There was a time when older workers looked forward to retirement at the age of 65. The retirement years were regarded as a reward for a lifetime of work, often within the same business. There would be a bit of a work do, a few speeches. Perhaps the big boss might come down to thank the loyal employee for his or her years of service. The office wag might interject with funny comments. A signed card would be opened and individuals thanked. There would be tears, perhaps. And then off the older worker would go, out into the world of retirement, content, thoughtful, a bit sad, but excited about the travel plans that lay ahead.
The ideal for this generation of retirees was to toddle around Australia with a caravan, to enjoy their grandchildren, to do a spot of fishing and maybe some volunteering. All this was to be fitted in between retirement at 65 and the inevitable onset of ill health from the mid-70s onwards. There was no time to lose.
I think the retirees of the 2020s will have a different experience. The joy of grandchildren will be a common thread but the relationship with the workplace will change. Serving many years at a single workplace is less common today; it’s more likely that over the final decade or so of a person’s working life a series of changes will diminish their role. Some will be let go; many will struggle to find a niche that values their skill-set.
And yet recent employment figures suggest that many people are working beyond the traditional retirement age of 65. Between February and November last year, the number of workers aged 65-plus increased by 3 per cent, according to ABS Labour Force estimates. This equates to roughly 2000 extra workers added to the over-65 workforce every month during the lockdown. No other workforce age group expanded at such a rate.
The burgeoning refuse-to-retire workforce now includes those who benefited from the introduction of free tertiary education in the 1970s. And it makes sense that their skills are now in demand. The pandemic has stymied the supply of foreign students and skilled labour, resulting in greater demand for degree-qualified workers who in another time might have happily wafted off into retirement.
And so now there is a new model for the retirement years. Many older workers choose to work on, picking up a contract here, an opportunity there, blending work with lifestyle throughout their 60s before eventually giving in to the demons that whisper: How many good years do you have left? Do you really want to keep doing this?
The average Australian now lives into his or her early 80s – that’s at least 15-17 years spent in the traditional retirement stage. Allowing for ill-health or simply slowing down, it leaves a full decade beyond the traditional retirement age for productive (income-earning) work. And the next generation of retirees, born in the 1950s, are better skilled and enjoy better health than preceding generations of 60-somethings, partly because fewer of them smoked. This generation is already reimagining retirement by working on while the pandemic disrupts the skills pipeline, delivering labour into a workplace unused to having mature workers around. This presents a remarkable opportunity for skills transfer, for mentoring and training the millennial generation as they prepare to assume the mantle of leadership.
If life expectancy continues to improve, the retirement years need to be reimagined. The pandemic-inspired older-worker surge is part of a bigger movement in which the working life is extended for those who, by choice, refuse to retire.
Why don’t we embrace eccentrics in Australia anymore?
The recently departed, singular filmmaker David Lynch had the strength to be exactly himself. Parts of the world venerate independent thinkers like him but our nation is not one of them.
Listening for signs of life
This tiny swamp wallaby joey, rescued from its dead mother’s pouch, was brought to a wildlife vet who listened for a heartbeat with his stethoscope.