rkers will grow while the supply of such workers declines, (2) the transition of the American economy from a manufacturing orientation to a service orientation will accelerate, (3) new workforce entrants will be drawn primarily from women, racial and ethnic minority population groups, and immigrants, and (4) the A American workforce will become older (Elliott, 1993). Since the early-1990s, some employing organizations, governmental agencies, and social advocacy groups have been refining their positions on the issues involved, and developing strategies to deal with these issues (Packer, 1993). While the Workforce 2000 report issued in 1987 warned that the nation's employers must prepare to deal with a future workforce that was characterized by much greater diversity·gender, ethnic, and racial·than existed in the workforce of the mid- to late-1980s, most employers were slow to react to the warning, and many are now being forced to deal with diversity issues.
At about the same time that most employers are beginning to deal effectively with the issues associated with diversity in the workplace, however, the Hudson Institute has issued a new report·Workforce 2020. Workforce 2020 alerts the nation and its employers to some newly emerging issues with which they must prepare to deal. Further, the authors of Workforce 2020 warn that the crunch associated with these emerging issues will begin around 2010 (Judy & D'Amico, 1997).
One of the more significant of the projections presented in Workforce 2020 is that by 2010 employers will be required to turn to older workers to fill their human resource requirements. In 1980, as an example, new entrants comprised 18 percent of the nation's workforce. By 1997, however, new entrants accounted for only seven-percent of the workforce. Compounding the effects of this trend is the aging of the baby-boomer generation. By 2010, baby-boomers will begin reaching the present retirement age of 65, ...