Jobs of persons working after receiving retired-worker benefits

This article describes the jobs of new Social Security retired-worker beneficiaries about 2 years after they received their first benefit payment and compares the characteristics of these jobs with those of jobs they were in before they received a benefit. The data are from the Social Security Administration's 1982 New Beneficiary Survey (NBS). The NBS data show that more than one-fifth of the new retired-worker beneficiaries were working 18-30 months after receipt of their first benefit payment. Most of the respondents usually worked less than full time at modest hourly wages rates--often for fewer hours and at lower wages than on the jobs they were in before benefit receipt. Thus, their annual earnings generally also were modest. The working NBS respondents were employed in all categories of occupations, but the majority were in white-collar jobs, often in the same major occupational or industrial category that they had been in before benefit receipt. When job changes had occurred, the tendency was to move into work in the service industries. Those individuals who were working were only slightly more likely to be self-employed in the postbenefit period than they had been in the prebenefit period.