Coming Soon: The Vanishing Work Force
[29 August 2004 - New York Times] To be perfectly blunt about it, Pittsburgh is getting old. Half the line workers who repair, maintain and upgrade the grid at Duquesne Light, its electric utility, will be eligible to retire by the end of the decade. Likewise, half the 6,500 nurses working at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center hospitals will hit the typical retirement age of 55 in the next seven years. And just outside of town, at Westinghouse Electric, which designs and maintains nuclear power generators, the average age of engineers is the late 40's. The trend has some people worried. "A silent crisis threatens the prosperity of Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania," warned a report done two years ago by the Center for Competitive Workforce Development at Duquesne University. "A declining and aging population places at risk the stability of the region's work force and opportunities for economic progress." In other words, there just may not be enough young workers to go around in the not-too-distant future. So the older ones may have to stick around a lot longer than they originally planned. ...