Cover Story
Staying alive
by Joanne Black
Older New Zealanders have much more incentive to keep working than their peers in most other developed countries.
David Bogan is not planning to drop dead at his desk, but if that were his fate, no one should lament that he did not have time to retire. For that matter, if his last job is not behind a desk but working on the checkout at his local supermarket, Bogan would not mind, either. Unless it is forced on him by ill-health, he has banished the word “retirement” from his life plan.
“We are genetically hard-wired to keep going,” says Bogan, 62, a mediator and conflict manager, and co-author of the book Avoid Retirement and Stay Alive*. “We are hard-wired to go up one side of the pyramid and down the other, not to go to the top and jump. And that’s what the whole retirement thing is. It’s saying, you’ve got a useful life until 60, or whenever, then that’s the end of it.”
By deciding not to give up work, Bogan is among a rapidly increasing number of New Zealanders who, through choice or necessity, are working until later in life.
More than half the growth in the national workforce since 2002 has come from the over-55s. Data from Statistics New Zealand’s Household Labour Force Survey show that people aged 55 and over have increased their participation in paid work over the past five years and more people over 55 are working than ever before. In the year to March, 40.7 percent of over-55s were working, the highest percentage since the survey began 21 years ago.
But although older people have provided a good labour source for a fast-running economy, the Department of Labour cautioned in a recent report that the steady increase in paid work for the 55+ age group may start to taper off.
Yet the demand for workers is still expected to increase, with estimates that another 95,000 employees will be needed by 2026 just for New Zealand to stand still. The author of the report “Maximising the Potential of Older Workers” Judith Davey, from Victoria University’s New Zealand Institute for Research on Ageing, argues that the problems associated with an ageing workforce need to be addressed not only because of personal inequities, but also as a way of “future-proofing” the country against the skills shortages that have emerged here.
“We are very unlikely to be able to fix this [shortage] by increasing immigration or raising the birthrate,” she says in her report, “so it is crucial that we improve and develop the human capital we already have, and the best prospect is to maximise the potential of older workers. If people in mid-life are unable to contribute to their full economic capacity because of unemployment, under-employment, premature retirement, discrimination or other circumstances, then this has serious implications for their futures, for business, for society and the economy.”
Equal Employment Opportunities commissioner Judy McGregor says the problem lies with retaining the over-65s. “There are large numbers of people who get to that mythical age of 65, and receipt of New Zealand Superannuation, who decide they can afford to quit or that they want to quit, and we need to be holding more of them in the workforce, at least for another two or three years.”
Like most OECD countries, New Zealand has an ageing population. Last year, just over 12 percent were older than 65. According to Department of Statistics projections, by 2039 that age group will comprise 25 percent of New Zealanders. Already, almost half the workforce is aged 40 or over.
One explanation why more people are taking up, or remaining in, paid work is the removal of compulsory retirement.
Another is that there has been a trend across the whole workforce to more flexible work arrangements, which have allowed older workers to stay on without having to work fulltime.
Increasing workforce participation by older women can also be explained by a generational effect – women born after World War II have entered the labour force in much larger numbers than their mothers’ or grandmothers’ generations. Now, as women age, they are continuing to work and, because some of them have moved in and out of paid work all their adult lives, the concept of retirement may not be the same as for men.
Although the statistics look positive for older people who want to work, it is not clear whether there has been a genuine change in employers’ attitudes. Traditionally, employers have been reluctant to hire people over 50, perceiving them as slower to adapt to change, less innovative, more likely to tire quickly and having a high rate of absenteeism. Either these views are changing or, in order to fill jobs, some bosses are willing to ignore negative stereotypes.
The increased workforce participation rate by older people may be nothing more than a product of a labour market that is willing to suck in all available labour when it is overheated, as it is at the moment. Should the economy turn sour, however, it might farewell its older workers first, and hire younger people.
Dr Sally Keeling, director of the institute for which Judith Davey works, says that because New Zealand was among the first countries to remove compulsory retirement, it could be leading the way in forging new attitudes towards older people in the workplace.
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