Golden years at work are the hidden treasure of the old

The writer is author of ‘Extra Time: Ten Lessons for An Ageing World’

Once upon a time, the route to happiness was supposedly to retire in your early sixties with a decent pension, get out the golf clubs and start, er, swinging. That was the vision of the “golden years”, sold to us by American marketers since the 1970s. But a Spanish plan to pay workers to postpone retirement is a harbinger of a future in which persuading oldies to keep slogging away could prove as important as trying to woo younger ones with heartfelt mission statements.

I sometimes give talks about the future of work, and the challenge of managing a workforce which will soon span five generations. Most of the questions I get are about the young: how to recruit Generation Z and retain footloose millennials. There is far less interest in the over-fifties and how to keep them happy. But if people live to 100, and remain productive into their seventies and eighties, that is a question employers should start asking.

In offering to pay people up to €12,000 to work beyond the pension age of about 66, the Spanish government hopes to reduce the deficit in its social security budget and to placate the EU, which is demanding reforms in return for coronavirus aid. Spain is not alone in worrying that its pensions may be unaffordable. But the better news for older workers is that their talents may be needed as labour pools shrink.

I know this goes against the grain of arguments about the Fourth Industrial Revolution sweeping jobs away. But although the robots are coming, Japan and other rich countries with low birth rates are running out of humans with the right skills. The prosaic reality, as the baby boomers retire, is one of shortages which technology can’t yet fill.

Already people who were once considered over the hill are being asked to stay on. To head off a recruitment crisis, the British government has just raised the retirement age for judges and magistrates from 70 to 75. The NHS has been trying for years to dissuade nurses from leaving their jobs. There were about 40,000 nurse vacancies before the pandemic, not just due to Brexit but because so many had left. In 2012, a third of NHS staff were over 50.

The US has a similar problem. Two thirds of nurses in 1990 were baby boomers and, as that group steps back, it has been said that the US healthcare system is suffering “a significant loss of expertise”. There are ways to entice older nurses to stay on — but they involve being adaptable and creative about their needs.

This is not just a public sector issue. In 2018, when the UK came closer to full employment than at any time since the early 1970s, there were skills shortages in IT, construction, leisure and hospitality. Yet many companies I speak to still think about staff over 50 as a separate category: on their way out, rather than a part of the future.

 Not every 75-year-old judge is a genius, of course, nor is every 60-year-old nurse tough enough to carry on. Lee Iacocca, who became Chrysler chairman at 53, famously quipped that “I had people at Chrysler who were 40 but acted 80, and I had 80-year-olds who could do everything a 40-year-old can”. Lumping people together by age makes little sense in a world where some people are what the Japanese call “young-old”: healthy and energetic into their seventies and eighties.

Economists are out of date when they calculate dependency ratios on the assumption that the working population is aged between 16 and 64. This leads to gloomy predictions about the growing burden of the retired, but ignores the fact that at least one in four adults in the US and UK have been “unretiring” and going back to work, sometimes years after they enjoyed the official office send-off. Some do this for financial reasons, others because they are bored and have more to give.

A big question is whether keeping older people on for longer will block the talented young from climbing the ladder. When Oxford academics challenged the university’s policy of forced retirement before the age of 69, they argued that it cut off some world-leading thinkers in their prime. However, this drew the retort that they were blighting the chances of doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars.

Economists often dismiss the idea that there is a finite amount of work as the “lump-of-labour fallacy”, because a growing economy creates more opportunities for everyone. Retaining Professor Past-It may deny promotion to Miss Super-Brain at one university. But she can apply elsewhere. The fear is that technology will lead to jobless growth. Daniel Susskind, in his book A World Without Work, warns that we may commit a “lump of labour fallacy” if we ignore the risk that automation will increase demand, but for artificial intelligence and computers rather than for humans.

While we wait to see who is right, the growing burden of state pensions makes it imperative to utilise older people if we can. Educated professionals have a reasonably bright future: research suggests that people who found tech businesses in their fifties, for example, have higher success rates than those in their mid-twenties. The challenge will be in convincing more people to stick with thorny personnel and legal issues than enjoy the garden.

I have been shocked to meet executives in big consulting and accounting firms who want to plan their exit before they get pushed out at 60. Most are in their early fifties, at the peak of their earning power, yet mentally they have already left.

Employers may want to rethink the “golden years” as ones where their staff stay on the books.