More Than 1 Million Baby Boomers Are Secretly Unemployed

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its tabulation of the monthly unemployment rate, showing the jobless rate dipped to 7.5 percent in April. But that leaves out one major segment of the population: Those forced into retirement. While older Americans were less likely to lose their jobs in the recession, it's well known that they were far less likely to find a new one if they did, in part, because of age discrimination. So some gave up and tapped their Social Security benefits -- becoming retirees.

Early Retirees Were Kicked Out Of The Workforce
How many Americans are forced into retirement because they couldn't find work? At the request of AOL Jobs, Matthew Rutledge, an economist at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, attempted to estimate the size of this group that remains invisible to the BLS. What he found: At the height of the recession, as many as 53,000 extra Americans were retiring early each month. In total, the recession has driven around 1.4 million additional Americans to collect Social Security early.