News & Issues

Joan L. Cannon writes: There are sadly too few who have had a chance to go where the trout are and spend the hours it takes to succeed in landing one, and then having the special pleasure of releasing it. The essentials of enjoyment for every sense are fortunately still available to almost anybody whose hands are at one end of a bamboo rod with a light reel that suspends the gossamer weight of a lure at the other.

Executive Summary

Unemployment has attracted much attention, but there has been less consideration of how older workers have fared. In past recessions unemployment has remained relatively low for older workers, whose seniority often protected them during rounds of layoffs. However, age might not protect older workers as well as it once did, because workplaces are now less regularized and labor unions are less powerful. And the 2008 stock market collapse, which wiped out trillions of dollars of retirement savings, appears to have raised fears about the affordability of retirement and discouraged many older workers from leaving the workforce.

This report describes how older workers fared in 2009. It focuses on age differences in unemployment rates (the share of the workforce that is out of work and looking for employment), labor force participation rates (the share of the population that is employed or unemployed), employment rates (the share of the population that is employed), the duration of unemployment spells, and earnings. Analyses compare 2009 outcomes with those in 2007, when unemployment fell to its lowest level after the 2001 recession. Data come from the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of about 50,000 households that serves as the basis for the federal government's official unemployment statistics.

Unemployment rates for older workers soared in 2009, although they were even higher for younger workers. Older unemployed workers were more likely than their younger counterparts to be out of work for many months.

• On average, 1.5 million workers age 55 to 64 and 421,000 workers age 65 and older were unemployed each month in 2009, more than double the number in 2007.
• The unemployment rate reached all-time highs (since records began in 1948) for older men and women. The 2009 unemployment rate was 7.2 percent for men age 55 to 64 and 6.7 percent for men age 65 and older. For women, the 2009 unemployment rate was 6.0 percent at age 55 to 64 and 6.1 percent at age 65 and older.
• Unemployment rates were much higher at younger ages in 2009. The unemployment rate at age 35 to 44 was 7.9 percent, for example, exceeding the rate at age 55 to 61 by 18 percent and the rate at age 70 to 74 by 30 percent.
• Unemployment in 2009 was more common for men than women of all ages — including older adults — because the recession hit male-dominated industries like construction and manufacturing particularly hard. In 2009, 14.3 percent of construction workers age 55 and older and 10.9 percent of older manufacturing workers were unemployed, well above the overall 2009 unemployment rate of 6.5 percent for adults age 55 and older.
• Construction, manufacturing, trade, and professional and business services accounted for nearly two-thirds of unemployed men age 55 and older in 2009. About two-thirds of unemployed women age 55 and older in 2009 came from trade, professional and business services, health care, manufacturing, and education.
• As in past years, 2009 unemployment rates were much higher among older African Americans, Hispanics, and workers with limited education than other older workers. Among men age 55 to 64, for example, about 11 percent of Hispanic workers and 10 percent of African American workers were unemployed, compared with 6 percent of non- Hispanic white workers. About 10 percent of female workers age 55 to 64 without high school diplomas were unemployed in 2009, compared with about 5 percent of their counterparts with college degrees.
• Older unemployed workers spent more time out of work in 2009 than their younger counterparts. More than two-fifths of out-of-work men age 62 to 69 in 2009 were unemployed for more than six months, compared with just less than one-third of out-of-work men age 35 to 44. In December 2009, nearly half of unemployed men age 55 to 61 were out of work for more than six months.

Other 2009 developments were more positive for older workers. The share of adults employed fell at age 25 to 54 but not at age 62 and older. Also, earnings for full-time workers age 65 and older grew rapidly between 2007 and 2009.

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—The White House Project: Film and TV

• In film, women constitute 16 percent of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers; this represents a slight decrease in their representation in these positions in the last decade.
• Among situation comedies, dramas and reality shows in the 2008-09 prime-time television season, women made up one-quarter of all creators, directors, executive producers and producers.
• Women don’t do much better on screen: across 400 top-grossing G, PG, PG-13 and R rated films released between 1990 and 2006, only 27 percent of over 15,000 speaking characters were female. African American women constitute only 7 percent of characters featured in dramas and situation comedies, Latinas constitute two percent, and Asian women account for less than two percent.
• Women own less than 6 percent of the full-power television stations in the US

Posted at the White House Project site is a New York Times op-ed by By Kim Elsesser, a research scholar at the Center for Study of Women at the University of California, Los Angeles:

"Many hours into the 82nd Academy Awards ceremony this Sunday, the Oscar for best actor will go to Morgan Freeman, Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Colin Firth or Jeremy Renner. Suppose, however, that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented separate honors for best white actor and best non-white actor, and that Mr. Freeman was prohibited from competing against the likes of Mr. Clooney and Mr. Bridges. Surely, the academy would be derided as intolerant and out of touch; public outcry would swiftly ensure that Oscar nominations never again fell along racial lines."

"Why, then, is it considered acceptable to segregate nominations by sex, offering different Oscars for best actor and best actress?"

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The following is edited from Johanna Grossman's two parts at FindLaw's Writ (see below). Ms. Grossman is a professor and the John DeWitt Gregory Research Scholar at Hofstra Law School.

"Larry and Joy Farr were married for thirty years — the first time around. Then, in 2007, three years after getting a divorce, they remarried. But this time, their marriage only lasted three years, at which point he filed for divorce and she cross-filed for an annulment — a declaration that their second marriage was invalid from the get-go."

"According to Joy, she only agreed to remarry Larry based on his representation that he had a terminal illness; she didn't want him to die alone. But he survived, and she cried foul. The second marriage, she alleged, had been based on fraud — a false representation that he would soon be dead."

"Is this type of misrepresentation, if proven, grounds for annulment? A Colorado appellate court said yes, in Farr v. Farr. In the first part of this two-part series, I will discuss the traditional doctrine of annulments based on fraud and the ways in which courts kept a tight leash on such claims. In Part Two, I will discuss the shift towards a more lenient definition of fraud that is exemplified by the ruling in Farr, an opinion I will analyze in detail."

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Annulments Based on Fraud: The Traditional Approach

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