Wall Street wants baby boomers to work longer. But no one wants to hire them.

America is facing a big problem: Baby boomers are getting older. In the coming years, the retirement age population will reach its highest ever figure, leading to dwindling social security funds, swamping of nursing homes and labor shortages in its wake.

Larry Fink, the 71-year-old CEO of asset management giant BlackRock, proposed a two-part solution to looming pension crisis in his March annual letter to shareholders. To avoid economic catastrophe, he argued, people should save more and work longer. “What if government and the private sector treated over-60s as late-career workers with a lot to offer rather than people who should retire?” Fink wrote. The current Social Security retirement age is 67, but most Americans leave the workforce earlier than that. If more people continued working into their 60s and 70s, the looming crisis would ease.

In some ways, Fink’s solution seems interesting, even sensible: Many able-bodied and energetic septuagenarians are happy to keep their jobs and contribute to the economy, so why not encourage more people to do the same?

The problem is that his plan neglects a few key realities. On the one hand, many older people cannot work because of a disability or because they have to care for another disabled person. The second is that those who are willing and able to work are often unwanted. Despite a legal ban discrimination against people aged 40 and over in the workplace, it’s still common.

Instead of allowing Americans to save for retirement and work as long (or as little) as they want, Fink sets up a catch-22 situation: the economy needs aging Americans to work longer, but many companies simply don’t want to. them.

In Texas, Daniel Ross has been busy. As a founding partner of Ross Scalise Employment Lawyers, an Austin firm that represents people with lived experience age discrimination, this is not necessarily a good thing. Over the past five years, he said he’s noticed an increase in age discrimination cases, particularly those alleging wrongful termination. “Here in Austin, we have a lot of jobs and tech companies,” he said. “They want to look younger.”

In 2023, a Society for Human Resources Management investigation found that 30% of workers felt discriminated against because of their age at some point in their career.

“This is absolutely not good at a time when we still have many more jobs to fill and people trained to fill them,” Emily Dickens, SHRM government affairs manager, said of the results of the investigation.

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According to the United States Chamber of Commerce, there are 8.5 million jobs available in the United States and only 6.5 million unemployed people looking for work. THE shortages cover several sectorswith health, hospitality and business services…