How Old is Too Old to Work?

Last month, the Michigan legislature repealed a law demanding mandatory retirement of university professors at age 70, ending yet one more dispute about when people are too old to do their jobs.

Still, fights linger.

The Supreme Court this spring heard arguments on whether Missouri state court judges should be forced to retire at 70. Airline pilots continue to battle a Federal Aviation Administration regulation that requires them to step aside at 60. But perhaps the most hotly contested mandatory retirement wars rage on college campuses.

Since 1987, federal law has prohibited mandatory retirement, but universities, judges and some public-safety jobs are exempt, at least until 1994. These few exemptions have come under increasing attack because there’s no solid scientific evidence to support them.

Instead, research shows that although some people’s mental or physical capacities decline by age 70, it is impossible to say all workers that age are unable to do their jobs. And, critics of mandatory retirement laws say, individual testing can and should be used to determine whether such capacities are impaired.

Thus, holding everyone 70 and older to a mandatory retirement law is unfair, claims Kathy Gardner, a congressional assistant who worked on the landmark 1980 bill that abolished mandatory retirement for federal employees and raised the age to 70 for others.

“Age is simply not a good measure of ability,” she says.

The federal government has tended to agree. The 1980 law was followed in 1987 by a law that eliminated mandatory retirement in most workplace sectors. But some exemptions were allowed, including professions that involve public safety--pilots, police and firefighters. For reasons that are less clear, judges and university professors were also exempted.

A government study will determine the merits of these exemptions. For example, if studies do not justify mandatory retirement at 70 for professors, that exemption will expire Dec. 31, 1993.

Many other mandatory retirement laws are expected to fall, too. After 1980, Gardner says, the myth that people 70 and older would take over and bog down the work force was destroyed.

“Using the federal law as a model, we were able to show that many of the arguments raised didn’t hold up. The work force wasn’t littered with doddering, senile elderly,” she says.

In fact, the 1980s saw the rise of several elder statesmen: former President Ronald Reagan, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and several Supreme Court Justices, four of whom are 70 or older.

Nor did those workers who wanted to stay on past 70 take jobs from younger workers--another myth that kept mandatory retirement laws popular, Gardner says.

Gary Burtless, a senior economist at the Brookings Institute in Washington, says only a small number of people--about 5%--want to work past mandatory retirement age: “Mandatory retirement is not an issue that grabs the bulk of the U.S. work force. More than half of all people collecting Social Security begin to collect before age 62.”

But workers still bound by such laws continue to point to the lack of scientific evidence that mental and physical skills generally deteriorate at age 60 or 70.

Officials of the American Assn. of Retired Persons say many studies show that neither mental nor physical skills invariably decline at a particular age.

One oft-cited 21-year study in Seattle showed no decline in average intelligence until at least 80. Another study by the National Institute of Health revealed that, in the absence of disease, most people can function with high levels of energy and ability into their 70s and 80s.

According to Dr. Thomas Juster, a University of Michigan researcher who is beginning one of the largest, longest studies on retirement, the types of cognitive or intellectual lapses that could interfere with one’s job performance usually do not emerge until very old age.

“But at the age where you’re talking about mandatory retirement, (these declines) are rare,” he says.

Two types of intelligence are subject to measurement, says Laurie Tubbs of the AARP’s worker equity department. One is called fluid intelligence: memorized, instruction-based learning of facts and figures.

“Those tests of fluid intelligence do show a gradual decline beginning in middle age,” she says. “But some of this is attributed to adults being out of practice at taking these kinds of tests.”

The other form is called crystallized intelligence.

“That involves your experience in solving problems. That tends not to show a decline,” she says.

Physical tests, however, are more likely to show declining abilities as people age into their 60s and 70s, experts says.

“You do see more of a decline in physical abilities,” Tubbs says. “But there is a lot of individual variation.”

What disheartens many gerontologists is that while improvements in exercise habits, diet and advances in medical care have led to longer life expectancy for Americans, it is not necessarily true that these added years will be healthy ones.

Medical advances have made it less likely that people in their 50s and 60s will die from major diseases--stroke, heart disease and cancer. But many adults in their 60s and older suffer from a host of non-fatal, debilitating, age-related diseases, says S. Jay Olshansky, a scientist with the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

These diseases, which may interfere with job performance, include diabetes, arthritis, hypertension, osteoporosis and vision or hearing loss.

“We’re barely making any (medical) progress in preventing these non-fatal, age-dependent diseases,” he says.

Still, Olshansky and others argue, it is impossible to say that by age “X,” one will suffer from a certain disorder.

“The whole issue of age-of-onset of these disorders is not an easy one to get a hold of,” he says. “In a sense, middle-aged people already have onset of many of these diseases (even though they might not yet have symptom). The question is, when does it get bad enough to affect what we do at work?”

Many experts argue that the only fair way to determine whether one is qualified to continue working is through performance tests.

“AARP’s position is that you can test these people easily enough rather than use an arbitrary age criteria,” Tubbs says.

For example, she says, “most states have an evaluation system for their judges. There are all kinds of ways to evaluate a person. So if those systems are in place, why do you need mandatory retirement?”

Testing also is suggested as a compromise in the dispute between the FAA and airline pilots, says Dr. Frank Williams, director of the National Institute on Aging.

“We have good ways to determine competence without using age as a criteria,” he says.

With airline pilots, simple cardiovascular stress tests can determine, with a high degree of probability, who is likely to suffer a heart attack in the near future. In addition, pilots’ cognitive skills can be tested in cockpit simulators and during in-flight observation.

“These types of tests can be done to give a lot of confidence about people being in safe hands,” Williams says. “There is a lot of background for this type of testing.”

Some critics of mandatory retirement suggest that the real issue isn’t even whether workers are still capable or how to test them. They claim that mandatory retirement laws have long been used as a tool to dump an employee for reasons other than competence. Some reasons include employers’ unwillingness to continue high salaries, personality clashes or, in the case of tenured professors, the lack of teaching and research demands placed upon them.

The laws abolishing mandatory retirement, says the Brookings Institute’s Burtless, “eliminate from the employers’ bag of tricks the ability to painlessly separate themselves from their employees.”