Impact of Technological Change on Middle-Aged and Older Workers: Parallels Drawn from a Structural Perspective

Abstract

In the last three decades labor force participation rates for middle-aged and older workers have shown a consistent linear decline. While it is true that female employment patterns have remained fairly stable, even rising somewhat among those women over the age of forty-five who are active in the labor market, male participation has not kept pace. To explain what has been happening to older workers, labor economists, sociologists, and social scientists of all stripes must focus not only on life cycle factors or human capital variables characteristic of individuals, but on structural determinants of employment conditions as well. To adequately understand the broad ranging changes which spell displacement and dislocation for many workers, it is essential that a sociology of labor markets examine business cycles, product market characteristics, firm or sectoral placement and so on. Permeating each of these should be a concern with the differential impact of innovations in technology, automation and modes of production in general. According to the Commissioner of Labor Statistics for the New York federal region, there is already sufficient evidence accumulating to suggest technological displacement is being disproportionately settled on workers, especially males, over the age of forty-five (Ehrenhalt, 1983).