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ruth bader ginsburg
How to Know When to Retire, If You Can Even Afford It
From the highest offices in politics to the smallest janitorial offices, older Americans are delaying retirement for a host of reasons from pride to financial precarity to a fear of being left behind.
Sep 11, 2024
The Washington Post headline reads: “A big problem for young workers: 70- and 80-year-olds who won’t retire.” For the first time in history, reports Aden Barton, five generations are competing in the same workforce. His article laments a “demographic traffic jam” at the apexes of various employment pyramids, making it ever harder for young people “to launch their careers and get promoted” in their chosen professions. In fact, actual professors (full-time and tenure-track ones, presumably, rather than part-timers like me) are Exhibit A in his analysis. “In academia, for instance,” as he puts it, “young professionals now spend years in fellowships and postdoctoral programs waiting for professor jobs to open.”
I’ve written before about how this works in the academic world, describing college and graduate school education as a classic pyramid scheme. Those who got in early got the big payoff—job security, a book-lined office, summers off, and a “sabbatical” every seven years (a concept rooted in the Jewish understanding of the sabbath as a holy time of rest). Those who came late to the party, however, have ended up in seemingly endless post-doctoral programs, if they’re lucky, and if not, as members of the part-time teaching corps.
Too Broke to Retire
For the most part, I’m sympathetic to Barton’s argument. There are too many people who are old and in the way at the top of various professional institutions—including our government (where an 81-year-old, under immense pressure, just reluctantly decided not to try for a second term as president, while a 77-year-old is still stubbornly running for that same office). But I think Barton misses an important point when he claims that “older workers are postponing retirement… because they simply don’t want to quit.” That may be true for high earners in white-collar jobs, but many other people continue working because they simply can’t afford to stop. Research described in Forbes magazine a few years ago showed that more than one-fifth of workers over age 55 were then among the working poor. The figure rose to 26% for women of that age, and 30% for women 65 and older. In other words, if you’re still working in your old age, the older you are, the more likely it is that you’re poor.
Older workers also tend to be over-represented in certain low-paying employment arenas like housecleaning and home and personal healthcare. As Teresa Ghilarducci reported in that Forbes article:
Nearly one-third of home health and personal care workers are 55 or older. Another large category of workers employing a disproportionate share of older workers is maids and housekeeping cleaners, 29% of whom are 55 or older and 54% of whom are working poor. And older workers make up 34% of another hard job: janitorial services, about half of whom are working poor. (For a benchmark, 23% of all workers are 55 and up.)
We used to worry about “children having children.” Maybe now we should be more concerned about old people taking care of old people.
Why are so many older workers struggling with poverty? It doesn’t take a doctorate in sociology to figure this one out. People who can afford to retire have that option for a couple of reasons. Either they’ve worked in high-salary, non-physical jobs that come with benefits like 401(k) accounts and gold-plated health insurance. Or they’ve been lucky enough to be represented by unions that fight for their members’ retirement benefits.
However, according to the Pension Rights Center, a nonprofit organization working to expand financial security for retirees, just under half of those working in the private (non-governmental) sector have no employment-based retirement plan at all. They have only Social Security to depend on, which provides the average retiree with a measly $17,634 per year, or not much more than you’d earn working full-time at the current federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Worse yet, if you’ve worked at such low-paying jobs your entire life, you face multiple obstacles to a comfortable old age: pay too meager to allow you to save for retirement; lower Social Security benefits, because they’re based on your lifetime earnings; and, most likely, a body battered by decades of hard work.
Many millions of Americans in such situations work well past the retirement age, not because they “simply don’t want to quit,” but because they just can’t afford to do so.
On the Road Again
It’s autumn in an even-numbered year, which means I’m once again in Reno, Nevada, working on an electoral campaign, alongside canvassers from UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union. This is my fourth stint in Washoe County, this time as the training coordinator for folks from Seed the Vote, the volunteer wing of this year’s political campaign. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in 2022, UNITE-HERE and Seed the Vote saved the Senate for the Democrats, reelecting Catherine Cortez Masto by fewer than 8,000 votes—all of them here in Washoe County.
This is a presidential year, so we’re door-knocking for Vice President Kamala Harris, along with Jacky Rosen, who’s running for reelection to Nevada’s other Senate seat.
Government, especially at the federal level, is clearly an arena where (to invert the pyramid metaphor) too many old people are clogging up the bottom of the funnel.
When I agreed to return to Reno, it was with a heavy heart. In my household, we’d taken to calling the effort to reelect Joe Biden “the death march.” The prospect of a contest between two elderly white men, the oldest ever to run for president, both of whom would be well over 80 by the time they finished a four-year term, was deeply depressing. While defeating Donald Trump was—and remains—an existential fight, a Biden-Trump contest was going to be hard for me to face.
Despite his age, Joe Biden has been an effective president in the domestic arena. (His refusal to take any meaningful action to restrain the Israeli military in Gaza is another story.) He made good use of Democratic strength in Congress to pass important legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act. That kitchen-sink law achieved many things, including potentially reducing this country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies (while putting a $2,000 annual cap on Medicare recipients’ outlays for drugs), and lowering the price of “Obamacare” premiums for many people.
Still, Biden’s advanced age made him a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad” candidate for president. Admittedly, a win for 59-year-old Kamala Harris in Nevada won’t be a walk in the park, but neither will it be the death march I’d envisioned.
Old and In the Way?
Government, especially at the federal level, is clearly an arena where (to invert the pyramid metaphor) too many old people are clogging up the bottom of the funnel. Some of them, like House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), remain in full possession of their considerable faculties. She’s also had the grace to pass the torch of Democratic leadership in the House to the very able (and much younger) Hakeem Jeffries, representing the 8th district of New York. Others, like former California Senator Dianne Feinstein, held on, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, long after they were gone. Had my own great heroine Ruth Bader Ginsberg had the grace to retire while Barack Obama was still president, we wouldn’t today be living under a Supreme Court with a six-to-three right-wing majority.
What about the situation closer to home? Have I also wedged myself into the bottom of the funnel, preventing the free flow of younger, more vigorous people? Or, to put the question differently, when is it my turn to retire?
I haven’t lived out the past three stints in Reno alone. My partner and I have always done them together, spending several months here working 18 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s what a campaign is, and it takes a lot out of you. I’m now 72 years old, while my partner is five years older. She was prepared to come to Reno again when we thought the contest would be Trump versus Biden. Once we knew that Harris would replace him, however, my partner felt enormous relief. Harris’ chances of beating Trump are—thank God—significantly better than Biden’s were. “I would have done it when it was the death march,” she told me, “but now I can be retired.”
Even when people’s material needs are met, as is the case for the luckiest retirees in this country, they can suffer profound loneliness and an unsettling disconnection from the social structures in which meaningful human activity takes place.
Until Harris stepped up, neither of us could imagine avoiding the battle to keep Trump and his woman-hating, hard-right vice presidential pick out of office. We couldn’t face a Trump victory knowing we’d done nothing to prevent it. But now my 77-year-old partner feels differently. She’s at peace with retirement in a way that, I must admit, I still find hard to imagine for myself.
I haven’t taught a college class since the spring semester of 2021. For the last few years, I’ve been telling people, “I’m sort of retired.” The truth is that while you’re part of the vast army of contingent, part-time faculty who teach the majority of college courses, it’s hard to know when you’re retired. There’s no retirement party and no “emerita” status for part-timers. Your name simply disappears from the year’s teaching roster, while your employment status remains in a strange kind of limbo.
Admittedly, I’ve already passed a few landmarks on the road to retirement. At 65, I went on Medicare (thank you, LBJ!), though I held out until I reached 70 before maximizing my Social Security benefits. But I find it very hard to admit to anyone (even possibly myself) that I’m actually retired, at least when it comes to working for pay.
For almost two decades I could explain who I am this way: “I teach ethics at the University of San Francisco.” But now I have to tell people, “I’m not teaching anymore,” before rushing to add, “but I’m still working with my union.” And it’s true. I’m part of a “kitchen cabinet” that offers advice to the younger people leading my part-time faculty union. I also serve on our contract negotiations team and have a small gig with my statewide union, the California Federation of Teachers. But this year I chose not to run for the policy board (our local’s decision-making body), because I think those positions should go to people who are still actually teaching.
Those small pieces of work are almost enough to banish the shame I’d feel acknowledging that I’m already in some sense retired. I suspect my aversion to admitting that I don’t work for pay anymore has two sources: a family that prized professional work as a key to life satisfaction and—despite my well-developed critique of capitalism—a continuing infection with the productivity virus: the belief that a person’s value can only be measured in hours of “productive” labor.
Under capitalism, a person who has no work—compensated or otherwise—can easily end up marginalized and excluded from meaningful participation in society. The political philosopher Iris Marion Young considered marginalization one of the most ominous forms of oppression in a liberal society. “Marginals,” she wrote, “are people the system of labor cannot or will not use,” a dangerous condition under which a “whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination.”
Even when people’s material needs are met, as is the case for the luckiest retirees in this country, they can suffer profound loneliness and an unsettling disconnection from the social structures in which meaningful human activity takes place. I suspect it’s the fear of this kind of disconnection that keeps me from acknowledging that I might one day actually retire.
Jubilation and Passing the Torch
The other fear that keeps me working with my union, joining political campaigns, and writing articles like this one is the fear of the larger threats we humans face. We live in an age of catastrophes, present or potential. These include the possible annihilation of democratic systems in this country, the potential annihilation of whole peoples (Palestinians, for example, or Sudanese), or indeed, the annihilation of our species, whether quickly in a nuclear war or more slowly through the agonizing effects of climate change.
But even in such an age, I suspect that it’s time for many of my generation to trust those coming up behind us and pass the torch. They may not be ready, but neither were most of us when someone shoved that cone of flame into our hands.
Still, if I can bring myself to let go and trust those coming after me, then maybe I’ll be ready to embrace the idea behind one of my favorite Spanish words. In that language, you can say, “I’m retired” (“retirada”), and it literally means “pulled back” from life. But in Spanish, I can also joyfully call myself “jubilada,” a usage that (like “sabbatical”) also draws on a practice found in the Hebrew scriptures, the tradition of the jubilee, the sabbath of sabbaths, the time of emancipation of the enslaved, of debt relief, and the return of the land to those who work it.
Maybe it’s time to proudly accept not my retirement, but my future jubilation. But not quite yet. We still have an election to win.
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'Retire, Breyer': Progressive Group Joins Growing Call for SCOTUS Justice to Step Down
"We cannot afford to risk Democrats losing control of the Senate before a Biden nominee can be confirmed," asserted Demand Justice director Brian Fallon.
Apr 09, 2021
A left-leaning advocacy group on Friday joined the growing chorus of calls for U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer to retire so that President Joe Biden can nominate a liberal replacement while Democrats control the Senate.
"We need to start the process of confirming a Black woman justice now. Tell Justice Breyer: Put the country first. Don't risk your legacy to an uncertain political future. Retire now."
--Demand Justice
Demand Justice published a statement Friday urging Breyer "to retire so that President Biden can appoint the first-ever Black woman Supreme Court justice."
The group--founded in 2018 by former Obama administration staffers amid then-President Donald Trump's successful effort to pack federal courts with far-right judges--launched an online petition declaring that "it's time for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to announce his retirement."
The petition states that Breyer "has been a distinguished justice, but now is risking the Senate falling into Republican hands before Democrats can confirm Biden's nominee."
"We have waited long enough for a Black woman Supreme Court justice," the petition asserts. "And with a 50-50 Senate, there is no time to waste. We need to start the process of confirming a Black woman justice now. Tell Justice Breyer: Put the country first. Don't risk your legacy to an uncertain political future. Retire now."
Demand Justice also hired a billboard truck that was spotted circling the Supreme Court with the "Breyer, Retire" message.
\u201cJust had this sent to me: Spotted outside the Supreme Court. \n\nComes after our Playbook team previewed this am how activists are pushing \u201cBreyer, Retire\u201d and that this truck would be out and about. \n\nCc: @rachaelmbade @RyanLizza @tarapalmeri @EugeneDaniels2\u201d— Olivia Beavers (@Olivia Beavers) 1617969394
"We are now firmly in the window when past justices have announced their retirement, so it's officially worrisome that Justice Breyer has not said yet that he will step down," said Demand Justice executive director Brian Fallon. "The only responsible choice for Justice Breyer is to immediately announce his retirement."
"We cannot afford to risk Democrats losing control of the Senate before a Biden nominee can be confirmed," Fallon added. "Justice Breyer is not entitled to the benefit of the doubt at this point. Those worried about the court's future should speak up to ensure he understands the need for him to time his retirement wisely."
While campaigning for president, Biden repeatedly said he would nominate a Black woman to the nation's highest court if he had the opportunity--a step he called "long overdue."
"I'm looking forward to making sure there's a Black woman on the Supreme Court," the former vice president said days before the 2020 South Carolina Democratic presidential primary.
The risk of Democrats losing control over the Senate--which confirms Supreme Court nominees--is not limited to the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections. The Hillnotes that if any member of the Senate Democratic caucus from a state with a GOP governor leaves office for any reason, their replacement would most likely be a Republican.
The Senate is currently evenly split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting a tie-breaking vote in the case deadlock.
\u201c"Justice Stephen Breyer should retire from the Supreme Court: He doesn't believe in court-packing? Or see his conservative colleagues' partisanship? Seriously?"\n\nMy new op-ed for @MSNBCDaily on the future of the Court & the need for Joe Biden to expand it:\nhttps://t.co/jSY9N8gVdD\u201d— Mehdi Hasan (@Mehdi Hasan) 1617892757
According to The Hill:
Ketanji Brown Jackson, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia appointed by former President Obama, is considered a top candidate to make history on the high court. Biden recently nominated her to fill Merrick Garland's open seat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
While Demand Justice is the latest group to urge Breyer's retirement, there have been calls for the 82-year-old to retire since Biden's election. In January, University of California, Berkeley constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky toldThe Washington Post that "stepping down when there is a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate to replace him... is his best way of ensuring that someone with his values and his views takes his place."
In 2014, Chemerinsky published an op-ed urging the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire while Obama was in office. She did not, and since she was still serving on the bench when she died last September, Trump was able to replace her with far-right nominee Amy Coney Barrett--his third successful appointment to the high court.
The Demand Justice campaign launched on the same day that Biden signed an executive order establishing a commission to explore possible Supreme Court reforms--including increasing the number of justices as allowed by the Constitution. Breyer's opposition to "court-packing" has been cited by some of those who are calling on him to retire.
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Biden Creates Commission to Study Supreme Court Expansion, Other Reforms
"To restore our democracy, we must expand the Supreme Court," said Rep. Mondaire Jones.
Apr 09, 2021
President Joe Biden won praise Friday for signing an executive order to create a 36-member commission that will analyze arguments for and against reforming the U.S. Supreme Court.
The White House announced that a "bipartisan group of experts" will spend the next six months considering the "merits and legality" of increasing the number of justices on the high court and imposing term limits, among other possible changes.
"Congress has the power, and the constitutional duty, to set the size of the court, as it has seven times throughout our history."
--Rep. Mondaire Jones
Although the commission "will not make final recommendations for reform," CNN reported, many, including Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), applauded the president's move.
Biden "acknowledged that it is time to reform the Supreme Court, following the example of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant," Jones said Friday in a statement. "The question is no longer if we will reform the Supreme Court, but how we will reform the Supreme Court."
"The answer to that question is clear," Jones continued. "To restore our democracy, we must expand the Supreme Court. Anything less would leave the future of our nation, our planet, and our fundamental civil rights at the whim of a far-right supermajority that is hostile to democracy itself."
As CNN noted, "The long-awaited commission announcement developed from a pledge Biden made as a candidate last October, as liberals were calling for additional seats to be added to America's high court, to try to bring greater balance to a bench dominated 6-3 by conservatives poised to continue its right turn on abortion rights, religious liberty, and voting restrictions."
While right-wing media personalities like Sean Hannity accused Biden--who has said he's "not a fan" of expansion--of flip-flopping on the issue and GOP lawmakers such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asserted that "Democrats want pack the Supreme Court," advocates for reform argue that the high court must be unrigged after Republicans distorted its makeup while benefitting from anti-democratic institutions like the Electoral College and antiquated rules in the U.S. Senate.
\u201c5 of 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by GOP presidents who initially lost popular vote & confirmed by senators representing minority of Americans\n\nThis is why we need to expand/reform the courts\u201d— Ari Berman (@Ari Berman) 1617982415
Former President Donald Trump--who lost the popular vote to 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton by nearly three million ballots--appointed three justices to lifetime positions on the Supreme Court during his one term; that includes far-right Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was nominated following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18 of last year.
Even though then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had refused in 2016 to seat Merrick Garland, former President Barack Obama's pick to replace Justice Antonin Scalia following his passing on February 13 of that year--claiming that doing so would be inappropriate when the president was "on his way out the door"--McConnell rushed through Barrett's confirmation just days before the 2020 election.
Earlier this week, Justice Stephen Breyer--an 82-year-old liberal who is facing calls to retire so that Biden and the Democratic-led Senate can fill his seat with a progressive--warned that "if the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts, and in the rule of law itself, can only diminish, diminishing the court's power, including its power to act as a check on other branches."
Breyer said that reformists should think "long and hard" about their proposals for "structural change or other similar institutional change."
MSNBC opinion columnist Medhi Hasan ridiculed Breyer's remarks, which he called "naive, misguided, and self-serving."
As Hasan wrote:
[W]here on Earth has he been over the past two decades as the Supreme Court delivered one partisan decision after another? Napping? Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, has tallied "80 5-4 partisan decisions by Republican Justices giving victories to big Republican donor interests" in the 15 years since Chief Justice John Roberts was sworn in in 2005. Does Breyer really believe these rulings--in which he dissented!--were all guided by "legal principle, not politics"?
... As for "confidence" in the Supreme Court, how about the fact that a majority of the nine justices were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote? Or that one of those five, Neil Gorsuch, is sitting in a blatantly stolen seat? Or that two of the nine justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct?
... It feels odd for me to have to remind a sitting justice that nowhere in the Constitution does it say there should be nine justices on the court. The court's own website says, "The Constitution places the power to determine the number of Justices in the hands of Congress." In fact, if Biden does eventually yield to pressure from liberal activists and Democratic lawmakers and decides to change the size of the court, backed by a congressional majority, he will be following in the footsteps of five previous presidents.
As APnoted Friday: "The size of the court has been set at nine members since just after the Civil War. Any effort to alter it would be explosive, particularly at a moment when Congress is nearly evenly divided. Changing the number of justices would require congressional approval."
In his statement, Jones noted that "many Americans will rightly be skeptical of a commission composed almost entirely of people protected from the real-life consequences of the Supreme Court's right-wing extremism."
"Nevertheless," he said, "I remain hopeful that the commission will join our rising movement for court expansion."
"In the meantime, Congress has the power, and the constitutional duty, to set the size of the court, as it has seven times throughout our history," Jones added. "My colleagues and I need not wait for the findings of a commission. We know the obvious: we must expand the Supreme Court before it's too late."
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