D.C. bound: A Maine advocate for the aging workforce steps onto the national stage | Phyllis Cohn, who for five years has encouraged Maine businesses to get proactive about retaining older workers, takes a new job tackling the issue nationwide
Photo/Whit Richardson
Phyllis Cohn, former communications director of the AARP Maine, recently took a job with the national office to address the country's aging workforce
As AARP Maine’s communications director, Phyllis Cohn has spent the last five years trying to convince Maine businesses to take the state’s aging workforce issues seriously. Beginning Sept. 29, Cohn put that experience to work on the national stage as AARP’s new national program consultant on the workforce issues team. In that role, Cohn will be AARP’s first full-time head of the department’s task forces on the aging workforce.
Cohn will direct the agency’s two task forces devoted to the workforce aged 50 and over — the 28-member Aging Workforce Advisory Council, which brings together organizations like the American Hospital Association and the American Staffing Association to talk about ways to embrace an older workforce, and the AARP’s federal roundtable, a pilot project to help U.S. government agencies retain their growing numbers of older workers.
With half of AARP’s 39 million members nationwide still working, and 70% planning to work past traditional retirement, helping businesses attract and retain older workers is top priority for the organization, and the country. In the United States, the more than 77 million baby boomers will reach retirement age by the year 2030, while the number of people aged 18-64 is only expected to grow by about 23 million during that time period. This means businesses in Maine and beyond are facing a staggering workforce shortage. Luckily, many older people may want to stay in the workforce. “We’re trying to get businesses to look at who those workers are and realize that their institutional knowledge goes out the door with them by not making accommodations,” explains Cohn.
In Maine, the state with the nation’s highest median age of 41.1 years, the aging workforce became Cohn’s “baby,” she says, especially when she earlier this year helped launch a new online assessment tool that allows businesses to evaluate how the aging of their workforce will impact them. “This isn’t just about being nice to your workers — this is about your bottom line,” she explains. (For more on this, see “The age question,” Aug. 11, 2008.)
Cohn hopes to continue to bridge the gap between AARP’s services and the business community through the Aging Workforce Advisory Council. Cohn wants to boost the two-year-old council’s effectiveness by holding monthly or bi-monthly web seminars and by starting a dialogue with council members to find out what resources they need, instead of simply disseminating information. Cohn also hopes to get some of the country’s biggest employers to join the council. “You have to sit down and say, ‘What are you seeing and hearing, what are your challenges and how can we work together?’” Cohn says. “For them to ultimately benefit from the information, it has to be a reciprocal relationship.”
At 52, Cohn understands the value of accommodating mature workers. Though Cohn will eventually work three days a week in AARP’s national office in Washington, D.C., for the first three to six months of the job, she’ll telecommute full-time from her Portland home.
And though she won’t be working for AARP Maine, Cohn plans to continue working with Maine businesses and organizations to help guide the nation’s oldest state through its aging workforce challenges. “It’s so satisfying to leave a place where you know the work you’ve done as part of a team has made an impact in the lives of people [aged] fifty-plus,” she says. “And to take that to the national office and still keep my relationships in Maine and bring information back — how cool is that?”
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