Report after report has made abundantly clear that job growth is weak, but there’s one wide swath of the population where employment growth is going gangbusters: older Americans.

A record 7.2 million Americans age 65 and older are working — double the number 15 years ago — partly because many older Americans love to work and partly because many feel too financially squeezed to retire.

With the value of many 401(k)s and homes taking a beating during the recession and with energy and health care prices climbing, many who dreamed that retirement was just around the corner have reluctantly kicked their retirement plans down the road.

While the overall number of Americans working has fallen by 4.4 million since the Great Recession began 4 1/2 years ago — with many dropping out of the workforce in frustration and some retiring early — the number of Americans 65 and older who are working has jumped by 1.4 million, a whopping 25 percent increase. Some work as doctors, some in retail, and some, with an entrepreneurial bent, start businesses in their 60s.

Americans are remaining healthier longer and living longer, making it easier to work past age 65. Moreover, it has grown easier for older Americans to continue working as the economy has shifted from physically taxing manufacturing jobs to less grueling service sector jobs.

In a survey done last year, the Society of Actuaries found that 55 percent of older Americans who continued working said they had done so to stay active and involved, while 51 percent said they had done so for additional income.

“One obvious reason people are working later is money,” said Steven A. Sass, program director at the Boston College Center for Retirement Research. “There’s a concern about what they have in their 401(k) and about Social Security.”

He said baby boomers were getting less than their parents did from Social Security because of the increase in the full retirement age — people cannot obtain full Social Security benefits until age 66, and for those born after 1957, the age will be 67.

“Not only are they getting less from Social Security,” Sass said, “but many don’t have a pension that gives them a steady income after they retire.”

These factors help explain why 18.5 percent of Americans 65 and older remain in the labor force, up from 12.1 percent in 1995. Many have stayed in the workforce past 60 because older Americans seem to be paying an ever-larger share of their incomes toward medical expenses and because many corporations have stopped providing health coverage to retirees, forcing many to work until Medicare is available at 65.

“Maybe people have recovered from the stock market plunge,” said Sara E. Rix, a senior policy adviser with the AARP Public Policy Institute. “But many people are still anxious about what may happen to the market, and that has caused many to delay retirement.”

Here are the stories of five Americans working well past age 65.

PATRICIA COTTON, 72

Home Care Aide

At age 72, Patricia Cotton toils 60 hours a week as a home care aide. Monday through Friday, she drives the 45 minutes from her home in Hyattsville, Md., to Washington to care for a 98-year-old with heart disease and other problems. Each day she works 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.

“It’s hard because I have a lot of lifting to do,” said Cotton, who often bathes, turns over and changes her patient. “But I have no choice. I had hoped to retire at age 65. I was looking forward to it. But then I lost my money.”

Cotton, an immigrant from Trinidad, says she had faithfully put money every few weeks into her Individual Retirement Account, entrusting it to a broker.

“I lost about $150,000,” she said. “I’d been putting money into it the last 25 or 30 years. My broker had me in high-risk investments. I didn’t pay much attention. He said, ‘You were doing so good.”’

But then the recession hit, and her IRA lost half of its value — money that had been intended to supplement her $1,200-a-month Social Security check to enable her to retire at age 65.

“I thought he was going to do something better for me,” Cotton said. “I didn’t know better.”

When the market nose-dived, she panicked and withdrew the rest of the money from her IRA. She was disappointed to discover that she had to pay almost half of that in tax and penalties.

“That left me all the way down,” she said. “When I lost my money, there was nothing else I could have done. I had to keep going.”

Cotton, a proud, divorced woman who has four children and seven grandchildren, lives on the second floor of a house that she fully paid off over 25 years. A daughter lives on the first floor, but Cotton refuses to take any money from her children.

She usually returns from work at 8 a.m., has breakfast, goes to sleep at 9 and wakes up at 3:30 to prepare to return to work.

“When you do something for so long, you get used to it,” she said. “But with that patient, you have to watch him constantly.”

She receives her monthly Social Security check and puts it in a safe money market account that will be her retirement nest egg.

But when will she retire?

“I have to continue for a little while,” she said. “I just hope my health keeps up. So far it’s going pretty good.”

DR. RAFAEL GARZA, 87

Physician

Dr. Rafael Garza vividly remembers the day he received his medical degree 62 years ago — it was April 17, 1950, in Monterrey, Mexico. Today, at age 87, he is still going strong, having moved from the often joyous but frequently grueling practice of family medicine to focusing on wound care.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays he does his rounds at Mission Regional Medical Center in Mission, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, treating bedsores, protecting burn victims from infections and helping diabetics who have had amputations.

“It seems that I always wanted to be a physician,” Garza said. “And now that I am a physician, I still enjoy practicing medicine.”

Garza did his residency in family medicine in St. Louis and did follow-up residencies in Fort Worth and San Antonio, ultimately setting up a family practice in McAllen.

To this day, he speaks lovingly of that specialty:

“You deliver the mother, then you take care of the baby, and that child continues as your patient, as he grows and develops. It’s been exciting.”

When he first moved to McAllen 55 years ago, there were few doctors in the area; today there are 600.

“There were two surgeons and two obstetricians, and we were family physicians, and we were delivering more babies than the hospital was at the time,” he said. “We were doing house calls and doing deliveries — we had an average of five a day. The time has gone by, and I’m still here.”

As much as he loved family medicine, he knew he could not keep running around so much. So in 1999, at age 74, he switched practices by taking a series of courses in wound care.

“I thought that would be a slower practice,” he said.

Now he sees only inpatients, handling a load of 12 to 18 people.

The emergency room takes care of the trauma, he noted, while he does the meticulous follow-up, trying to ease pain and repair wounds and wounded psyches.

“We have a lot of people in this area who have diabetes, and they don’t have a family doctor, and they neglect their diabetes,” he said. “Complications show up, and then there are sometimes amputations. I don’t treat diabetes. But I do see the pressure ulcers.”

“Believe it or not, I still enjoy it very much,” he said. “I’ve been there so long, everybody is very supportive of me. I get a lot of appreciation.”

CAROL BERMAN, 77

Retail Clerk

In many ways, Carol Berman, 77, had a charmed career. In 1983, she began as executive assistant to the head of a startup cellphone company in Columbus, Ohio. That company merged with another, and soon she was executive assistant to the head of Cellular One. After several more mergers, she found herself assistant to the chief executive of Verizon Wireless.

She retired in 2000, at age 66.

“I loved my job, and I would have stayed, but I was already a fossil in the company,” she said.

So she moved to West Palm Beach, Fla., expecting a relaxed, fulfilling life as a grandmother — she has three daughters, two stepdaughters and seven grandchildren, six of them girls.

“I worked all my life,” Berman said. “When we moved to Florida to retire, I pictured myself sitting by the pool and playing cards and mah-jongg. I tried that, and I found out these people start playing at 6 p.m. You have to start dinner at 5 so you can be in bed by 8. I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ And so I started looking for things to do.”

She applied for jobs at a nearby mall, and when the Dillard’s department store there offered her a position, she leapt at the opportunity. That was 10 years ago; soon she was a mainstay in the store’s Ralph Lauren Polo department, which attracts many shoppers who play polo in the Palm Beach area.

“Our Polo shop is gorgeous,” she said. “It doesn’t just happen. The people who work there make it beautiful.”

Berman said she loved the job in the beginning.

“There was not the same kind of pressure,” she said. “It was easy to sell. Times were good. We’re near the polo grounds, so we get a lot of equestrians who come from overseas to play polo, and many remember me.”

But financial bubbles burst, sales at the Polo shop slowed, and Dillard’s management raised the pressure.

“This whole retail thing is very difficult,” Berman said. “I enjoy the people. I enjoy the customers. But there is a lot of pressure. We have quotas we have to meet. For me it’s $244 an hour. I’ve had two pay cuts for missing my quota. I earned $16 an hour. But now I’m down to $13.”

“I’m really good at this,” she added, but the recession and cuts in advertising caused sales to slide.

“I’m looking for additional things to do that would give me more satisfaction,” she said.

She plans to join a committee that fights to prevent cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

WILLIAM BUETTNER, 78

Plumbing Inspector

William Buettner, the son of a plumber, grew up in Baltimore, near Pimlico Race Course.

“My dad wanted to be a lawyer, but he didn’t become one,” Buettner said. “He’d say, ‘I want you to be a lawyer.’ I said, ‘Pop, I don’t want to be a lawyer.’ He said, ‘If you’re not going to be a lawyer, you’re going to have to be a plumber.”’

So he became a plumber. He did private plumbing jobs until age 45, when he quit to become a plumbing instructor at Patuxent, a maximum-security state prison in Jessup, Md.

“I felt safer in the prison than I did in the street,” Buettner said. “I never had any problem. They didn’t look at the teachers like they looked at the guards. They saw us as trying to help them. Many times they’d say, ‘Mr. Buettner, if I had you as a father, I wouldn’t be here today.”’

At age 62, he retired from the prison.

“I took a year off, thinking, I’m glad to get out of there,” he said. “But at the end of a year, I couldn’t wait to get back to work. I was just bored.”

The prison director invited him back, and he taught at Patuxent for two more years. Around the time he was leaving that job, the plumbing inspector for the city of Annapolis asked him whether he could help out one or two days a week.

That was 12 years ago, and at 78, Buettner is still a plumbing inspector for the city. Although Annapolis has many historically protected buildings, there are plenty of commercial jobs and residential renovations that require inspections.

“I like to be active,” Buettner said. “I go into apartment buildings, and it’s three stories up or three floors down. And it keeps my mind sharp, the contact with other people.”

“When I started, I felt it was good to make some extra money,” he said. “But now with this economy, and property taxes and gas prices going up, it’s feeling like very helpful money.”

He earns about $18,000 a year from his inspection work, examining whether plumbers used the right piping and did the work properly.

“I’ve been a master plumber for 45 or 50 years, and there doesn’t seem to be the pride in workmanship that there was years ago,” he said. “It’s more speed and get the job done. Now everything is plastic. Years ago, it was cast-iron pipe and lead. Now it’s plastic PVC pipe. You can take your shoe and step on it, and it will crack. A rat or mouse will chew through it. With cast-iron pipe, they didn’t even try. If you flush a toilet with PVC pipe in the wall, it sounds like Niagara Falls.”

Buettner, who plans to retire at age 80, sees another disturbing change:

“Today it’s always, ‘Go get a new one.’ Don’t repair anything. Tear it out, throw it out, and get a new thing.”

ETHEL RUSHER, 72

LOUISE KING, 92

Retail Workers

Last Feb. 18, Wal-Mart phased out Ethel Rusher’s and Louise King’s positions as people greeters at its store in Bremerton, Wash., 15 miles west of Seattle. The two are now stocking shelves, Saturdays through Wednesdays, in the health and beauty aids department.

Rusher is 72, and King — who is Rusher’s mother — is 92, making her one of the oldest of Wal-Mart’s 1.4 million employees in the United States.

“I don’t think Social Security is enough to retire on,” said the daughter, explaining why she was still working.

King said that she continued to work because “I don’t want to sit down and die.” The daughter was quick to add, however, “If she didn’t live with us, she’d need it financially, too.”

Rusher said: “Right now I’m satisfied working. I drive my mother back and forth. Although sometimes it’s hard to go to work but not always.”

Their job involves helping customers and stocking and straightening up shelves with skin creams, shampoo, toothpaste and aspirin. Because Rusher badly hurt her back years ago lifting patients while working at a hospital, doctors have ordered her not to lift more than 15 pounds or work on a ladder. She makes sure her mother doesn’t do strenuous work either.

What Rusher likes most about working at Wal-Mart are the people.

“We have customers who hunt you up and like talking with us,” she said. “Some will even hug you. They miss us at the front. The store still has four greeters. They said they had too many.”

She and her mother work 35 hours a week, from 3 to 11 p.m., five days a week. On their days off — Thursday and Friday — mother and daughter do laundry, go to doctors and see their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Rusher said she had five children, three in Bremerton and two in California, as well as 13 grandchildren, seven of them in Bremerton.

Rusher, who has worked for Wal-Mart for five years, said she planned to retire in two years, when her 401(k) plan fully vests — although she said she might cut back to part time, instead of retiring.

At that point, she plans to supplement her Social Security by sewing.

“I’ve been sewing since I was a teenager,” she said. “I used to make formals, wedding dresses and stuff.”

“A lot of people who work at Wal-Mart tell us we should retire,” Rusher said. “But we just enjoy it.”

“Some people,” she added, “just say they wish they still had their mothers, that I’m lucky.”

© 2012 The New York Times Company