Work & Retirement

Canceled by the Social Security Administration on Feb. 20, 2025.

Direct care workers—nursing assistants, home health aides, and personal care aides—provide vital assistance to the disabled and elderly at very low pay, making them among the most precarious workers in the United States. Many direct care providers also work “off the books” for individual families alongside more formal arrangements or may move back and forth between formal and informal employment. Such arrangements add to these workers’ precarity, as they earn less and are not protected.  Informal labor market work is expected to impact direct care workers’ retirement savings and future earnings, as they are not paying into Social Security. However, we are aware of no existing studies that assess direct care workers’ employment trajectories and retirement outlook. We propose to do this, providing evidence about three key questions:

1. What factors impact direct care workers’ decisions to move back and forth between the formal labor market and off-the-books employment and how (if at all) does this vary by demographic factors, including age (e.g., nearing retirement)?

2. As a consequence, what do direct care workers’ employment trajectories look like over the life course?

3. How does working in the informal labor market shape direct care workers’ retirement outlook?

To do this, we will collect in-depth interview data from 30 direct care workers to understand how they make decisions about rotating between formal employment, often with agencies or assisted living or nursing facilities, and jobs off the books, often employed by families to care for an individual. Simultaneously, we will examine existing nationally representative datasets to describe direct care workers’ employment trajectories and subsequent retirement outlook. These two approaches will allow us to estimate retirement capacity among an understudied, critical, and vulnerable workforce.

The principal investigator is Ruth Finkelstein. This project is funded by the Social Security Administration (SSA) through the New York Retirement and Disability Research Center (NYRDRC), which is part of the SSA’s Retirement and Disability Research Consortium. The NYRDRC, led by Na Yin, Ruth Finkelstein, and Teresa Ghilarducci, is a collaboration of the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research at Baruch College, the Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging, and the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at The New School.