries new risks. Older workers are far more likely to sustain a fatal work injury than their younger counterparts, Labor Department statistics show. Workers 65 and above are twice as likely to die on the job as workers aged 55 to 64, and three times as likely as all workers. When older workers get injured, the consequences last longer. They are more likely to land in the  hospital and to miss days of work and the wages that come with it. 

The situation is likely to get worse for aging workers as the senior population explodes in the coming decades. By 2030, more than one in five U.S. residents will be over the age of 65. Despite these trends, little is being done to safeguard an aging workforce, and it is unlikely that the Trump administration will address the issue, given budget and staff cuts at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health — agencies responsible for protecting workers. 

Walter Carpenter, now 70, working at the Waterbury Center State Park in Vermont in 2018. Credits: Peter Hirschfeld / Vermont Public

“The biggest protection workers might get is moving to less physically rigorous jobs, rather than a specific practice that’s going to protect an older worker,” said Peter Berg, professor of employment relations at Michigan State University.

But many workers won’t ask for lighter duties because they’re afraid they’ll just be replaced by younger workers, Berg said. Only employers who value the knowledge and experience older workers bring may be willing to accommodate them, he added.

Fortunately for Carpenter, he has an accommodating boss at the restaurant where he has worked winters for the past 15 years. In a year or so, he expects to move from his current role as busser, carrying dishes from the dining room to the kitchen, to less physically taxing work as a prep cook or at the cash register. Both would require less walking and lifting.

Carpenter is grateful for his employer’s flexibility, even if he is not looking forward to the change. “I don’t enjoy [working with] cash and money that much, but oh well,” Carpenter said, but he acknowledged that the new role would “make it easier on the old man.”

* * *

Physically demanding jobs are the riskiest for older workers, because of the normal physical and cognitive decline that comes with age. Still, about half of workers over 50 have a physically demanding job, according to a 2023 study from the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank affiliated with the labor movement. More than half are exposed to unhealthy or hazardous situations at work, such as having to operate machinery, enduring low or high temperatures, and breathing in dust, smoke or toxic vapors. These hazards also tend to have more serious repercussions for older workers.

“The same injury that might just injure a younger worker could kill an older worker due to their physical vulnerabilities,” said Ryan Olson, an occupational health psychologist and professor at the University of Utah.

Meanwhile, there are few laws designed to ensure older workers’ safety on the job beyond prohibitions against age discrimination and requirements to accommodate workers with disabilities.

To Olson, moving older workers to supervisory positions when possible can be a good way to ensure their physical safety while valuing their experience and expertise. Some older workers might want to keep working for the social connection and sense of purpose it can bring, he added. But many don’t get to choose.

“I think about this topic as a person’s power and ability to choose when they retire,” Olson said. “And that includes their financial security: Some people may not be able to retire because they must keep their level of income coming in.”

Indeed, their finances are the main reason workers stay on the job longer than they wish, and the burden falls heaviest on low-wage workers. One in four workers over age 50 said they would never retire, according to a 2016 study. Among workers who earned less than $50,000 a year, the share jumps to one in three.

Low-wage workers are less likely than their higher-wage counterparts to have pension benefits that would allow them to retire around 65, Olson said. They also are less likely to have retirement savings. A 2022 survey by the Federal Reserve found that 43% of people between 55 and 64 years old lack a retirement savings account, which likely means they would have to rely on Social Security alone. 

For minimum wage workers, Social Security benefits on their own come nowhere near covering the basics. Even if they waited until 70 to retire — which is when benefits are maximized — they would fall short by about $13,000 per year, according to a study by sociologist Mary Gatta and data analyst Jessica Horning. 

If such workers picked up a minimum-wage job after they retired to compensate for that gap, they’d have to work 33 hours a week, every week, until they died, their study found.

“The question will be, is this going to kill them … or will it just lead to a society that’s further unequal, where there will be these poor people as they age who must keep working to survive?” Berg said. 

Workers in this situation don’t see a way out, he added, even if their job is getting harder and more dangerous. Sometimes, changing jobs to accommodate their physical condition can mean taking a pay cut.

“They know they’re putting themselves at risk, but they’re taking on the risk because they feel like they need the money and they don’t feel like they have alternatives,” Berg said.

* * *

In 2006, a serious illness prevented Carpenter from working for three months. As a result, he said, he lost a job at a ski resort that he’d hoped to keep until his retirement, as well as his health insurance and his retirement benefits. He was over 50 at the time, and couldn’t find a job with benefits comparable to those provided by the one he lost. 

The loss of the job came as a major blow.

“When I lost that, I lost everything, and there was nothing I could do to get it back,” Carpenter said. “So that kind of condemned me to having to keep working.” Soon after, he cobbled together seasonal jobs, which lacked benefits. Eventually, he was able to qualify for Medicaid.

Through Social Security, Carpenter earns a little more than half of the $2,823 a month he would need to retire, according to the index used by Gatta and Horning. Over half of his $1,524 in earnings goes towards rent for his subsidized apartment in Montpelier, Vermont. That’s why he works four days a week, and never plans on stopping. 

“I feel about two ways. Number one is, I’m amazed that I’m still alive to be this active,” he said. “And I’m also frustrated that I have to keep doing it.”

During his 56 years in the workforce, Carpenter has painted and weatherized houses, run ski lifts, waited tables and logged. Now, keeping up the winter-summer work cycle in Vermont is a matter of maintaining his strength and stamina. He exercises to stay in shape and to avoid, or at least delay, becoming physically unable to work anymore — his biggest worry.

“You just wonder,” he said, “how long you’re going to last.”

Lili Euzet is a writer with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. She reported this article through a grant from The SCAN Foundation.

Copyright Capital & Main 2025