Why Longer Working Lives Require a New Approach to Worker Safety

Millions of Americans who once expected to retire in their early sixties now expect to work well into their late sixties or seventies. Some continue working because they enjoy it. Many do so because rising healthcare costs, inadequate retirement savings, and longer life expectancy leave them little choice. Yet while policymakers have extended working lives, employers have largely failed to redesign work for longer careers. That omission has consequences far beyond productivity. It is becoming a worker safety issue.

For decades, occupational safety focused on physical hazards such as machine guarding, chemical exposure, falls, repetitive motion, and ergonomics. Those risks remain important, but today's workplaces face a new challenge. Artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, and digital technologies are transforming nearly every occupation. Increasingly, a worker's ability to remain safe depends not only on physical capacity, but also on the ability to continuously learn, adapt, and confidently interact with new technologies.

Learning is Becoming a Workplace Safety Competency

A recent systematic review of 51 studies concluded that successful adaptation to modern work depends less on chronological age than on how organizations support continuous learning. Learning is shaped by organizational culture, training opportunities, job design, and societal attitudes, and not age alone.  Yet we continue asking the wrong question. 

The question is not whether older workers can adapt to rapidly changing workplaces, but whether workplaces are adapting to an aging workforce.

The stereotype that older workers cannot keep pace with technology ignores decades of research. While aging may affect processing speed and certain aspects of memory, older workers also possess qualities that become increasingly valuable as work grows more complex: practical knowledge, professional judgment, reliability, quality awareness, emotional intelligence, and problem-solving experience. Experience often compensates for age-related cognitive changes, particularly when work and learning are designed appropriately. 

Many organizations still treat training as a one-time event rather than an ongoing component of occupational safety. That approach may have worked when jobs changed slowly. It fails when AI systems, software, equipment, and work processes evolve continuously. When workers are expected to use technologies they do not fully understand, mistakes increase. Errors become injuries. Confusion becomes stress. Stress contributes to fatigue. Fatigue increases injury risk.

Safety today is no longer just about guarding machines. It is also about helping workers safely interact with increasingly complex systems. This is why America needs a Healthy Work Longevity Strategy. 

If society expects people to work longer, organizations cannot simply extend careers, they must extend healthy careers.

Designing Workplaces for an Aging Workforce

Healthy work longevity means designing jobs that allow people to remain productive without sacrificing their physical, cognitive, or psychological well-being. Injury prevention is no longer limited to reducing physical hazards. It must also address excessive work pace, cognitive overload, poorly implemented technology, inadequate staffing, and continuous workplace change. Learning itself should become part of occupational risk management. 

Just as employers routinely evaluate ergonomic risks before introducing new equipment, they should also evaluate learning risks before introducing new technologies.  Research consistently points toward practical solutions: lifelong learning throughout employees' careers, technology that supports rather than overwhelms users, and intergenerational learning where younger workers contribute digital fluency while older workers contribute judgment, troubleshooting ability, and institutional knowledge. Organizations should also involve workers in technology implementation, provide time to practice, and measure success by confidence, safety, productivity, and sustained use, not simply by completing training modules. 

Perhaps most importantly, employers must stop treating chronological age as the primary predictor of technology adoption. Research consistently shows greater variation within age groups than between them. Self-efficacy, leadership support, organizational culture, prior experience, and job design explain technology adoption far better than age itself. 

By 2030, adults over 65 will represent one of the fastest-growing segments of the labor force, while AI will reshape nearly every occupation. Organizations that fail to prepare for both realities risk losing invaluable institutional knowledge while struggling to recruit enough skilled workers. This is not simply an aging issue. It is a workforce sustainability issue as well as an occupational safety issue.

OSHA, NIOSH, employers, insurers, healthcare systems, and policymakers should recognize that an aging workforce is as much an occupational health challenge as an economic one. Poorly implemented technological change increases cognitive workload, stress, burnout, and injury risk for workers of every age. Well-designed technology, combined with continuous learning and thoughtful work design, can improve safety, reduce fatigue, extend healthy working lives, and preserve one of our greatest competitive advantages, an experienced workforce. The safest workplace will not be the one with the newest technology. It will be the one where every worker, regardless of age, has the opportunity, confidence, and support to keep learning.

We have spent decades making workplaces safer by reducing physical hazards. The next frontier of occupational safety is ensuring that workers can safely adapt to artificial intelligence, automation, and rapidly evolving technologies throughout longer careers. If society expects people to work longer, we must redesign work so they can do so safely, productively, and with dignity.

Three Priorities for a Healthy Work Longevity Strategy

1. Make Lifelong Learning a Core Occupational Safety Strategy. Continuous learning should be recognized as an essential component of occupational safety rather than an optional employee benefit. Employers should provide ongoing opportunities for skill development throughout employees' careers, ensure equal access to training regardless of age, and incorporate learning readiness into technology implementation. Policymakers should support incentives for workforce reskilling and encourage gradual retirement pathways that allow experienced workers to remain engaged while mentoring the next generation.

2. Redesign Training and Technology for an Aging Workforce. Training should reflect how adults learn across the lifespan. Rather than relying solely on standardized digital instruction, organizations should provide practical, hands-on learning, flexible pacing, opportunities for practice, and ongoing coaching. New technologies should be evaluated not only for efficiency but also for usability, cognitive demands, and their potential impact on worker safety. Technology should adapt to workers—not require workers to adapt without support.

3. Build Age-Friendly Work Systems That Promote Health, Knowledge Sharing, and Sustainable Careers. Organizations should redesign work to support healthy, longer careers by addressing ergonomic, cognitive, psychosocial, and organizational risks together. Flexible scheduling, manageable workloads, worker participation in technology implementation, and age-diverse teams can improve both safety and performance. Formal mentoring, reverse mentoring, and other intergenerational learning initiatives enable younger workers to contribute digital expertise while experienced employees provide judgment, problem-solving skills, and institutional knowledge. These practices strengthen organizational resilience while helping workers remain healthy, productive, and engaged throughout longer working lives.

The future of occupational safety will not be defined solely by better machines or smarter algorithms. It will be defined by whether we create workplaces where people of every age have the opportunity, confidence, and support to continue learning, adapting, and contributing throughout longer careers. A Healthy Work Longevity Strategy is not simply an investment in older workers—it is an investment in the future resilience, productivity, and competitiveness of the American workforce.

Further Reading and Resources

• World Economic Forum. (2025). Future of Jobs Report. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025
• Ranasinghe, T., Grosse, E. H., Glock, C. H., & Jaber, M. H. (2024). Never too late to learn: Unlocking the potential of aging workforce in manufacturing and service industries. International Journal of Production Economics, 270,109193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2024.109193 
• Cox, V., Overbey, J. A. (2023). Generational knowledge transfer and retention strategies. Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal, 37(4), 10-13. https://doi.org/10.1108/DLO-03-2022-0055
• Czaja, S. J., Boot, W. R., Charness, N., & Rogers, W. A. (2019). Designing for Older Adults: Principles and Creative Human Factors Approaches, Third Edition (3rd ed.). CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/b22189 
• Truxillo, D. M., Cadiz, D. M., & Hammer, L. B. (2015). Supporting the aging workforce: A review and recommendations for workplace intervention research. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2, 351–381. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032414-111435
• Posthuma, R. A., & Campion, M. A. (2009). Age stereotypes in the workplace: Common stereotypes, moderators, and future research directions. Journal of Management, 35(1), 158–188. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206308318617
• Ng, T. W. H., & Feldman, D. C. (2008). The relationship of age to ten dimensions of job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(2), 392-423. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.93.2.392. PMID: 18361640.
• Ashworth, M. J. (2006). Preserving knowledge legacies: workforce aging, turnover and human resource issues in the US electric power industry. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 17(9), 1659–1688. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585190600878600 

Meet the Author

Dr. Pouran Faghri, MD, MS, FACSM is an Adjunct Professor in the Environmental Health Sciences Department at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and is on the advisory board of the Southern California Education and Research Center (SCERC). Her area of expertise lies in assessing workplace physical and psychological stressors and evaluating their impact on health outcomes. Dr. Faghri has developed and assessed multiple participatory intervention models to enhance employees' mental and physical well-being in various work environments and job conditions. She played a crucial role as a site PI for the Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace (CPH-NEW), which is a National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Centers for Excellence in Total Worker Health®, evaluating the intersection between work and non-work risk factors for employee health and safety. She collaborated with Healthy Work Campaign researchers to develop a validated diagnostic and intervention tool called Healthy Work Survey to assess employees’ mental health, including burnout, and offer interventions for organizations to mitigate the problem.