For more seniors, golden years are still working years

They are the great-grandparent work force.

In recent years, the number of people 75 and older with jobs has grown. The trend is driven by love of work, the need for something meaningful to do and a Depression-era fear of poverty.

"I love to work," said Lila Adams, 78, at her desk at Bradsher & Bunn Insurance in downtown Raleigh, N.C., where she's an agent. "I love my clients – they're like family to me."

"The 75-years-and-older labor force is expected to grow at a significant annual rate of 6.3 percent, to a total of nearly 2 million in 2016," researcher Mitra Toossi said in a recent report from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Reasons for the boomlet include:

• Better health and longer lives for seniors.

• Higher education levels, a marker of longer careers.

• A move away from traditional pension plans to retirement based on employee contributions.

• Need for health insurance.

• Continuing increases in the Social Security retirement age.

"There's a lot of research that shows people respond to economic incentives," said Robert Clark, a North Carolina State University professor of economics and business management. "The increasing retirement age works just like a reduction in benefits.

"You could also point to some other things about changes in the demands of work," Clark added. "It's not as physical as it used to be. If you were to talk with people making cars in the factories of GM or Ford, those guys want to get out."

"What we hear most is that (older workers) are dependable because they want to be there," said Larry Parker, a spokesman for the Employment Security Commission, which helps older workers find jobs. "If you tell them they have to be there at 8 a.m., they're there at 7:45. Employers appreciate that."

Census numbers show that older workers' participation in the work force – those who either have or are looking for jobs – fell steeply between 1950 and 1985. Then the rate started climbing again.

A variety of factors – some financial, but not all – come into play when people consider whether to keep working, said Victor Marshall, director of the UNC-Chapel Hill Institute on Aging.

"It's no longer acceptable to retire to the front porch. Normatively, culturally, you are supposed to be busy." Marshall said.

Cases of older people who want to work because they're broke are likely to increase; about a quarter of baby boomers have no significant savings, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate.

"Those are very hard to place," said Gene Norton, manager of the Raleigh office of the Employment Security Commission. "The ones who are looking for a job because they are bored, or are looking for something to do, they are fairly easy to place."

For people born in the perilous economy of the Great Depression, a good job represented a step out of poverty. Upward mobility rested on the kind of work ethic that kept Elgie Ivey, 80, at work until after 5 p.m. on New Year's Eve, her last day before retirement from Green & Wooten Insurance.

Ivey is Adams' sister, and the two share a history that contributes to their long careers. The girls' parents died in the late 1930s, leaving the girls, still in grade school, to be raised on love and little else by their older sister.

"I always felt like an underdog," Adams said of those formative years. "We were laughed at and made fun of because we worked in the lunchroom to pay for our lunch."