Having a Post-Retirement Job: Improvisation and Containing Commitments

This qualitative paper focuses on individuals who work after pensionable age, a distinctive period in the late career when workers are supported by the known and reliable income of a pension. Using constant comparative analysis, we analyzed interviews from a purposive sample of 25 Swedish people in their late sixties and early seventies. We examined conditions for being in paid work in terms of enabling factors (self-employment, shift work, shortage occupation), improvisation, and the role of chance. The interviews revealed that post-retirement workers took charge of the aspects of work that mattered most to them, evading the disciplinary aspects of work by controlling scheduling and limiting the duration of their commitment. These constrained commitments had knock-on effects of improving psychosocial working conditions. Women and immigrants—groups facing low pensions—experienced the greatest financial consequences of being unable to work in their retirement years in order to supplement their pension income.

How do employers think about older workers?

PurposeHigher pensionable age in many countries that are part of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and a shrinking pension income force older people to postpone their retirement. Yet, age-based discrimination in employers' decisions is a significant barrier to their employment. Hence, this paper aims to explore employers' attitudes regarding the employment of workers aged 60–70, striving for a better understanding of age discrimination.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 30 managers, experts and employees in retirement age in Israel.FindingsFindings reveal a spectrum of employers' attitudes toward the employment of older workers. The authors' analytical contribution is a conceptual typology based on employers' perceived ability to employ older workers and their stated attitudes toward the employment of older workers.Social implicationsThe insights that emerge from this research are fundamental for organizational actors' ability to expand the productive, unbiased employment of older workers.Originality/valueBy understanding employers' preferences and perspectives and the implications on employers' ability and/or willingness to employ older workers, this research will help policymakers formulate and implement policy innovations that address these biases.

The nature of paid work in the retirement years

Ever more people are in paid work following the age of state pension availability, and yet the experience of working in this phase of the late career has been little studied. We interviewed a purposive sample of 25 Swedish people in their mid- to late sixties and early seventies, many of whom were or had recently been working while claiming an old-age pension. The data were analysed with constant comparative analysis in which we described and refined categories through the writing of analytic memos and diagramming. We observed that paid work took place within a particular material, normative and emotional landscape: a stable and secure pension income decommodifying these workers from the labour market, a social norm of a retired lifestyle and a looming sense of contraction of the future. This landscape made paid work in these years distinctive: characterised by immediate intrinsic rewards and processes of containing and reaffirming commitments to jobs. The oldest workers were able to craft assertively the temporal flexibility of their jobs in order to protect the autonomy and freedom that retirement represented and retain favoured job characteristics. Employed on short-term (hourly) contracts or self-employed, participants continually reassessed their decision to work. Participation in paid work in the retirement years is a distinctive second stage in the late career which blends the second and third ages.

Relationships of Resource Strategies, Family Composition, and Child Growth in Two Rural Timor-Leste Communities

Subsistence and economic activities undertaken by households in the context of transition from subsistence farming to cash economies are sometimes seen as substitutable with only minimal reference to the households themselves. We use data from in-depth interviews of 190 householders in Ossu (mountains) and Natarbora (coastal plains), Timor-Leste, to query relationships of family composition, resource strategies, and their relationships to children’s growth. Principal component analyses of six household composition variables reveal “grandparent and fostered-in children”, “two generational households with numerous adults and children”, and “smaller households with few adults and fostered-out children”, explaining 72% of the variance. A similar procedure with 11 resource variables produced four components explaining 56% of resource variance. Households with grandparents have a pension income and engage in large animal husbandry, and are associated with better standardized BMI for resident children. Households with numerous members (but not grandparents) are more invested in subsistence gardening and are negatively associated with child stature. Salaried income is not associated with household composition, but children in these households are taller than their peers. Consistent differences between the two communities are partially a result of differences in socioecology, but there remain unexplained differences that may relate to cultural practices.

The Main Reasons and Goals of the Pension Reform in Georgia

The concept of pension reform is a government’s plan to improve the pension system and reflects the long-term risks and takes into account the socio-economic reality in the country. The aim of the reform is to protect better existing retirees from poverty through indexation, which is guaranteed to maintain the retiree's purchasing power level; Providing the next generation of retirees with a higher pension income, which will be directly proportional to the income received during the employment period and the profit of the pension fund. The private pension system will allow employed citizens to plan better their retirement age and not depend only on state funding and be able to mobilize a certain amount before reaching retirement age. The need for reform stems from negative factors such as: an increase in the number of people of retirement age, a decrease in the birth rate, a decrease in the working age population, migration processes, etc. Analysis of the existing system show that it is impossible to maintain or improve the existing replacement ratio only in the medium and long term at the expense of state funding. The private accumulation model will be an additional component of the pension system, which will contribute to a significant increase in the replacement rate. The existence of a private accumulation system will make it possible to define better the fundamental principle of social pension, which implies protection of the population of retirement age from poverty. To achieve this goal, it is important that the social pension does not fall below the subsistence level and also that the pension should be increased at least in parallel with inflation or in the event of economic growth above inflation. Keywords: Pension system, Reform, Pension fund, Government, Population.

Income growth in the United Kingdom during late career and after retirement: growing inequalities after deindustrialisation, educational expansion and development of the knowledge-based economy

This article shows how late-life incomes from work and pensions evolved in the United Kingdom between 1991 and 2007, the year the Great Recession began. Our main contribution comes from focusing on changes across cohorts in different educational groups while also considering the gender divide. Our statistical analyses based on the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) suggest that deindustrialisation, the expansion of jobs in the knowledge economy and pension reforms affected senior workers’ incomes before and after retirement. Highly qualified senior male workers have profited from increasing income across the cohorts more than any other social group. Such a trend is not observed among highly qualified female workers. Male and female low-qualified senior workers do not show major income loses, but have not benefited to the same extent as highly educated male workers. As a result, pension income inequalities between highly qualified men and the rest have increased. The increasing pensions gap between educational groups can be traced back to the improving situation on the labour market for highly qualified male workers, and to reforms benefiting private pension schemes, where the highly qualified are overrepresented. Thus, the shift in pension provisions towards private pension schemes is clearly disadvantageous for low-qualified male workers and for women of all educational levels, and contributes to the increase of social inequalities.

How Does Mortality Contribute to Lifetime Pension Inequality? Evidence From Five Decades of Swedish Taxation Data

As with many social transfer schemes, pension systems around the world are often progressive: individuals with lower incomes receive a higher percentage of their income as a subsequent pension. On the other hand, it is well known that those with lower earnings have higher mortality and thus accumulate fewer years of pension income. These opposite factors, therefore, both contribute to the progressiveness of a given pension system. Thus far, empirical research efforts to disentangle the effects of mortality inequality on lifetime pension income have been scarce. To close this gap, we use Swedish taxation data linked with death registers from 1970 to 2018 to study how education and pre-retirement earnings relate to lifetime pension income from age 60 onwards, as well as how inequalities in mortality between groups contribute to overall inequalities in lifetime pension income. The results show that both a progressive replacement structure and mortality differentials contribute to the overall distribution of life-course pension payments. A substantial proportion of the total inequality in lifetime pensions can be attributed to the fact that socially advantaged groups live longer, and this is particularly true for men. Mortality differences can explain up to 28% of the lifetime pension benefits between socioeconomic groups. We conclude that inequalities in mortality play an important part in determining the overall degree of between-group income transfers in a pension system.

Do Public Pensions Improve Mental Wellbeing? Evidence from the New Rural Society Pension Insurance Program

The causal effect of public pensions on the mental wellbeing of the elderly in lower and middle-income countries deserves further investigation. This paper first constructed a theoretical framework for the impact of New Rural Society Pension Insurance pensions in China on the mental wellbeing of the rural elderly, and described potential channels through which pension income may affect mental wellbeing. We then used the fixed effect model and the instrument variable approach to estimate the casual effects of pension income on the mental wellbeing of the rural elderly. The results reveal that pension income improves mental wellbeing by relieving depression of the rural elderly; however, the beneficial effects of pension income are very limited. Pension income has no beneficial effects on the mental health of the rural elderly in the east region, whereas it slightly relieves depression of those in the middle and west regions. We also found that pension income produces small improvements in the mental health of older females, elderly persons living independently, and those with relatively poor economic conditions.