Walter Carpenter walks across the ski resort’s dining room on a knee that needs to be replaced and a hip that’s going bad. Lumbering into the kitchen, he deposits a brown bin of dirty dishes on a counter before heading back out to collect more bowls of half-eaten tomato soup and plates littered with sandwich crusts. “One foot in front of the other,” he jokes to kitchen prep worker Kim Hopper, 72, as they pass each other.
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Carpenter, 69, has worked winters at the Mad River Glen ski area in Waitsfield, Vt., for the past 15 years. Four times a week, he clocks in around noon, and makes $20 per hour carrying dishes up and down the three flights of stairs in the “base box,” as the kitchen and bar area is called, putting plastic food baskets and metal tongs and soup ladles in their rightful place, loading the industrial dishwasher with cups and bowls. He has peripheral neuropathy, which can leave him without feeling in his feet or legs. Some days, his phone tells him, he walks more than five miles during his shifts.
He never thought he’d be on the job at this age, but without much in retirement savings, Carpenter has no plans to stop. “I’m broke and poor and still working at 69,” he says as he once again ascends the carpeted gray stairs with a bin full of dishes, his shoulders slightly stooped, his gray mustache and hair hidden under a baseball cap, a scruffy Einstein with a slight Boston accent. “But at least I’m still here.”
Mad River Glen, where a daily adult lift ticket costs $115, couldn’t run without staffers like Carpenter. If you include part-timers on the ski patrol, the kitchen crew, and the employees at the retail shop, about half its workers are over 65, according to marketing coordinator Ry Young. That’s not entirely surprising in Vermont, where about 26% of residents 65 and older are still working—the highest share in the U.S. The state is at the forefront of a national trend: as birth rates decline and the country ages, older people are staying in the workforce longer. Today, about 19% of people 65 and older in the U.S. are still working, up from 10% four decades ago.
They do it for a variety of reasons. Some, like John Mandeville, 75, the executive director of the Central Vermont Council on Aging, find fulfillment from their jobs and want to keep going until they can’t anymore. Others, like Hopper, the prep cook, have ample retirement savings but still want to be around people, and work part time to stay connected. But about half of workers 65 and older are people like Carpenter, according to Craig Copeland, director of wealth-benefits research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute. For one reason or another—an illness, an investment scam, a lifetime of jobs without a pension or means to save for retirement—they have no choice but to keep working to pay the bills.
For these people, the finish line can feel miles away, and every time it draws closer, something moves it back again. Maybe they thought they could get by with their retirement savings until inflation started climbing. Or perhaps they were on track to quit at 65 until the stock market took a dive. Many are like Carpenter, who has worked for 55 years, doing construction, picking apples, running ski lifts, and managing parking lots, but can’t retire because most of his jobs were low-paying, with meager benefits.
There will likely be more of these Americans in the years to come. Half of babies born in the U.S. in 2007 are projected to live to 103, according to the World Economic Forum. As lifespans lengthen, wages are not keeping up with inflation, and even a decent nest egg may not go far enough. That’s especially true as employers have shifted the burden of retirement savings to employees, offering 401(k)s rather than pensions that promise a certain benefit every month. As a result, millions of Americans are going to have to keep working longer. “The issue more than anything is the high cost of living,” says Mandeville, the Council on Aging director. “It’s really strained people’s retirement budgets.”
The growing class of people who want to stop working, but can’t, represents a crack in a social compact that assured citizens who worked hard that they could take it easy when they hit 65, if not before. As that crack grows, it will put economic strain on younger generations who have to care for family members, contributing to a growing burden of debt that includes student loans and homeownership. Retirement savings will become one more discouraging thing that young workers can’t afford as their costs grow but their wages do not. Forty years ago, a teacher or a municipal worker or an employee on a manufacturing line was guaranteed a good retirement after putting their time in. Today, more people are working in service-industry jobs, but longtime workers like Walter Carpenter cannot afford retirement. “I just have to keep working,” he says as he clears away dirty dishes. “Right now, retirement is a distant dream.”
In the mornings, Carpenter sits down at a desk in his rent-subsidized apartment in downtown Montpelier and writes letters. He sends missives to newspaper editors about the need for single-payer health care, the problems with the private insurance market, and the importance of gun control. Evidence of his political advocacy adorns the otherwise bare walls of his spartan apartment. There’s a picture of him with Senator Bernie Sanders taken on the steps of the Vermont state capitol; a letter from former Senator Patrick Leahy; a commendation from former Governor Peter Shumlin. Carpenter spends hours sitting at his big desk, the main piece of furniture in his couchless living room, writing about the flaws of the American economy. “What will happen when, as a friend so aptly put it, I become ‘too frail to work and too poor to live?’” he wrote in one 2017 letter advocating for state-sponsored retirement benefits.
Carpenter became a health care advocate in 2006, he says, after he became seriously ill from a liver disease caused by gallstones in the bile ducts. His health-insurance company wouldn’t preapprove blood work and radiology tests that were needed to figure out what was wrong, he recalls, forcing him to spend hours and hours on the phone with them, advocating for his own treatment. The illness forced him to take a 12-week absence from his job at Stowe Mountain Resort, which was owned by a different company than it is now. He’d worked there since 1995, in a series of jobs that had health insurance and a 401(k) and paid $10 to $12 per hour—not a huge sum, but well above a state minimum wage that sat at $7 at the time. But when Carpenter was ready to return to work, he says, the company had gone through a restructuring, and his job was gone. He applied for other full-time gigs with benefits, but no one seemed to want to hire a 52-year-old man with a history of health problems.
When people lose good jobs in their 50s, it’s common for them to struggle in their 60s and in retirement, says Lisa Berkman, a professor of public policy and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who has studied older workers. The 50s are a fork decade professionally, Berkman says. Around half of Americans are not working full time throughout them, and the odds of those people being able to find good jobs in their 60s are low. In contrast, about 80% of people who work full time through their 50s go on to work in their 60s. “When you get to be 60, all the inequality that has accumulated over your lifetime comes into Technicolor,” Berkman says.
So it has been for Carpenter. Since his illness, he has been a seasonal worker, spending winters at Mad River Glen and summers at Vermont’s Waterbury Center State Park, where he is a park attendant for $22 an hour. The pay isn’t bad, but the cost of living in Vermont is higher than the national average. Even with a rent-subsidized apartment, Carpenter’s finances are tight. There’s the $235 he has to pay monthly for his Medicare supplement, and the $184 deducted from Social Security for Medicare Part B, plus hundreds of dollars on groceries, his cell-phone bill, and expenses for his car, which he drives about 50 miles per day to get to and from work in the winter. The salt does a number on the undercarriage of his 2015 Subaru Forester. One year he had to dip into his retirement savings to get it in shape for its annual inspection.
Carpenter’s situation may sound like bad luck, but it’s a reality for many older Americans. About 1 in 5 people over 50 have no retirement savings at all, according to the AARP. The problem is getting worse over time. A 2023 government survey found that 20% of low-income workers had a retirement-account balance in 2007, but only 10% had one in 2019.
Carpenter has had a colorful life—a self-identified hippie, he’s studied the flute at the Berklee College of Music, taken trains across Canada, lived in Israel, and survived the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. The hospitality industry found him when he moved back to the East Coast to care for his aging father, a professor, and started working odd jobs. This, too, is a common problem: as more people are thrust into caregiving for aging parents, they’ll either have to spend much-needed money for that care or scale back their own work, compromising their fragile finances even further.
Carpenter sometimes wishes he’d thought about retirement earlier, back when he was traveling the world and working part-time jobs. It can be hard sometimes to go to events like his high school reunion and see old schoolmates who are retired and financially secure. He’s worried about what will happen over the next decade. That’s why he scrimps and saves now, eating the half-priced food at Mad River Glen whenever he can, subsisting on deli meat from the kitchen. “There’s going to be a time when I can’t do this anymore,” Carpenter says, wiping his hands on the dirty rag tucked into his pants. “So for now, I have to save as much as I can.”
The sun is setting at Mad River Glen one December evening, and the cafeteria is closing. Customers clomp across the vast dining room in their ski boots, ready to go home. In the kitchen, things are slowing down; workers mop the floor as a boom box blasts the Grateful Dead. Carpenter tosses a green bag of sopping compost into a bin, then bends over to pick up a black plastic bag filled with trash. “You have to know how to lift things in this job,” he says, gesturing to the rolling cart full of trash bags and compost.
Donning his jacket, he rolls the cart to the elevator, takes it to the ground floor, and drags it outside. It’s about 10°, but Carpenter is cheerful as he hoists the trash, recycling, and compost, and tosses them in the proper bins. It is a job for a younger person. When it eventually becomes too difficult, he may ask to become a cashier like his colleague Ron Anderson, 81, who retired from a career in advertising decades ago, then decided to come back to work for camaraderie and the free lift ticket given to all employees.
As the nation ages, workers like Carpenter and Anderson will play a greater role in the economy. The Census Bureau predicts that the 65-and-older population in the U.S. will leap from 58 million in 2022 to 82 million by 2050, when the group is projected to make up more than a quarter of the country’s population. The share of people in the workforce who are 55 and older is growing, while the proportion of people 16 to 54 has been shrinking since the late 1990s, according to a recent report by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Older workers are becoming more prevalent as the youngest contributors to the economy—people 16 to 24—no longer work as often as they once did, instead pursuing school or other interests.
With its high proportion of older workers, Mad River Glen—and the state it serves—offer a glimpse of America’s future. Vermont is the third oldest state in the nation; the number of residents 65 and older has nearly doubled during the past two decades, according to the Vermont State Data Center. The cost of living deters some people from moving here and often sends locals in search of an exit. As employers report worker shortages, state officials are beginning to look for ways to support older workers willing to fill the gaps, says Mandeville, the 75-year-old Council on Aging director.
That’s how a business like the Trapp Family Lodge, a resort in Stowe, Vt., came to put out an ad in 2022 that targeted retirees: “Are you retired and looking for a part-time job to get you out of the house/make play money?” it asked. Bob Schwartz, the resort’s marketing director, said the idea came as management looked for the “low-hanging fruit to beef up our workforce.”
Flexibility is one of the biggest demands from older workers, says Jena Trombly, director of human resources at the Clara Martin Center, a nonprofit mental-health facility in Vermont. The center has cobbled together a staff by hiring many older people for part-time jobs, agreeing to give them ample time off to travel or visit their grandkids. The center has kept on some longtime workers by allowing them to transfer from full time to part time, keeping their knowledge in the organization. “It’s a win-win all the way around,” she says.
Japan is a good model for what America might look like if its workforce is increasingly made up of older people. About 80% of Japanese workers want to continue their jobs after retirement, according to the World Economic Forum, and about 1 in 4 people 65 and older were still working in 2022. The country has encouraged companies to help by employing older workers and raising the mandatory retirement age above 60. Technology helps too. Some companies have used robots to help elderly workers continue at jobs that their bodies might not otherwise be able to do.
But having everyone work longer isn’t the only option. A new type of savings plan spreading around the U.S. could help more people put aside money for retirement. Called an auto-IRA, the plan sets aside money from people’s paychecks, which it then invests in stocks and bonds. The program costs employers nothing; their only responsibility is to inform workers about it. “This means that people who, for the most part, never had a chance to save can do so,” says David John, a senior policy adviser to the AARP who helped invent the concept. Vermont passed a law allowing auto-IRAs in 2023, and 17 other states either have operational auto-IRAs or are putting plans in place. In some states, like California, almost all employers have to participate.
The program appears to be helping workers grow their retirement savings in the states where it’s already operational, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. More than a million people have amassed more than $1 billion in assets through such plans since 2018, according to John. In one Pew survey, nearly two-thirds of low-wage workers participating in an auto-IRA plan in Illinois said they were satisfied with it.
Walter Carpenter supports the idea. In one of his letter–writing campaigns in 2017, he penned a missive to the online publication VTDigger advocating for Vermont to support state-sponsored retirement plans. In the letter, Carpenter referred to himself as “someone who knows what it means to lose any hope of retirement through circumstances beyond my control.”
Employers in Vermont can now start offering this type of plan. But unfortunately, Carpenter is unable to avail himself of the benefits now. It’s too late for the contributions he’d make at this point to amount to much. He reflects on this as he sits in the basement staff dressing room at Mad River Glen, pulling off his apron, swapping his work boots for snow boots and his jeans and sweatshirt for something clean.
“Someone who has worked for 55 years like me should be able to retire,” he says. Instead, he keeps going—one foot in front of the other. He’s cleaned the kitchen counters with dish soap, taken out the trash, and stacked chairs on tables. He’s ready to go home for the night. But he’ll be back tomorrow, and for many days after that.