Labor & Employment Law

Raising Retirement Age Is Deal Breaker and Back Breaker

By Mike Hall

It?s a sure bet that none of the members of the federal budget deficit commission has spent his or her career lifting, carrying, digging or otherwise doing hard physical work for a paycheck.

Because if they had, it?s another sure bet they wouldn?t even be considering raising the Social Security retirement age, as committee co-chair Alan Simpson and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) support. In an eye-opening piece in The New York Times, John Leland profiles 58-year-old Jack Hartley who works at a Cooper Tire plant in Findlay, Ohio. Here?s his typical workday.

A 12-hour shift assembling tires: pulling piles of rubber and lining over a drum, cutting the material with a hot knife, lifting the half-finished tire, which weighs 10 to 20 pounds, and throwing it onto a rack.

Mr. Hartley performs these steps nearly 30 times an hour, or 300 times in a shift. ?The pain started about the time I was 50? he said. ?Dessert with lunch is ibuprofen. Your knees start going bad, your lower back, your elbows, your shoulders.?

Imagine doing that until you?re 70 years old as Boehner suggests? Hartley is not alone Leland points out.

A new analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) found that one in three workers over age 58 does a physically demanding job like Mr. Hartley?s?including hammering nails, bending under sinks, lifting baggage?that can be radically different at age 69 than at age 62. Still others work under difficult conditions, like exposure to heat or cold, exposure to contaminants or weather, cramped workplaces or standing for long stretches.

In all, the researchers found that 45 percent of older workers, or 8.5 million, held such difficult jobs. For janitors, nurses? aides, plumbers, cashiers, waiters, cooks, carpenters, maintenance workers and others, raising the retirement age may mean squeezing more out of a declining body.

Click here to read the entire story and here for the CEPR study.

Meanwhile, House Democrats, led by Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), are circulating a ?Dear Colleague? letter urging members to add their signatures to a letter to President Obama opposing any cuts to Social Security benefits,

including raising the retirement age?.We also oppose any effort to privatize Social Security, in whole or in part…. If any of the Commission’s recommendations cut or diminish Social Security in any way, we will stand firmly against them.

Click here for the full letter courtesy of Talking Points Memo.

Last week at Huffington Post, R.J. Eskow wrote that behind the deficit commission?s closed doors is a deal to pit middle-class seniors against the elderly poor,

forcing them to compete for a stripped-down pool of dollars. The end result would be the one that many Commission members have pursued for years: to cut the most stable and successful program in the Federal government’s history.

He also asks a question many of us have had since the commission began its top-secret meetings.

Remind me again: Why are such critical issues being debated in secret, only to be presented to Congress for ratification after the November elections?

Click here for his full column.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on September 14, 2010 (boomark / email).