You’re Not Old, You’re Perennial

28 Dec You’re Not Old, You’re Perennial

This is my latest article for the Globe and Mail..this time on ‘Perennials’ as older workers are sometimes called. Those over 55 now comprise about 23 per cent of the U.S. workforce and 21 per cent of the Canadian one, which should not surprise anyone. Perennials now have a higher labor force participation rate than they have had in the past (credit more women in the workforce, as well as a lack of pensions, some bad investments, and perhaps some marriages that went south and meant assets needed to be split up). In a macroeconomic sense, this has some interesting implications (yes it does, economics can be interesting ok?) in that the higher labour force participation rate may be keeping interest rates lower than they would have been otherwise, and affecting productivity too. That’s not where the reader comments on the article focussed though: turns out that all generations (boomers, Xers, Millennials) in the workforce had views on how this trend is affecting THEM. Clearly lots more to discuss here.

Portrait of mature store worker