There is no excuse for it…..
I heard it again on a recent National Radio discussion between a very experienced broadcaster and two academics in the field of gerontology and population health. They should have known better.
In workshops I often ask people if New Zealand/Australia has a retirement age. Consistently around fifteen to twenty per cent will say yes. If the politicians have been talking about it and there is a high level of media comment the percentage can go as high as thirty to forty per cent or even higher. In one recent workshop all participants told me that New Zealand’s retirement age is 65.
Today most countries do not have a compulsory age at which people must finish work. New Zealand removed compulsory retirement in 1999. In the United Kingdom regulations passed in 2006 made it illegal to force anyone to retire at 65. In Australia compulsory retirement was abolished in the Commonwealth public service in 2001. The Federal Age Discrimination Act was passed in 2004; the Fair Work Act in 2009 and there are relevant provisions in various States.
We do not have a retirement age, what we have is an age at which people are entitled to a state funded aged pension. The only thing that changes when you turn 65 is you have a new income stream.
Yet I still hear the phrase “retirement age” or the “traditional retirement age”. Both inferring that there is a time when you should go. American researcher Gail Sheehy, wrote extensively on life stages in her first book, Passages, published in 1976. In Understanding Mens Passages,[i] a sequel published twenty two years later, she observed that the word “retire” is synonymous with discard, dismiss, resign, retreat, seclude oneself, be unsociable, go to bed. She, like many others goes on to suggest we should retire the word “retire” and replace it with a word that is much more active. She suggests, “redirect”. A time in your life when you want to redirect your energies, talents and time.
So while we no longer have a compulsory retirement age, we do have an age at which people have access to state funded superannuation, age pensions or their private savings. For some this may create the option financially to make the move from employment to “retirement” or even to a new form of contribution through volunteering be it to their profession, community or family.
Chris Farrell an economic journalist is of the view that with the boomer generation living longer many more people will be extending their working lives. “We’re at the early stages of a long, difficult transition toward a different vision of the elder years, less a model of disengagement from work and neighbourhood to one of continuing engagement in work and community.”[ii]
The reality is that more and more people are choosing the age at which they “retire” or alter the nature of their working life. It has little to do with the age of entitlement to an age benefit. For a growing number the intention is to never retire in the traditional sense, they cannot imagine not working in some way, even if it is part time. The New Zealand projections are that by 2050 sixty five per cent of men and 55 percent of women aged 65 – 69 will still be working. The even more interesting projection is that twelve percent of men and ten percent of women over 80 are expected to still be in the workforce.[iii]
Why is it that we keep talking about the age of retirement when there is no such thing?
In my next blog I will talk about the recent history of the concept of retirement. Did you know the first pension plan was created as recently as 1889?
Geoff Pearman January 2016
[i] Sheehy G (1998) Understanding Men’s Passages Random House
[ii] Farrell C (2014) Unretirement How boomers are changing the way we think about work, community and the Good Life. Bloomsbury Press NY
[iii] Business of Ageing 2015 Update Ministry of Social Development New Zealand