Bourdieu's capitals matter: tracking longer working lives across Europe.

Background: Reforms are changing pension systems in many European countries, in order to both restrict early retirement and force people to extend their working life. From occupational therapy and occupational science perspectives, studies focusing on aspects of working life that motivate the older worker is urgent.Aim: The aim was to describe incentives behind an extended working life among people over age 65.Method: Focus group methodology was used, with participants ages 66–71, from varying work fields: construction and technical companies and the municipal elderly care sector.Findings: Work was considered important and valuable to the degree of how challenging work was, the possibilities for inclusion in a team of colleagues and the chances for better personal finances. Amongst all, the participants expressed a feeling of a strengthened identity by being challenged and having the opportunity to manage working tasks.Conclusion: The finding showed the actual reasons behind an extended working life among older workers. However, a risk of rising social inequity may appear with increased working life if older people are forced to extend their working life due to a difficult financial situation as a pensioner. A variety of retirement options and initiatives in order to support older workers are justified.

BackgroundRecent analyses explored associations of welfare state regimes with population health, with particular interest in differences between social protection-oriented versus more liberal regimes. Little is known about such associations with...

This study examined retirement decisions among people who had left working life before 65 years of age and those working beyond 65 years in an extended working life. The results were used to make a model about their considerations, weighting and decision making, and important factors and themes in working beyond 65 years of age or retiring before 65. The interviewees seemed to have considered and weighed their own best life balance to finally result in their identity as (older) worker or early retiree. They included their work situation and social surroundings in descriptions of their planning and retirement decision making. The most important themes in these descriptions were (i) personal health and well-being; (ii) personal finances; (iii) possibilities for social inclusion; and (iv) possibilities for self-crediting by meaningful activities. Those identifying themselves as older workers had possibilities in their life situation to manage their work in relation to their functional ageing and health situation; felt important to others and socially included in the workplace; and did meaningful tasks and felt empowered in their working life. Those who had left the working life before 65 years of age describe a better possibility to this outside the working life and left as soon as they acquire a sufficient pension. The results and model presented here on how people perceive their identity as older worker or early retiree will hopefully contribute to understanding retirement planning and to the formulation of strategies to extend working life.

The financial deficits of many social security systems caused by ageing populations and stagnating economies are forcing workers to retire later from the labour market. An extended working life, combined with rapid technological progress in many sectors, is likely making older workers' skills obtained in school obsolete. In this context, lifelong investment in training is widely recognised among the international research and policy community as a key element to increase or at least limit the decline in productivity of older workers. This paper investigates the relationship between training undertaken by European older workers and their wages, relying on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. There is no evidence of training wage premium for older workers residing in many European countries including Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Very high premiums are instead found for Austria, Germany, Greece and Italy. It is, however, likely that these high premiums are overestimated due to training endogeneity and sample selection bias.

Policies supporting longer working lives have to a great extent described older people as the problem. In this chapter we challenge this description by looking critically at some of the assumptions underlying the extending working life agenda. The chapter begins with a discussion about the homogeneous representations of increased life expectancy, where we show that the neglect of growing differences in longevity takes privileged aging as the starting point. Next we discuss the use of the concept of genderequality to illustrate how male life courses are taken as the norm. The chapter then considers how increased individualization and the conditions that work organizations provide frames older people as all the same leading to widening inequalities amongst those in retirement. All taken together, extended working life leads to be an individualization of the risks of working life. Based on an analysis of the debates at the country level we further argue that the extended working life agenda is a top-down process and a globally spread implementation of an economically based political project.

The aging population and subsequent demographic shift have driven the Extended Working Lives (EWL) agenda to become an important policy goal. However, millions of older workers leave the workforce each year due to unsupportive work environments attributed in part or in whole to ageist policies and practices, raising questions about older workers’ perceptions of themselves in the workforce and what this means for the EWL agenda. Using data from 25 qualitative interviews, our research finds that ageism continues to play a part in the decision-making process of older workers when considering their future. These findings fall into two categories: Age barriers within the workplace and Perceptions. Age barriers within the workplace include tasks or events that incite a feeling of separation from younger peers, such as training, social interaction, and digitization. Perceptions are older workers’ internalized expectations of themselves and their abilities. Our findings suggest these perceptions do not align with the reality for older workers, thus contributing to internalized ageism. The need to target stereotypical attitudes towards older workers was highlighted as an age barrier to employment before the turn of the century. However, despite the Extended working Lives, Active Aging and Fuller Working Lives Agendas changing the policy context around older workers, this research suggests that the same stereotypes continue to pervade older workers both externally from policy and practice and internally in self-perceptions. A life-course approach to policy is needed to improve conditions for older workers and to challenge ageist stereotypes in a meaningful way.

Through a comparative perspective, the present paper sheds light on recent policy trends and political strategies to reform pensions in Europe. Pension reforms are a risky process. Even when reforms pass, their implementation is uncertain. Risks of partial or total reversal are always present.
\nAfter the brief introduction, Section one provides a comparative review of the measures passed in different European countries in the aftermath of the recent economic downturn. Many of these measures resemble what was included in the Swiss Old Age Security 2020. The increase of the pensionable age, its equalization between men and women, and the increase of the system revenues have been part of many reform packages across Europe. While in the following we refer to broad reform trends, we mainly focus on three cases: Denmark, Germany and Italy. They are representative of different pension models and different political contexts . All have passed major reforms in the last two decades – before and after the spread of the financial crisis – with different processes of implementation. The key concepts we use to assess policies are reform reversal and stability.
\nSection two focuses on the main traits of the politics of pensions. Through the analysis of the same three countries we see that reform packages are often politically fragile. Many European countries have experienced contingent agreements - between political and social forces - that tend to be contested in the longer-term. We refer to few major challenges to pro-reform consensus. The changing economic conditions, the emergence of new political forces, and the ongoing re-framing of policy priorities may weaken the pro-reform consensus. On top of that, reform packages are complex deals that are difficult to design and implement. Their multi-dimensional nature does often lead to problems of incoherence that weaken the political support for reform and provide room for further contestation. Here the key concepts we propose are those of inclusion or insulation as typical traits of the policymaking process. 
\nThe brief comparative analysis seems to prove that the more inclusive is the policymaking, the lower is the risk of contestation in the longer-term. In the concluding section, some final remarks address the prospects for pension policy and politics in the context of population ageing and austerity.

Societal interest in enabling older workers to prolong their working life has increased in recent years due to demographic change. Managers have a key role in extending working life among employees, because they control the organisation, work environment and potential measures enabling older workers to extend their working life. To examine managers' attitudes to their older workers. A cross-sectional study based on a questionnaire answered by 905 managers working in different municipal departments in Sweden. Managers' attitude to their older workers' retirement time appeared to be associated with their own retirement planning. Managers who themselves wanted to work beyond 66 years considered it more important to keep older workers beyond that age than managers planning to retire at 66. The managers reported that older people were more careful, possessed experiences, skills and life knowledge that were useful in the workplace and helped guide new employees and younger employees. On the other hand, the majority of managers agreed with the stereotypical claim that older people are slower, resistant to change, less well educated and hostile to technology. The study stated that the managers' attitude to their own retirement planning affected their attitude to the retirement age for their older employees. This is important to consider in the debate of delayed retirement, and to perform activities and incentives in the society to change those attitudes if more people should get the possibility to an extended working life. Additional, almost 50% of the managers surveyed recognised possible measures for adapting work tasks to suit their ageing employees. However, only 5% of managers reported the existence of organisational measures targeted at promoting a sustainable work situation for older employees in their municipal department. The managers were interested in retaining older employees mainly if those older employees had some specific skills that were needed by the department, and not in general.

BackgroundIn recent decades, many countries have observed increasing labor force participation beyond the state pension age (SPA). However, there is a lack of research on employment beyond SPA and how it relates to older workers’ health. Moreover, there is a need to better understand how institutional factors affect the relationship between older workers’ employment and health. In this study, we examine simultaneous employment and health trajectories over 11 years in 12 countries from Europe and the Americas, and study how these trajectories differ by welfare state regime and level of old-age pension redistribution.MethodsWe used a harmonized pooled-country dataset of 3699 older workers based on four representative panel surveys: the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), and the Chilean Social Protection Survey (EPS). We conducted multichannel sequence analysis to estimate the types of simultaneous employment–health trajectories, and multinomial regression analysis to examine the relationship between trajectory types and institutional factors.ResultsWe found that late retirement was equally associated with poor and good health. There is also a higher prevalence of late retirement trajectories in combination with poor health in liberal welfare regimes and in countries with lower levels of old-age pension redistribution.ConclusionOur study indicates that nonliberal welfare regimes and redistributive old-age pension policies may be better suited to protect vulnerable workers while providing those in good health with the opportunity to work beyond the SPA.

The proportion of elderly individuals in the population is increasing in most industrial countries. This demographic change increases the need of more people who work until an older age to maintain the welfare in the states. However, it is not clear if older employees are interested to in generally extend the working life to an older age. It is also not stated if managers in organizations are interested of extending their older employees working life. The overall aim of this study was to examine older employees own experience of their work situation and ageing at work. The aim was also to investigate their managers' attitude to them as older employees. The investigation was conducted by focusing group interviews with employees aged 55 - 63 years, and with their mangers aged 40 - 63 years. The findings stated that the older employees' consideration for an extend working life seemed to be based on their health and health problems in relation to their work situation; their personal economy; their managers attitude to them as elderly and the possibility to social inclusion at work; and their possibilities for self-crediting activities at work despite their age. The managers seem to have a positive attitude to some of the older employees' experience knowledge, if that was in the same direction as their own interest. Otherwise the mangers saw the older employees as problem and obsoleted. The managers were also negative to older employees who got health problems which effect the work production negatively. The older workers in this study described managers' importance to if they want to work in an extended working life. However, the managers seem not to understand their own importance in this and were not interested to keep all elderly in an extended working life.

Late Working Life in Four European Countries sheds new light on the role of life course factors on circumstances in late working life, including the impact of exclusion and inequalities on opportunities to prolong employment. Focusing on Germany, Poland, Sweden and the UK, it distils the key findings from each country, delivering an up-to-date comparative analysis of the policies in the four contrasting countries. Enabling the development of best practice recommendations in relation to Extended Working Lives (EWLs) to inform policy discussions and developments and taking a life course approach to considering EWLs, chapters argue there is a tendency for policies to be too simplistic and cross-sectional, failing to sufficiently engage with the need to develop a systematic long-term life course focused approach to policy design. While the general impact of EWL policies on labour force participation among older workers has been explored, limited attention has been paid to the heterogeneous nature of this demographic group and the implications of their diverse life course experiences. Providing national case studies regarding EWLs policies and inequalities therein, these examples expose hidden inequalities among older workers and how these can be addressed. Demonstrating the need to look beyond notions of late working lives in isolation and to explore the impact of longer-term life course orientated experiences, this collection addresses a major gap in the academic literature in social policy, employment, and ageing.

BackgroundDue to transformations in pension policies, older workers, even those with poor health, are expected to extend their working lives. In this context, favourable working conditions are frequently discussed as...

Decades of research have shown that health is a key determinant of labour force participation in later life. As the ageing global population necessitates extended working lives (EWLs) for broader economic sustainability, the importance of the older population for the labour market is emphasised. Understanding the role of health and health inequality across the life course is crucial for impactful policy development to protect the health of the older workforce and encourage participation in EWLs. Using 100 interviews on risks and turning points in working life with older workers in Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the UK, this research explores the role of health as a barrier and facilitator of EWLs across the working life course. Drawing on policy and literature to contextualise our findings, this research reveals the role of health in retirement planning, including assumptions about health decline, impact on work, and the importance of partner’s health. Health as a ‘push and pull’ factor is also explored, with good health both fostering labour market engagement and encouraging early retirement, while physical and mental health can be both positively and negatively impacted by work. Inequalities by sector of employment, gender, and education level are also explored, with all four countries facing a ‘double bind’ whereby the most vulnerable must work longer for financial security but are limited by poor health. For future older populations to be healthier and more productive the current treatment-based model of health care needs to be challenged with preventative policy interventions throughout the life course.

Population ageing presents major challenges to the welfare system across the European Union. Consequently, emphasizing delayed retirement age and extended working lives abound in political discussions. Researchers have recognized numerous problems, which make the extended working life a challenging political task. One of these problems are citizens’ negative attitudes toward delayed retirement and extended working life. In this paper, we approach this “attitude problem” from the perspective of discursive social psychology and analyze the variation in the way aspirations to extend working lives are evaluated by older workers. The data analyzed in the study consists of interviews where participants between 50 and 65 years of age comment on the political goal to extend working lives. The article sheds light on the “attitude problem” by turning the attention from underlying individual preferences to discursive resources used to undermine the political goal and the situational functions these evaluative practices have.

Purpose Drawing on the social information processing theory, this study aims to investigate the effect of age-inclusive HR practices (AIHRP) on older workers’ willingness to delay retirement and explore how and when this effect occurs. Design/methodology/approach Three waves of survey data are collected from 272 older workers in China. PROCESS MACRO and Bootstrapping were used to test theoretical hypotheses. Findings Results show that AIHRP positively affects older workers’ willingness to delay retirement both directly and indirectly through perceived internal marketability. Essentialist beliefs about cognitive aging (EBCA) negatively moderate these effects, with the indirect effect being weaker for employees with higher EBCA. Research limitations/implications First, the authors take the lead in linking AIHRP and older employees’ willingness to delay retirement. This provides a new explanation of AIHRP’s impact and broadens the AIHRP’s outcome. Second, by exploring the mediating role of perceived internal marketability, the authors not only provide new insights on the mechanisms of increasing delay retirement willingness but also reveal the “black box” between the AIHRP and willingness to delay retirement. Third, the moderating role of EBCA broadens the AIHRP’s boundary conditions and enriches the EBCA literature. All variables were measured through self-reports, which is the limitation of this study. Practical implications The findings have several practical implications. First, the leadership personnel throughout the firm should be conscious of the crucial role of AIHRP. Second, organizations should also value the contributions of older employees and create a working environment where they contribute their own value, which will help them feel their added value to the organization at work and increase older workers’ willingness to delay retirement. Third, organizations can alter older employees’ EBCA through proactive education, instilling the belief that both individuals and the external environment can intervene in the cognitive resource loss during the aging process through collective efforts. Social implications The findings have some social implications. First, the results of this study effectively answer the question of how organizations can improve older employees’ willingness to delay retirement and make delayed retirement policies more effective. Second, this study provides theoretical guidance for organizations and society to manage older workers by proving the role of AIHRP, which is conducive to alleviating social problems such as youth labor shortage and increased burden of retirement. Third, the authors can contribute to dispelling pervious incorrect stereotypes that providing older workers with training opportunities and equal resources brings little benefit. Originality/value Although government and organizations are increasingly concerned about how to improve older workers’ willingness to delay retirement, little is known about it. Unlike the future time or social-exchange perspective predominantly used in previous studies on AIHRP, this study takes the lead in exploring the effect and mechanisms of AIHRP on older workers’ willingness to delay retirement based on the social information processing perspective. The findings not only deepen the understanding of perceived internal marketability and EBCA but also contribute significantly to the broader literature on the connection of AIHRP and career choice.