A seldom-heard encouraging word?

Although it contradicts my experience as an (ahem) over-50 job hunter, this NY Times piece seems to have some good news about the job market for my cohort...

After years of encouraging workers to take early retirement as a way to cut jobs, a growing number of companies are hunting for older workers because they have lower turnover rates and, in many cases, better work performance.

Except...

How encouraging is it, really, that men and women 30 or 40 years into their careers are willing to accept entry-level retail wages from the likes of Home Depot, Wal-Mart and Borders. And if older workers are filling more and more of those jobs, where do the people really entering the work force go?

Sounds almost like someone's trying to gin up another generation of anti-boomer backlash, a socially unproductive phenomenon that's being exploited, for instance, by the arguments of the Social Security destructionists...