Two blue-collar industries beat white collar for retirement readiness
Some industries’ workers are considerably worse off than others. But not blue-collar workers in this industry.
It’s only two, and it’s certainly not typical—but workers in two blue- and gray-collar fields, engineering and protective services, actually beat workers overall, including white-collar employees, when it comes to retirement preparedness.
According to The State of America’s Workforce, a national study commissioned by the Indexed Annuity Leadership Council, while otherwise blue- and gray-collar workers lose out on retirement readiness compared to white-collar workers, some industries’ workers are considerably worse off than others.
Those in blue-collar fields, which include precision production, craft and repair occupations; machine operators and inspectors; transportation and moving occupations; handlers, equipment cleaners, helpers and laborers; and those in gray-collar fields, which include technicians or paraprofessionals, such as administrative workers and clerks; are outpaced in retirement readiness, overall, by white-collar workers. And among them, 49 percent, compared with 44 percent of white-collar workers, say they’re “not ready at all” or “not very ready” for retirement.
But in engineering and in protective services, those workers are actually better off in that regard even than white-collar workers. Engineering garnered a readiness score of 57.6 percent, while protective services came in at 50.5 percent. White-collar workers only achieved a score of 49.1.
Still, and curiously, protective service workers, along with personal care workers, are among the 14 percent of workers taking on a “side hustle” with the explicit goal of saving for retirement—and those in those two fields are the most likely to work multiple jobs, compared to those in other blue- and gray-collar industries.
And personal care workers (whose retirement readiness score was at the very bottom, at 27.5), along with food preparation and serving workers (scoring just 28.5), have the lowest levels of retirement readiness.
Overall, the study finds, blue- and gray-collar industries are less prepared for retirement, with eight of 11 scoring below average. Bottom-ranked industries trail the others thanks in part to little to no access to employer-sponsored retirement plans.
Unsurprisingly, smaller companies—those with fewer than 50 employees—are less likely to provide access to a retirement plan, and correspondingly, workers at small companies are two times more likely than employees at larger companies to feel their employer is not helpful at all in retirement planning.
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