Concepts of work and retirement

Aging

There are endogenous and exogenous drivers behind changing meanings of work, retirement and aging. The exogenous, extrapersonal 'push' drivers are demographic and systemic. An aging workforce is for the first time larger than the workforce available to support them under current law, which has become traditional over some 75 years, and this can be seen as reciprocity for payments these 'retiring' seniors made over their work careers. This combined with increasing health adding years to life expectancy, and the result is a perfect storm of fewer paying more for longer. These external quality of life improvements have also disrupted traditional meanings of retirement age. If senior workers are effectively retiring at midlife instead of at the third quarter or fourth fifth, this is different than when the legal benchmarks were implemented. Once senior workers earn enough to derive income from other means than working for payroll, and if they choose to stop working that career, then this endogenous, interpersonal desire for growth beyond employment, leads to a redefinition of career as a tool to achieve independence, rather than as the major element defining personal identity over an adult life. Employment then becomes a necessary but temporary period like the school years, one we try to put behind us in order to pursue the work of achieving our real potential.

Still more exogenous workplace factors contribute to this evolution of the meaning of aging and work. Traditional employment along a gradual path up the company ladder to the gold watch (or perhaps partnership) is being undermined by a corporate shift toward piecework, part-time employment and outsourcing. If the most senior workers are the highest paid, especially in contractual positions like the public sector, then the employer may face an incentive to cut these highest labor costs first, under competitive business institutions at least. Add to this the complication of rapidly-evolving technology and best practice, and the result is a cost-benefit analysis between retraining a younger worker at a lower pay scale with more years to contribute, fewer years before drawing pension, but less on-the-job experience, versus retraining an older worker with fewer future years to operationalize that training investment and then drawing pension. The result will be empirical based on relative individual factors. If both senior and junior workers have to be retrained every year, the senior worker may be the better investment after all. One depressing outcome of this competitive push to reduce retirement-benefit cost by offering short-term, part-time and outsourced employment rather than the traditional career, is an implied peak after which workers become less employable the more expertise they have, such that the slide to senility is marked by lower and lower status jobs, because they earn too much at what they're trained for. Competitive incentive to reduce payroll by getting rid of the highest earners complicates and is driven by the demographic anomoly of the Baby Boomers outnumbering GenX. Electricians and biologists would call this a feedback loop.