Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (20 page)

Steve has three heroes beyond his family members—the prophet Isaiah, Pope John XXIII, and Leonard Fein. Fein, a former professor at Brandeis University, is the founder of Mazon (“sustenance”)—A Jewish Response to Hunger. He started Mazon in 1985 to help Jews share a portion of the cost of significant “life-cycle events” such as weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other celebrations, with organizations working to reduce world hunger. Mazon fulfills the commandment in Isaiah 58:10: “If you offer compassion to the hungry and relieve the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness and your night will become like the noonday.” In addition to supporting Mazon, Steve serves on the advisory boards of the Women’s Lunch Place and of Cambridge College. (A lot of other philanthropic work had to be put on hold when he became state treasurer, as Steve cannot do fundraising.) He sums up his sociopolitical philosophy with watchwords derived from his grandfather Maxwell’s family, career, service-to-community mantra. “It is not what we earn that’s important but what we
do
to create a just and humane society.”

The next profile describes a man who also works in state government, Jack Buckley. Jack is the deputy director of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. At MassWildlife he oversees administrative functions, the land acquisition program, fisheries management, and the endangered species program. Now sixty-four, he is one of the highly experienced “old-timers” on staff who know how to function effectively within the bureaucracy. He enjoys his job, especially preservation of open space; but he does not plan to work forever—he would like to have the time to pursue his many strong interests outside of work.

Profile: Jack Buckley

Jack Buckley is the deputy director of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, an agency of the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game, within the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. MassWildlife manages more than one hundred Wildlife Management Areas and thirteen wildlife sanctuaries with responsibility for more than 195,000 acres of lands and waters.

Now at the peak of his career, some forty-three years ago Jack discovered a program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst that combined a second bachelor’s degree with a master’s degree in Fisheries Biology. (He already had a bachelor’s degree in history.) He focused his graduate work on shortnose sturgeon. After graduate school he worked at the University of Massachusetts for three years on shortnose sturgeon research projects. In 1982 he was hired as fisheries chief for the District of Columbia government, responsible for overseeing the District’s fisheries resources.

For the past twenty-five years he has worked as a senior manager in the Commonwealth’s fisheries and wildlife agency, juggling a variety of responsibilities. First, he oversees administrative functions, such as budgeting, personnel, and issuing regulations and permits for hunting, fishing, trapping, and recreational land use.

Second, he manages the land acquisitions program whose primary goal is protecting biological diversity, what he deems a legacy issue. The state spends 6 to 10 million dollars a year on locating land parcels, negotiating, and purchasing open space. Typically, the state acts in partnership with conservation organizations, such as the Nature Conservancy, the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the Trust for Public Land, Sudbury Valley Trustees, and other nonprofits.

His third area of responsibility is fisheries management. This includes inland streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, and five fish hatcheries containing 2 million rainbow, brown, brook, and tiger trout for stocking various state waters. Also involved is safeguarding the relationship between land and aquatic resources, for example, between a river and its riverbank.

Fourth, he oversees the endangered species program. The state list contains 429 endangered species at present. The division issues regulations for the permitting process (a controversial program because people don’t like the government telling them what they can and cannot do with their land when endangered species are involved).

Jack, now sixty-four, plans to retire in a few years. The long commute into Boston from his home in Hopkinton is wearing on him. He would like to travel more often and for longer periods with his wife, Jeanne Kelley, who happens to be the recently retired director of my local library. One aspect of Jack’s job that he particularly enjoys is the international work associated with the United Nations environmental protection program. “It is interesting, rewarding, and a good change of pace. The program, based in Geneva, moves even more slowly than operations here in the US.” Jack points out that wherever he travels—Thailand, the Middle East—he is always connected to his job via his iPad and iPhone.

“I really like what I do and I enjoy my colleagues. The division is going through a transition. Most of the staff has been with the agency for a very long time, as I have; fifty years on the job is not unusual (even though most state employees have retired at sixty-five and taken their pension). Gradually, we will be replaced by younger scientists, who represent the future.”

Like many older men who have years of work experience, Jack knows what he excels at. One of the highlights of his career is the preservation of open space. “Land protection represents a lasting legacy and is the most significant action we can take to preserve the Commonwealth’s biological diversity,” he explains. Jack functions well within the state government bureaucracy and knows how to get funding for the division’s programs. He thinks he has been effective where he is because he knew how to make good choices. When he works with other agencies, he usually spots what is likely to be productive and avoids what threatens to be a wasted effort. “I have a reputation as a skilled bureaucratic infighter. I tell people what I honestly think because I believe I am being paid for my honesty.”

Jack gets up at 5 a.m. every day to get in a run before leaving for work. He takes concertina lessons and plays the fiddle or practices the concertina for two hours a night and tries to do some reading before bed. One night a week he plays in a session with a pick-up band at a local bar. “They usually play from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., while I’m ready to go home at 10:00 p.m. because I need to get up early to run.”

When I ask Jack what he thinks about older men continuing in the workforce, he replies that it is a personal decision. Some people can’t wait to retire because they dislike their jobs, but that definitely does not apply to him. Much as he has enjoyed his career, he does not plan to work forever because he believes that a job is a
part
of your life, it is not your life. He has many strong interests outside of work that he would like to have more time to pursue. He is reminded of the Tom Wilkinson character in the film
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
, who peremptorily declares, “Today’s the day,” quits the halls of Parliament, and heads off for India. In Jack’s view, “You do the best you can and when you’re done, you’re done.”

Well over three-quarters of the men (78 percent) hold jobs in metropolitan areas. Thirteen percent are working in nonmetropolitan locales and eight percent work in both metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. On the whole, professional work has always been more available in major metropolitan areas, and salaries tend to be higher for urban workers than for workers in nonmetropolitan areas in the same occupation. According to the BLS, approximately 86 percent of US nonfarm wage and salary jobs are located in urban settings. Significantly, compared to nonmetropolitan areas, metropolitan areas have higher employment concentrations in nearly all of the higher-paying occupational groups.
1
For example, as a share of total employment, metropolitan areas have about twice as many legal and business and financial operations jobs, and more than three times as many computer and mathematical science jobs. Metropolitan areas also have higher employment shares of management; architecture and engineering; life, physical, and social science; and arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations. Among the occupations with above-average wages, only education, training, and library occupations have a higher employment share in nonmetropolitan areas than in metropolitan areas. Workers with especially high wages because of their location in metropolitan areas (referred to as a “wage premium”) include: lawyers, financial managers, advertising and promotional managers, economists, art directors, administrative law judges, producers and directors, editors, writers, and authors.
2

Economic status has a close association with residence. Recall that many of the older men I surveyed live in New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and western states. Massachusetts and California residents predominate. The majority of the women I surveyed for
Women Still at Work
live in the New England and mid-Atlantic states, where the highest rates of professional and managerial women and the highest annual earnings for full-time, year-round employed women can be found. Many of the women are doing very well for themselves in financial terms, yet they are not on the whole as prosperous as the men.

The older men I surveyed are more likely than older women to work in the private sector and in a metropolitan area where higher-paying jobs are to be found. Two-thirds of the professional women have jobs in the private sector (compared to 81 percent of the men) and more than two-thirds work in a metropolitan area (compared to 78 percent of the men). Like the men, professional and managerial women also work in a wide variety of career fields, but the greatest number are found in the so-called helping professions whose doors were open to women in the 1960s and 1970s—namely, education, health care, social work, or social services—as well as in business and the arts. Although nowadays women can land good jobs in banking, publishing, medicine, and law, choice jobs in those domains used to go almost exclusively to men. Years ago (and to this day), far more men than women in the United States have pursued lucrative careers in the STEM fields—shorthand for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. These differences suggest that career choice, sector, and location explain at least partially the financial advantage men have over women.

Don McEachern’s doctorate in chemical engineering in 1963 was only the first opportunity to study subjects that would be interesting and useful for a career designing advanced nuclear reactors. At seventy-seven he is manager of Nuclear Fuels at General Atomics in California. The work is obviously challenging; the technology has to be both effective and safe. After nearly five decades in the business, Don still has lots of energy (that was immediately apparent when I met him) and is most content when he has a stimulating project to work on. He relishes opportunities to learn with his colleagues and enjoys teaching younger staff. He has outside interests but none as compelling as his work. He admits to fearing retirement.