At the Cooper Tire plant in Findlay, Ohio, Jack Hartley, who is 58, works a 12-hour shift assembling tires: pulling piles of rubber and lining over a drum, cutting the material with a hot knife, lifting the half-finished tire, which weighs 10 to 20 pounds, and throwing it onto a rack.
Mr. Hartley performs these steps nearly 30 times an hour, or 300 times in a shift. “The pain started about the time I was 50,” he said. “Dessert with lunch is ibuprofen. Your knees start going bad, your lower back, your elbows, your shoulders.”
He said he does not think he can last until age 66, when he will be eligible for full Social Security retirement benefits. At 62 or 65, he said, “that’s it.”
After years of debate about how to keep Social Security solvent, the White House has created an 18-member panel to consider changes, including raising the retirement age….
Why is there an assumption in today’s society that we should be pain free? It is unbiblical. Life is pain. Production is pain. Giving a cup of water in Jesus name is a pain.
I also think it amusing that the sports types beat their bodies to injury on a regular basis but often won’t lift a finger to help anyone because of their sports injuries & pains.
We, as Christians, need to have a different view.
Don
I read an article awhile ago with some numbers on Social Security…
When SS was created, the US male life expectancy was I think 57.
In 2009 according to the CIA Factbook, it is 75.65.
In the meantime, has retirement age at 65 moved at all?
For “full retirement” benefits, the SS retirement age applied to persons born in or after 1960 is 67.
This issue of how to treat people who do heavy labor is a real problem. In many of the construction trades, there are unwritten customs that involve making things easier for the older guys. But physical labor is still physical labor. I have practiced law for the past 23 years, which involves inside work and no heavy lifting. I can name several colleagues who are still working full-time in their 80s, and the list of my colleagues I know who are still working in their 70s is too long to be worth reciting. But when I look back on some of the laboring jobs that I struggled through in my late teens and twenties while working in college, I can’t imagine how someone could do that work in his or her late 60s.
2. markjandrews:
No, I deliver kitchen cabinets. I’ve had a variety of joint and muscle problems. The last one is my right hand gets horiffic pains in it if I bump it the wrong way. I got through today. By God’s grace I’ll get through tomorrow.
Don
well i hope they aren’t voting tea party candidates.
don gander, i don’t understand your statement can you please elaborate? i know i won’t want to be constant pain as i get older. who is not lifting a finger to help, and who are they supposed to be helping?
6. magnolia:
Happy to help. I am often too brief.
I have worked a variety of physically challenging jobs. One, for example, was household moving. It involves moving everything from lampshades to pool tables from one house to another house. The locations of the pick up location and delivery locations are often far apart and I often was required to seek help to move items like sofa-sleepers and other heavy and/or bulky items. In all the help that I ever had I rarely had anyone who was/had been and athlete that was competent to assist to move anything fragile and heavy with safety and care. I have my theories why but that is for another place. I was fortunate, however, that most athlete types would readily excuse themselves from helping because of a bad back or knee or whatever received as a sports injury.
^^^^^
But in order to give a cup of water in Jesus’ name one must first earn or otherwise obtain said cup of water. This proccess always entails work. And work is often difficult and painful. It is the nature of life.
Hope this helps.
Don
The way the problem used to be handled prior to SS was:
1. People were encouraged to have a paid off house to live in rent free, instead of gambling their “home equity” on the stock market.
2. During their working years they raised and educated children with whom they moved in (or who moved in with them) when they became frail.
3. As they aged, seniors cut back their hours, but still worked, and spent their leisure babysitting, tutoring and counselling grandchildren, and keeping families together during nasty times.
4. The 60’s encouraged parents to divorce and abandon their children so as to “fulfill themselves”.
5. They also encouraged seniors to “retire” to child free golf communities or roam around the country in RVs sporting “I’m spending my children’s inheritance” bumper stickers, while their young adult children struggled with child care and keeping families together, and while their grandchildren floundered in school and got into trouble unsupervised at home.
6. The 90s then encouraged parents to refrain from assisting their entering college children and were advised to put all their money into their 401ks, instead of making sure their children were debt free.
This resulted in todays young adults who shoulder Massive student debt while working multiple lousy jobs, at the same time that their elders (who had minimal debt, and much better work) engage in prolonged recreation
7. My mother is 81 years old and still works 4days a week. She values her independance and refuses to live with me. However, she knows that when she is no longer able or willing to work she will move in with us. Her bedroom is prepared and always vacant for her.
8. My grandmother (at the age of 70) looked after my sister and myself (then newborn) full time for 2 years, because my mother and father had jobs in a plague stricken city where kids could not safely go.
9. My parents looked after my grandparents until they died in their nineties.
10. I have very little in my 401k. I do, however, have 2 paid off houses, which will go to my two children, and it is my expectation that both my children will graduate college debt free. I have made a point of urging them to remain in the area so that I can assist with babysitting and other child care, once they have children. Hopefully they will do so. If not, they know where they can send their children if they need tutoring during the summer, or a safe place to stay while their parents work.
As to the rest, I hope to work until I can work no more, and live as simply as I can. Hopefully my children will be able to help me if I need assistance, but I hope to need as little assistance as possible, and have arranged my durable power of attorney so that nobody will try to keep me alive if I can only be taken care of in a nursing home. If I fail in these goals, I will take comfort in the fact that I did my best, and made a point of always putting the interests of my family ahead of my own, as did my mother and my grandmother before me. That is all that one can do.
There was no SS back then. However seniors who looked out for their families in general found that their families looked out for them.
SSI has disaility SSI has disability. In this state there are lawyers who advertise on TV all the time to represent you if you get turned down. Look at the statement you get from social security each year – there is a line that says if you are disabled you get x amount. You can go on disability until your full retirement age. Further you would be amazed at how broad the definition of disability is (for social security purposes.
Hence – if due to bad knees etc one can no longer perform their job – they will get SSI. No need to hold down the age because of this
#9, I would agree…except that my brother-in-law is now rated at an 80% disability from line-of-duty injuries sustained in warzone military service. He was an Army National Guard soldier that had a civilian job with the DoD working on helicopters. Because of his disability, he was honorably discharged from the ARNG with more than 30 years of service. Once he was discharged, he no longer met requirement of ARNG service that allowed him to work as a DoD technician, so he was forced into a disability retirement after more than 20 years of civilian service in the DoD. He is receiving 60% of his average high three years base pay in the DoD this year (about $1,500 a month) and that will be reduced to just 40% starting next year (about $1,200 a month). Because he is receiving VA disability payments, the Army reduced his Army retirement pay to about $17 a month. That is because it is forbidden to receive “concurrent payments” of VA disability and Army pay. So, between his DoD civilian FERS retirment after over 20 years of service and his ARNG retirement after over 30 years of service, he gets about $1,517 a month to support his disabled wife (bi-polar disorder) and his 12 year old daughter. He is currently receiving NO VA money because before he was retired, he was put on orders to help prepare his unit for overseas deployment and was payed by the ARNG to do so. But, because he had a VA disability at the time, all the money he earned on active duty was “concurrent receipt” and so he is now having to pay that money back to the Army. The repayment comes from his VA checks and is deducted before he gets any of it. The Army takes his entire disability check each month and will continue to do so until the “debt” (his regular ARNG pay he received when he was placed on active duty orders) is paid in its entirety. So, for most of his first year of disability retirement, he has received $17 dollars a month for his over 30 years of honorable service. He will be in the same position next year for a few months because he was activated 2 years in a row, after being declared disabled by the VA. He should finally start collecting his VA disabilty checks around March of 2011.
Both he and his wife tried to get SSI and both were denied, despite her inability to hold a job and his 80% VA disabilty. They appealed using one of the lawyers you talked about, and their appeal was rejected. I told him that he needed to become addicted to heroin or become an alcoholic before they would actually give him SSI.
If you have a better solution, I would like to hear it.
BTW, my minimum retirement age for full SS benefits is 67 1/2 years, not 65. They already “fixed” this problem with social security once. Personally, I think the system needs to be phased out and the funds I payed into it over the years should be reimbursed to me with interest. That way, I will at least get something for the 32 years of payments I have made into the system. As it stands now, I expect to receive nothing for all the money I have put into the system since I was 14 years old and started paying into it.
The time to fix this was back when the baby boomers were still working. It is too late now. The follow-on generations are under-employed and even if you delay our retirements until 80, the system is insolvent now.
Quick Math, probably wrong in my assumptions, but…
When SS was created, with male life expectancy at 57 and retirement age at 65, retirement was 114% of average life expectancy.
Now, with male life expectancy at 75.65 and retirement age at 67, retirement is only 88% of average life expectancy.
Swell, I am 46 and I have 5 life threatening medical issues. Will I ever get a dime of the money I paid in? The amount I paid in would pay off my current mortgage entirely. Or, I could purchase an annuity now, and enjoy the residuals while I am alive. I worked hard manual labor for the first half of my life. There is no way I could continue to do that now. Fortunately, I learned to work smarter not harder and I am able to keep working as I get older. Not everyone is as fortunate.
Just give us our cash back…I would even settle for an immediate cessation of payroll taxes now with no future retirement expected. We could just shake hands with Social Security and walk away and let those that are currently retired live off their own pay-ins to the system. Gee, if that isn’t enough, why don’t THEY go back to work. No, THEY want to raise the retirement age for the follow-on generations and continue to live in the style paid for by the younger generation! How utterly selfish the boomers are!
I am 73, retired USAF with 90% VA Disability compensation plus 10% for Individual Unemployability, suffer from constant phantom pain due to the amputation of all of my left leg (service-connected), and I receive my Social Security pension in addition to that. My wife is retired from a major insurance company, receives her pension and her Social Security, and we supervise our three granddaughters (twins, 16, and their sister, 10) after school until their mother arrives home from her insurance office.
I’ve gotten so used to the pain after 30+ years that it usually doesn’t bother me much……unless I’m really tired……and then it hits like electric current. Getting used to pain can be done, but only with determination.