For Many of America's Aging Workers, 'Retirement Is a Distant Dream'

Walter Carpenter walks across the ski resort’s dining room on a knee that needs to be replaced and a hip that’s going bad. Lumbering into the kitchen, he deposits a brown bin of dirty dishes on a counter before heading back out to collect more bowls of half-eaten tomato soup and plates littered with sandwich crusts. “One foot in front of the other,” he jokes to kitchen prep worker Kim Hopper, 72, as they pass each other. Carpenter, 69, has worked winters at the Mad River Glen ski area in Waitsfield, Vt., for the past 15 years. Four times a week, he clocks in around noon, and makes $20 per hour carrying dishes up and down the three flights of stairs in the “base box,” as the kitchen and bar area is called, putting plastic food baskets and metal tongs and soup ladles in their rightful place, loading the industrial dishwasher with cups and bowls. He has peripheral neuropathy, which can leave him without feeling in his feet or legs. Some days, his phone tells him, he walks more than five ... Read full article.