Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age. Julia Neuberger
that gives them a role. In the United States, where people retire later – if at all – this is sometimes provided by continuing to go to work, and often by getting a more and more senior-sounding title, even though the role is in fact less influential than the one the same person held in their forties. It is hugely important that this has happened: the people concerned feel valued, still have an office, a secretary and a role, and are often wheeled out at all sorts of occasions to do some glad handing or to look after more junior staff.
In fact, when the bank HSBC carried out a huge survey of 21,000 people on the subject in 2006, it showed that more than 70 per cent of people in countries such as Canada, the United States and Britain say they want to work into their old age.6 Many of those who took part in the survey were clear that they wanted to work on their own terms, part-time or seasonally, with switches between periods of work and periods of leisure. Surprisingly, HSBC’s advisor on retirement said he thought the British were the most positive in the world in their attitude towards working in retirement, perhaps because the pensions are so poor here that people simply have to think differently. Or perhaps because opportunities are finally emerging for older workers to work differently from earlier in their career, more flexibly, and with increased satisfaction.
If so, there is still a very long way to go. An ICM poll for the BBC’s Newsnight programme in 2004 suggests that people are more than irritated at the discrimination against older workers. But there is a peculiar contradiction here. Only a few months earlier, when Lord Turner had published his pensions report, much of the media coverage had been about being ‘forced’ to work longer, to 67, 68 or 69. On the one hand, the polls suggest people want to work longer, albeit more flexibly; on the other hand, the commentators are telling us that people are resisting the idea.
The answer is that it depends what we mean by ‘work’. It depends on what the work is, whether we feel we are being cheated out of a pension we have earned, and a retirement date, whether pensions will be clawed back if we are earning, whether we are allowed to be flexible about how we work, whether the jobs can be rewarding in older age and, perhaps most significantly, how much we can feel independent. If people are self-employed, then they might reasonably expect to carry on working because they have customers, the most natural thing in the world. Maybe others can reinvent themselves to become self-employed later in life in order to do something totally different and, of course, find the customers who want to buy.
The Independent columnist Hamish McRae suggested that, a generation from now, a quarter of the workforce will be self-employed, which will change the nature of the pensions debate completely.7 The Turner proposals, and all the others, assumed that people are mainly employed by somebody else. But if McRae is right, then a large proportion of older people will be self-employed, carrying on working, perhaps less energetically than before, but possibly just as devotedly, and arguably with greater experience.
Some will be new self-starters, like Jacquie Lawson, of JacquieLawson.com, who became the market leader in online greeting card, at the age of 62.8 After six weeks of trial and error, having taught herself how to do it using Macromedia Flash, she sent a Christmas card to various friends in 2000, and went to Australia. When she got back, there were some 1,600 messages from people all over the world who had seen it and wanted her to set up a website. She did, but it crashed under the strain of huge demand. So friends and relatives helped her set up her business, investing in higher-grade technology, and she became an instant success. Not everyone does so well, but Jacquie Lawson is a shining example of someone who wanted to keep going as she got older, and had some good ideas.
There are also moves to keep people employed beyond retirement age. Older employees are being encouraged to stay at work longer to prevent a ‘dependency crisis’. That applies to both women and men, but women are more concentrated in poorer-paid and part-time jobs, so their financial provision for old age tends to be worse than men’s – and they tend to live longer too. As a result, we are seeing women in the workforce to an increasing extent, especially amongst older age groups.
There are 1.5 million women in the workforce between the ages of 45 and 64, and some 113,000 over 65, when women’s ‘official’ retirement age is still 60. For many of these women, the effects of working are wholly beneficial: more money, better mental health, better self-esteem and better social networks. A large body of evidence suggests that many women of all ages get much of their social support from colleagues at work, and this must be particularly true for women who have been widowed or whose children have moved away.
Official efforts
Despite a new official desire to keep people at work longer, and a plethora of initiatives to make sure that this happens, there are huge challenges in finding and keeping a job in later life, especially in areas of high unemployment, in the toughest regions or the toughest sectors. There is also real age discrimination. This is partly because of obsolete social protection schemes which means that older people get their earnings stopped to pay for their social support.
There is still a prevailing view that older workers are too costly and resistant to change. The Social Exclusion Unit of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister reported in 2004 that the low level of older workers in jobs costs the economy between £19 and £31 billion a year in lost output and taxes, and increased welfare payments, not to mention all those skills lost to employers.9 Yet nine out of ten older people believe that employers discriminate against them, and a quarter speak from experience. As many as ten per cent of companies refuse to employ anyone over 50.
The European Union is now resolved to do something about this, given the waste of resource so many older people not working represents. The idea of anonymous CVs certainly helps people from ethnic minorities, another group who are unfairly discriminated against in employment, but they are very little help to older workers, because a glance at the work history gives away the rough age of the applicant.
Some EU member states have tried to create incentives for employers to hire specific age groups by making them more attractive – that is to say, less protected – than the rest of the workforce. But this approach has not really helped either, though those countries which have a rather different approach, and a range of positive active ageing policies, are succeeding in attracting older workers. It works where working conditions are improved for everybody, with early retirement schemes being restricted to cases where major restructuring is inevitable, and where allowing part-time work to be combined with part-time pensions is the norm, so that people are not caught in a social benefit trap where it simply is not worth their while to work.
The European Union is worried about their ageing populations and falling birth rates. Japan is facing similar issues, and tackling them by paying grants to employers of older people and by other means of supporting older workers directly. The Japan Organization for Employment of the Elderly and Persons with Disabilities (JEED) does a huge amount of work trying to get older people into work, and they also work to police the new law which forces employers to take measures to keep people in work until at least 65.
JEED provides counselling and advice services on employing older people, and the measures – half of the costs of which are paid for by the government – include health management counselling, specialist advice services for re-employment, and much else besides. This is so far in advance of anything done in Europe that it seems amazing to us, and yet these are exactly the kinds of measures we need to see if older people are to be comfortable at work and not treated as slightly eccentric for continuing to want to be there. They are also working away at a long-term ‘Project to Develop a Solid Foundation for a Society Where People Can Work Regardless of Their Age (The Age-free Project)’, to find out what kind of systems would be needed so that anybody can work regardless of age.
But beyond the subsidies to companies that are making efforts in this direction, there is support for self-employment too. If three or more older people (aged 45 plus) have united to start an enterprise,