Historic Shift in America's Labor Force

(CBS)  Gladys Ramos has been a nurse for 45 years - and doesn't plan on stopping anytime soon.

"I'm 64 years old and very proud of it," Ramos told CBS News correspondent Jim Axelrod. "I like to spend, I love shopping, I love to travel."

Like many seniors, Ramos not only works because she wants to. She works because she has to.

"I have a mortgage to pay," she said.

"Four in 10 folks still working in their 60s say they will have to delay their retirement because of the recession," said Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center.

Ramos is also the face of an aging American workforce. According to a new report, during the next decade 93 percent of the growth in the U.S. labor force will be made up of people 55 and older.

Read the full report here.

At the same time people 24 and under are choosing school instead of work. Fifty-seven percent of them are now in the workforce; it was 66 percent just nine years ago.

"Younger adults are having a hard time finding a job. So they say to themselves they can't find work anyway. Might as well stay in school. It's a good investment in my future," Taylor said.

The other big change is how the workforce breaks down by gender. The fact that 47 percent of American workers are now female is a huge jump from 28 percent six decades ago. For the first time ever, women workers may soon outnumber men.

"I think it's wonderful we're going to be 50 percent of the workforce," Ramos said.

Not so fast. With construction and manufacturing jobs vanishing and health care and teaching fields expanding, there's no predicting which will be the majority gender.

"As male-dominated sectors contract, it is conceivable that men will change their patterns of employment, you know," Taylor said. "They'll look to become more employed in rising sectors that heretofore have been predominantly women."

Meaning Gladys Ramos may soon have some company.

[curiously1]

Didn't we see this coming? We did, we sure saw it when jobs started being outsourced. And what did we do about it? NOTHING. Not a damn thing. We kept electing the same kind of politicians and we let them go unchecked. We were happy we had MTV and cable and we drank away in night-clubs ignoring the obvious signs.
I had a neighbor living off of $56000/year with two kids. His mortgage was around $2000/month and he had a leased SUV and a leased boat. Just don't ask me how he made it. Or better yet, don't ask me what happened to him !

[rhs648]

ibsteve2u - It is not a question of whether a private company could do better. It is a question of government ineptitude and mismanagement of taxpayer money. Our government knowingly spent money collected from social security year after year. There have been numerous warnings for over thirty years about social security running out of money yet the problem was never fixed properly. The government answer has been to defer retirement ages and raise the amount of money we pay in each year. This could have been avoided if the government stopped spending social security money on other things. If businesses did this, they and their executives would be prosecuted. That is the difference.

[ibsteve2u]

Our government has the same problem that our corporations have: Both systems promote those who care the least about their fellow human beings.

You have to be a cold-blooded S.O.B. to advance to the top in America these days; leadership is dead, and manipulation, deceit, and bloodthirstiness is what gets you the brass ring.

Most importantly of all, you have to have a insufficient heart to even notice those you trample in your climb to the top...

lolll...such is who we entrust with the future of our children and this world.

[rhs648]

correction

There seems to be a lot of confusion about who pays for social security. My father, who died in 2000, paid the maximum into social security every year since its inception. He retired at age 67 and collected social security for 17 years. He paid in far more than he received. There is not enough in social security because government used the social security funds year after year to pay for other things. The government knew it could spend social security funds for fifty or sixty years before there would be a problem. Now there is a problem. If government had not raided the social security funds year after year, there would be plenty of money to cover present and future generations. This is an example of government mismanagement. This was not caused by old people. Now lets give the government our health care to manage.

[ibsteve2u]

And if a private company ran Social Security, it would be better?

lollll...ayup. Like AIG?

lolllll...

[rhs648]

There seems to be a lot of confusion about who pays for social security. My father, who died in 2000, paid the maximum into social security every year since its inception. He retired at age 67 and collected social security for 17 years. He paid in far more than he received. There is not enough in social security because government used the social security funds year after year to pay for other things. The government knew it could spend social security funds for fifty or sixty years without before there would be a problem. Now there is a problem. If government had not raided the social security funds year after year, there would be plenty of money to cover present and future generations. This is an example of government mismanagement. This was not caused by old people. Now lets give the government our health care to manage.

[doctorj2012]

I was 24 a few years ago and I went straight from undergrad to the workforce upon graduating college. Parents told me grad school just wasn't in the financial cards, and I'm not going to put myself through working 50 hours a week AND trying to go to grad school. So I got an entry level job, but I worry about my future, because in a few years all those kids who are in grad school right now are going to get out, and they will immediately be in a higher class than me, and their earning potential will quickly overshadow the meager financial progress I have made with my entry-level job. It seems my parents' decision to put their retirement ahead of my education has relegated me to a middle-class existence that will be very hard to climb out of. I don't fit in with this national trend of staying in school until age 30, and that makes me worry about my future. I honestly wish I had the option of continuing my education, as I think that would be a better investment of the best years of my life than working for peanuts. Our higher education system in America is classist to the point of almost being feudalist. The kids with better financial backing from their parents do better and go farther. So yeah, I guess if boomers don't care about the individual fates of their children, they should retire and forget about all that fancy-schmancy new-fangled edumacation for their kids. Hey, its not like your children's future is going to effect you at all: you'll be dead, right?

[pollroller1]

Don't worry too much about it. I only went to the 9th grade. I quit school and started working. I worked very hard and started a small business. I'm now retired and my kids and grandkids are now running our small family business. If a dumb a** like me can make it, anyone can. Good luck and Don't give up. And remember, nothing beats hard work. to get ahead.

[doctorj2012]

Its not so much about "making it" or "doing well" to me, its more about doing something meaningful with my life and being the best person I can be. I really feel as though I am quite capable of doing more than just menial office work. I am basically yet another American moving at half speed, simply because no one has entrusted me with enough responsibility to show what I can really do.

I also feel as though I need more education, and there aren't enough opportunities for working class people like me who want to do more for society but simply lack the funding for higher education. The kind of career I want would be in scientific research, which is a field that requires a lot of education, but you end up making pretty low pay and live off grants mostly. And I'm not about to go 5 or 6 figures into debt just so I can get what basically amounts to job training so I can be a more productive member of society.

If society doesn't want to throw me a bone, then why should I even bother? I'll just stagnate in the middle class existence I've been marginalized into and watch the world end on TV, knowing I probably could have done something to prevent it, had someone merely given me the most basic of resources to work with.

Its also a serious thorn in my side to watch these yuppie larva kids in grad school go on to way better lifestyles and jobs than me simply because their parents were willing to do so much for them. It makes me wonder, does the upper class really have more merit than I do, or did they simply just get better breaks in life?

[dragon8me]

Capitolism creates a greed driven society. Unfetered capitolism is what brought America down. As they say "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer". And the banking families who own the Federal Reserve Bank and the central banks of Europe control the world and it's governments and hand pick who the leaders are. The politicians don't listen to us unles we're on the edge of revolt, and even then they brand you a terrorist and send in the troops. Only a social revolution can end the insanity. A step in the right direction would to abandon the 2 parties that got us into this mess and get some real diversity.

[skeezix06]

Reasons why women outnumber men in the workforce...

1. Women outnumber men in the general population.
2. Unlike when I was a child when a family could survive well on the income of a single paycheck, today's family has to have two incomes in order to survive with the minimum. That is a clear indication of how badly our spending power has deteriorated in my lifetime.
3. An over supply of women means the man can dump the older woman and find a younger, less wrinkled replacement if he's inclined to do so (and most of them are) at which point the woman has a choice to find a job or die.

[michaelrsi]

I want to watch the evening CBS news. If I want to read I have 1400 to choose from. I hate reading on the ******* computer. I used to watch the CBS evening news but I'm sick and tired of trying to figure out what I have to do to get video. Last I knew I had to use segments that could take all night to watch. Just unsubscribe me. I don't want to see another email from CBS and the idiots who designed this piece of ship web site. Michael R. Shearer

[dragon8me]

Speaking of watching. Where I live I used to get 1 station although it was sometimes fuzzy, since digital, I get nothing, I have the conferter box. The signal dosn't travel as far. Oh, they say they boosted the power and I should be able to get it where I live but it's like 90 miles to the nearest station. Seems to me they could use a little of that stimulas money to put up a few repeters in rural areas, you would think the stations would want to to reach a larger audience. No, they want you to pay for satalite, which is the only alternative. The way I see it, theres nothing worth watching to pay for it. I would rather buy DVD's than pay for garbage.

[charlie7566]

"You didn't.. *sob sob*.. You didn't load de forklift right.. Ya don't love me."