Age and work in the Trump era

I don’t imagine this will be the last blog post on the topic of age and work during Trump’s presidency in the US.

There’s something of a mirror image to our earlier post this week going on in this article on the Michigan Radio website.

It reports that in the hospitality sector, restaurants are struggling to attract workers. They have traditionally depended on migrant labour as apparently nearly one in five restaurant employees in the US are foreign born. And restaurants also have the youngest workforce of any sector of the economy.

The article considers what the effects of this might be of Trump’s immigration policies (handily explained in detail here by the New York Times) but broadly in this context it involves favouring employment of nationals.  Justin Winslow, president and CEO of the Michigan Restaurant Association, is cited as saying that “over the next decade restaurants will likely create more jobs than the U.S. born workforce can fill.” And he goes on to point out that with numbers of younger workers in decline, this is going to create vacancies which would otherwise have been filled by immigrants.

There’s no mention here of what other options could be explored – hiring older workers? – but again, we’ll watch with interest to see what happens.