Rating: 
Summary: Where Have All the Workers Gone?
Review: Workers these days are like snow shovels in a South Carolina blizzard - not enough to go around. Some of the causes are simple statistics: economy up, unemployment down, working-age population falling, employers' demand outstripping supply. But others are cultural. Large corporations, the traditional source of jobs, are often perceived as uncaring engines of depletion, exhaustion, and downsizing. The young are choosing options, from lifestyle to stock, while workplace veterans opt for the dignity of early retirement over the desolation of forced termination. Employers' alternatives are stark: expand their supply, increase their appeal, or prepare for shortfalls and belt-tightening. Recruitment, retention, recession - remorse.Were companies to examine their own assumptions on hiring and firing, they would find a pervasive and self-destructive premise: old is bad. But as Beverly Goldberg argues in _Age Works_, employers - indeed, society as a whole - have built this premise on an ill-considered, ill-defined congeries of prejudices and presuppositions. Believe it or not, Americans age 55 and above take fewer sick days, adapt to new technologies successfully, and are more loyal to their employer than are their colleagues thirty years younger. And perhaps more importantly, they may be the only untapped workforce available. As hidebound organizations throw fortunes at untested youth, others more far-seeing (including Travelers, GTE, and Baxter Health Care) actively recruit, train, and depend upon senior workers. In a shrinking labor market, corporations and their HR departments may find a surprising competitive advantage in coaxing older employees away from the brink of an often sterile and impoverished retirement. Eager to dismiss this challenge to their standard practices, naysayers and doomsayers will demand proof. Fortunately _Age Works_ reads more like a position paper than a business book, and like any good position paper, it's loaded with facts. Age Works is the ideal volume for anyone itching for a statistical analysis of the American workforce 1950-2050, in all its hues and strata. Arguably Goldberg's love of statistics verges on addiction, but in the pharmacy of authorial dependence, statistics are a pretty benign habit. More distracting, although again less than fatal, is the book's policy-wonk style. Goldberg stands foursquare in the school of tell-'em-what-you're-going-to-tell-'em, tell-'em-, tell-'em-what-you-told-'em, and _Age Works_ sometimes reads like an executive summary that cannot bear to end. Nonetheless, _Age Works_ is a cogent, serious, undeniably well-supported piece. Even those who resist the proposed solutions (admittedly the book's weakest section) will find the diagnosis difficult to dispute. Like it or not, America's workforce will continue to grow smaller and grayer over the next twenty years. And by the time the population bounces back, corporations' hiring practices will have appealed to all ages - or to none.
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