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The idea that everyone can carry on working into their 70s is completely unrealistic
Sometimes you have to hand it to the French. They were out in January, on the streets, protesting against the retirement age being raised from 62 to 64. I liked the placard that read “Retirement before arthritis”. I like the joie de vivreof it all, of insisting on the right to have a period of life not dominated by work.
They have the same problems we do: an ageing population and a falling birth rate, but an entirely different attitude. Here, we are being told that those who are currently middle-aged or younger (anyone born after 1970) may not be able to retire until they are 71.
So, no state pension till then. You better have a private one, yet we all know it’s impossible for so many younger working folk to save for a house, never mind pay into a pension pot. We are looking at a future of impoverishment unless something changes and some dots are joined.
For a start, there are many jobs that are not suitable for anyone in their 70s. I don’t want my roofer to be a septuagenarian. Actually, I have seen teachers at my kids’ schools burnt out in their 50s, and I don’t blame them at all. There are some jobs that require simply sitting down with a laptop, and as we found out during lockdown, we don’t need to be in offices to do them – yet many of those jobs are now threatened by artificial intelligence.
I thought the pandemic might make us rethink our whole attitude to the work-life balance, but I thought wrong. There is a kind of denial about what happened and an emphasis on a return to “normality” that ignores what we learnt. Kids need to be in school for social reasons, not just for exam passing, just as adults need more connection than Zoom calls.
But the idea that everyone has to carry on working forever is completely unrealistic. Some can and do. As Bette Davis said, “I will not retire as long as I’ve got my legs and my make-up box”. If you are privileged enough to do something you enjoy then why not?
But most of us are not Bette, and applying for jobs in your 60s? Well, good luck with that. The shocking reality is that by the age of 70, only half of us are disability free. I knew we had an ageing population, I didn’t realise we had such an unfit one. Health inequalities are huge and getting bigger. Life expectancy is now actually dropping. All of this means a smaller number of workers and a bigger economically “inactive” population.
Look, something is going very wrong here and it will not be solved by pushing up the retirement age. The fixation on small boats ignores the reality that our care homes, the NHS and the hospitality industry functions through immigrant labour. Our elderly are not looked after by our young but those we import to do the work.
The moral panic about women not having enough babies ignores both the housing crisis and the cost of childcare. Women are choosing not to have children in what feels such an insecure situation. Are we now telling a 30-something that while spending her wages on childcare and rent, she must also pay into a pension fund as there will be no state pension for another 40 years?
This all comes from the blinkered view of seeing people as economic units who exist only to “grow” wealth. There is no account of how we actually live or our intergenerational dependence; grandparents may happily work less to help with childcare; some retire to care for spouses.
The sad stories of the Waspi (Women Against State Pension Inequality) revealed this. In 2018, women born between 1950 and 1955 were affected by the sudden rise of the pension age to 65 when they thought it would be 60. They were not warned of the change and so found themselves with declining incomes. The investigation into this, which I hope results in compensation for them, started six years ago and will apparently finish next month. But their issue of lowered incomes and few job opportunities is very real and will affect more and more of us.
The silver-haired Saga foxes playing golf and cruising around the world belong to the generation above me. Retirement no longer means a chance to try new things or relax, it will simply mean decades of insecurity.
We know when we look around the world what makes for long healthy lives: connection, activity, purpose, a sense of belonging. It is really noticeable in a country like Japan that old people are part of life, not shut away from it.
The bigger issue here, then, is not at what age we get a state pension but how we build lives that are about more than work, recognising a third phase towards the end of our lives when we might retrain or live in an entirely new way. A future that involves clinging onto jobs that we are too ill or too tired to do does not sound like the dream of a bright country – rather one that is withering on the vine.
There will be a point at which we are all “economically inactive” but can still contribute. Being terrified of ageing – or of even talking about it – is being terrified of life somehow. We are a long time dead and, until then, I believe in life after work.
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