Social Position, Work Stress, and Retirement Intentions: A Study with Older Employees from 11 European Countries

Abstract

Using data from 11 European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) we explore associations between social position and retirement intentions in elder employees. Social position is defined in terms of three complementary measures of occupational position: occupational class, occupational status, and occupational skill level. Additionally, we study to what extent psychosocial stress at work, as measured by the demand–control and the effort–reward imbalance models, underlies the association between social position and retirement intention. For all three occupational classifications, findings show a social gradient of retirement intentions and of work stress. The lower the people’s social positions, the more likely they are to report retirement intentions and to experience poor working conditions. Furthermore, results of multivariate analyses indicate that parts of the association between occupational position and retirement intentions can be explained by a poor psychosocial work environment. Our findings suggest that promoting working conditions may help to keep older workers in employment, in particular among workers in low occupational position.