Mandatory Retirement Research Articles

The Retirement Age: An Informative Analysis

Retirement is a critical concern as well as a critical event in the working life of every employee of a formal organization. The retirement age is a major aspect of management of employee retirement. Hardly research studies carried out to give an informative analysis which has both theoretical and practical importance are found, particularly in Sri Lanka which recently experienced a change of the retirement age, in fact an increase. This conceptual research paper was written to give answers for eleven research questions formulated with regard to the phenomenon of retirement age. The research questions were answered by adopting a desk research strategy. It was revealed that a retirement age exists for any permanent employment, it is important due to several valid reasons, it has a form called mandatory retirement age which is different from the minimum retirement age, mandatory retirement age exists owing to accepted reasons, it has a case against itself and a case in faour of itself, a universally accepted retirement age does not exist owing to some reasons, there is a possibility of extending the retirement age with certain pons and cons, and a good organization can determine appropriate retirement ages.

Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades

Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades

From Social Protection to Personal Protection: Implications for an Integrated Framework of Retirement Planning for Informal Workers in Ghana.

Without a mandatory retirement age, many informal workers are exploring diverse ways of ensuring their well-being as they age. This exploratory study focuses on the retirement plans of workers in Ghana’s informal sector to inform interventions to ensure their well-being. Findings from 35 in-depth interviews among self-employed informal workers in Adum-Kumasi, the largest hub of Ghana’s informal work, highlight that retirement planning is centred on self-protection through investment in economic and non-economic activities. The study contributes to the discourse on extending social protection coverage to informal work settings. It further recommends an integrated policy framework for social protection to cover a broad range of domains that are important for the well-being of informal workers in later life.

Comparative Analysis of the Effects of Retirement on Health Status of Older Adulthood.

This study examines the causal effect of retirement on the health of middle-aged and older adults in China. We used the mandatory retirement age in China as an instrument variable with a fuzzy discontinuity design. This served to examine the exogenous impact on retirement behavior. Two regression analyses were used, each with the dependent variable as self-assessed health status (SAH) and depression levels, respectively. Changes in an individual’s internal and external environment after retirement were associated with an increase in SAH and a decrease in depression. Highly educated men are 93.5% more likely to improve their health. Women are 0.26% less likely to be depressed. People with higher education tend to reduce their vigorous activities and increase walking for over 10 minutes after retirement. This study may promote research on aging and the health status of the Chinese population. It may provide a scientific basis for formulating, revising, and improving social security policies in China.

Retirement and health outcomes in a meta‐analytical framework

AbstractThis paper presents a meta‐analysis on the effects of retirement on health. We selected academic papers published between 2000 and 2021 and studying the impact of retirement on physical and mental health, self‐assessed general health, healthcare utilization and mortality. Our search resulted in a dataset consisting of 308 observations from 85 articles. Using meta‐regression analysis and after checking for the presence of publication bias, we found that the average effect of retirement on health outcomes is very small and barely significant, under the assumption of a common true effect. We applied model averaging techniques to explore possible sources of heterogeneity of the true effect. Our findings suggest that effect heterogeneity across results is explained by the differences in both health measurements and retirement schemes. In particular, mandatory or involuntary retirement is associated with a negative impact of retirement on health, although it is small in magnitude.

Retirement planning mistakes undermining the post-retirement adjustment and well-being

ABSTRACT The increased longevity of retiree populations calls for constant attention in addressing their social, economic, and psychological adjustment and well-being. Informed by a qualitative research approach, this study was conducted to explore the perspectives of both the employers and the employees (teacher retirees) on retirement planning mistakes that undermine the post-retirement adjustment and well-being. The findings revealed both systemic and behavioral mistakes that affect teacher retirees’ smooth transition from work to retirement, including low savings and debt accruals, limited access to retirement planning education, late family establishment, poor record management, and disregarding opportunities for career development. While the mistakes on each side are costly in isolation, their costs are substantial, irreversible, and have implications on time, health, and psychological well-being. The study recommends that the government timely pay statutory benefits to employees in line with the legal requirements to facilitate smooth retirement planning. Additionally, mandatory retirement planning education in the form of seminars and workshops should be provided to all potential retirees. This can be operational through systematizing retirement training as part of a career development plan in the policies, Public Service Acts and Public Service Social Security Acts.

Factors Influencing the Intention for Early Retirement: A Case Study Among Teachers at Secondary Cluster Schools in Dungun, Terengganu

Purpose: Teachers’ roles in delivering classroom instructions and executing lessons in this 21st century is much bigger than assumed by many who are not in the teaching field. Some people perceived teaching is a stressful job and those who do not have the passion would give up after a certain number of years. Many have opted for early retirement and this number has increased year by year. Thus, this study aims to analyze the factors (health, school management and workload) that influence teachers’ intention towards early retirement.
 Design/Methodology/Approach: 152 teachers were chosen from four cluster schools in Dungun, Terengganu and online questionnaires were distributed among them using Stratified Random Sampling Method. The data was analyzed using SPSS.
 Findings: The results show only teachers’ health influence them towards early retirement intention. Meanwhile, the other factors are viewed as a challenge in the teaching world and would not influence them to opt for early retirement.
 Implications/Originality/Value: This finding will assist the Ministry of Education in taking actions, to circumvent teachers from leaving their profession before reaching the compulsory retirement age. As a result, the school’s management will focus on improved alternatives in managing the teachers’ welfare and controlling the factors of early retirement among teachers.

Factors Influencing the Intention for Early Retirement: A Case Study Among Teachers at Secondary Cluster Schools in Dungun, Terengganu

Purpose: Teachers’ roles in delivering classroom instructions and executing lessons in this 21st century is much bigger than assumed by many who are not in the teaching field. Some people perceived teaching is a stressful job and those who do not have the passion would give up after a certain number of years. Many have opted for early retirement and this number has increased year by year. Thus, this study aims to analyze the factors (health, school management and workload) that influence teachers’ intention towards early retirement.
 Design/Methodology/Approach: 152 teachers were chosen from four cluster schools in Dungun, Terengganu and online questionnaires were distributed among them using Stratified Random Sampling Method. The data was analyzed using SPSS.
 Findings: The results show only teachers’ health influence them towards early retirement intention. Meanwhile, the other factors are viewed as a challenge in the teaching world and would not influence them to opt for early retirement.
 Implications/Originality/Value: This finding will assist the Ministry of Education in taking actions, to circumvent teachers from leaving their profession before reaching the compulsory retirement age. As a result, the school’s management will focus on improved alternatives in managing the teachers’ welfare and controlling the factors of early retirement among teachers.

Appointed or Elected: How Justices on Elected State Supreme Courts Are Actually Selected

During at least part of the post–World War II period, the constitutions of thirty-six states called for the popular election of the judges of the states’ highest courts. In practice, only slightly more than half of those judges (excluding strictly interim appointees) initially obtained their positions by election. This article examines the likelihood of initial election in actual practice, how it has varied over time, and various factors that might be related to election versus appointment (e.g., type of election, mandatory retirement). It concludes that state norms play a substantial role in determining patterns of actual selection.

The dignity of work: An ethical argument against mandatory retirement

The dignity of work: An ethical argument against mandatory retirement

Job Quality in the Late Career in Sweden, Japan and the United States.

Increasing numbers of older workers continue to work after being eligible to claim a state pension, yet little is known about the quality of these jobs. We examine how psychosocial and physical job quality as well as job satisfaction vary over the late career in three contrasting national settings: Sweden, Japan and the United States. Analyses using random effects modelling drew on data from the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (n = 13,936-15,520), Japanese Study of Ageing and Retirement (n = 3704) and the Health and Retirement Study (n = 6239 and 8002). Age was modelled with spline functions in which two knots were placed at ages indicating eligibility for pensions claiming or mandatory retirement. In each country, post-pensionable-age jobs were generally less stressful, freer and more satisfying than jobs held by younger workers, results that held irrespective of gender or education level.

Leaving the labor market: Exit routes, personality traits and well-being.

In this paper we examine the buffering effects of personality traits when people leave their work in later life. Using large-scale panel data for the UK, we show that depending on the exit route and satisfaction related to overall life and the domains of income and leisure, different personality traits act as moderators. Besides augmenting leisure satisfaction for those who hit mandatory retirement, conscientiousness augments life satisfaction for those becoming unemployed. On the contrary, extraversion mitigates satisfaction with life, income, and leisure for those who retire early. This may be an indication that extraverted individuals who tend to be sociable and outgoing may suffer when losing social relationships from their work. At the same time, extraversion may be helpful in augmenting leisure satisfaction for those who stop working for reasons related to ill health or family care. Neuroticism augments income satisfaction for those who become unemployed, which may reflect that people high in neuroticism had a lower “baseline level” of income satisfaction relative to typical individuals so they were not affected as much. Finally, agreeableness mitigates life and leisure satisfaction for those hitting mandatory retirement, as is also the case with openness in terms of income satisfaction.

Direct and Indirect Income Support and Their Determinants: Developing an Income Profile for Older Adults in Sri Lanka

Given the rapid increase in population aging and older population dependency rates, a sound understanding of old-age income support systems is vital for formulating effective policy responses. This research studies old-age income sources to develop an income profile for older adults in Sri Lanka, measuring direct and indirect income sources using nationally representative survey data from Household Income and Expenditure Surveys 1995/1996 and 2016. In the absence of direct information on intergenerational transfers, we investigate the material support older adults receive from their families, an essential source of income in many developing countries. We found that while indirect income support, cash transfers, and employment are vital sources of old-age income, there have been significant changes in the composition of old-age income over time. Indirect income support is becoming less important, and income from employment and formal cash transfers is becoming more prominent. These results highlight potential avenues to improve the economic well-being of older adults, such as increasing the mandatory retirement age and taking measures to provide decent employment opportunities for older adults while also expanding pension coverage to all types of workers and access to social security for vulnerable groups such as women or the poor.

Unintended consequences of the retirement‐age extension in South Korea

In this study, we investigate the effects of the policy on the legal retirement age of 60 (or above) implemented in Korea in 2016. It was generally expected that the implementation of the policy would extend the retirement age of workers and provide them with minimum employment up to the age of 60. However, our empirical analysis provides evidence contrary to general expectations. First, post the introduction of the policy, the probability of workers retiring at the mandatory retirement age has decreased, whereas the probability of workers retiring early for involuntary reasons in their 50s has increased. Second, the workers who were predicted to benefit from the policy had trouble retaining their jobs until the legal retirement age of 60. These results demonstrate the possibility that companies attempted to terminate their senior workers before they reached the mandatory retirement age of 60 by means of recommendations to resign and offers of honourable retirement. In conclusion, we found that it is difficult to provide actual employment protection up to the legal retirement age by making it compulsory through legislation.

Readiness Towards Working Beyond Retirement Age in Public Sector: Are We There Yet?

With aging population and the need for high productivity, the role of workforce in organizations is critical to ensure a continuous economic growth. The workforce is at stake as the younger generation is getting smaller while the older generation continues to leave the employment after serving the retirement age limit, leaving a gap in the productive output along with the increase of population life expectancy as indicated by World Health Organization. As older people live longer and healthier, this makes them available to participate the workforce after employment as the retirees will later has an idling yet productive years that is wasted by staying unemployed. The worldwide on-going trend of returning to employment after retirement (or unretirement) seems to be the solution to this shortfall. Equipped and advantaged with invaluable experience, knowledge, skill, and wisdom gathered throughout lifelong learning and working years, the readiness of these retirees needs to be evaluated prior to rejoining the workforce as presumably, they are physically and mentally reduced after passing productive years. This study investigates through a qualitative study using thematic analysis on the readiness of Government retirees to return to the employment after serving the mandatory retirement age in respect of the population aging and maintaining workforce. Four (4) emerged themes were identified that helps to explain what it takes for retirees to unretire.

Does the early retirement policy really benefit women?

China’s mandatory retirement policy requires female workers to retire five years earlier than their male counterparts. The conventional wisdom behind this policy is that it benefits women by relieving them from work earlier, providing them with more years of public pension benefits than men. However, is the early retirement policy really welfare-improving for women? In this paper, we quantitatively evaluate the welfare consequences of China’s gender-specific mandatory retirement policy using a calibrated overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets. We find that early mandatory retirement reduces welfare for women. One of the reasons for this result is that China’s public pension benefits are only partially indexed to economic growth, and therefore, women who retire earlier than men benefit less from economic growth. Our quantitative results suggest that equalizing the retirement age across genders will generate welfare gains for both men and women. Furthermore, we find low replacement rate and high men to women ratio diminish this welfare gain.

The Temporal Borders of Transnational Belonging: Aging Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore

Amidst public debate about the need for migrant domestic workers to assist with eldercare in Asia, we hear little about the futures of the workers themselves. This paper focuses on low-wage migrant domestic workers of different nationalities who have spent decades in Singapore, and how they imagine, prepare for, or avoid discussion of their aging futures. Singapore’s immigration regime enforces mandatory retirement and return migration when domestic workers reach 60 years old. These impending displacements evoke mixed emotions as migrant women re-evaluate questions of care, home, and the relationships they have developed with employers, kin back home, and communities abroad. In this paper, I explore how temporal borders operate alongside spatial borders to shape migrant women’s futures, illuminating uneven intersections between citizenship, gender, and care over the lifecourse. I further trace how the women navigate, ignore, push back, and bridge the anticipated ruptures of temporal borders.

Chinese Versus United States Workplace Ageism as GATE-ism: Generation, Age, Tenure, Experience.

Ageism is a pan-cultural problem, and correspondingly, increased research attention worldwide has focused on how a person’s age drives prejudice against them. Nevertheless, recent work argues that chronological age alone is a limited predictor of prejudice—particularly in the workplace, where age conflates intertwined elements (e.g., life stage and work experience), and across cultures, in which the nature of ageism can substantially differ. A recent organizational behavior (GATE) framework advocates for extending beyond numerical age alone, focusing instead on prejudice arising from workers’ perceived Generation (birth cohort), Age (life stage), Tenure (time with organization), and Experience (accumulated skillset over time). In addition to clarifying the multifaceted nature of workplace ageism, GATE helps uncover potential cultural ageism differences. Using the United States and China as focal Western and Eastern prototypes, the current paper compares Eastern and Western cultures through a GATE Lens. Eastern and Western cultures adopt different perceptions of generations (e.g., United States “Boomers,” versus Chinese “Cultural Revolution” generation), elder life stages (United States warm-but-incompetent older adults, versus Eastern pragmatic elder resource concerns), organizational tenure expectations (Western job-hopping, versus Eastern filial-piety-based loyalty), and desired experience levels (shaped different by higher Eastern frequency of mandatory retirement practices and family business ventures). Moreover, existing research offers clues for how workplace GATE-ism likely differs between cultures, but more research is needed. Future research should adopt a nuanced GATE conception of “age”-ism, toward enhanced ageism understanding and the ability to utilize a globally aging workforce.

As ciências sociais e a contrarrevolução permanente

O presente artigo possui o propósito de analisar a perspectiva de Florestan Fernandes sobre o papel político dos cientistas sociais, como categoria social, após sua aposentadoria compulsória da Universidade de São Paulo (USP) em 1969, por força do regime ditatorial implantado em 1964. O método de pesquisa utilizado se baseou na reconstrução dos argumentos de Fernandes em seus trabalhos da época, delimitando-se as leituras em torno de seus ensaios sobre a questão dos intelectuais. A principal tese aqui defendida assume que a análise sociológica dos cientistas sociais elaborada por Florestan Fernandes se relaciona com sua categoria teórica de contrarrevolução permanente, ideia bastante desenvolvida em suas análises da ditadura civil-militar (1964-1985). O autor produz uma verdadeira sociologia dos intelectuais, ainda hoje pouco explorada pelos intérpretes de seu pensamento, especialmente preocupada com a situação dos países periféricos e de capitalismo dependente.

Relicensing Practices of Taxi Drivers and Crane Operators Aged 70 Years and above in Singapore

Singapore is a rapidly ageing society, underpinned by national policies to promote successful and active ageing. Whilst older worker participation in the workforce is encouraged, policymakers are challenged to ensure that work competency is not compromised with any normal age- and/or health-related changes. This paper will briefly outline how policymakers responded to the needs of two subgroups of older workers aged 70 years and above (taxi drivers; crane operators) who desire to continue working in the last two decades. Whilst a mandatory retirement age policy exists for older taxi drivers in Singapore, there is none for older crane operators. Despite this, stricter relicensing protocols were introduced for both types of workers, with active collaboration involving additional occupational therapy services for functional work competency assessments to complement the routine medical fitness screening. Comparisons will be made of these two relicensing frameworks, including the mention of any relevant studies to align with the call of evidence-based practices. In mid-2020, the relicensing policy for older taxi drivers was revised based on findings of a retrospective national database study. Currently, a 4-year national database study on older crane operators aged 70 years and above is being undertaken with preliminary findings to be reported.