Dialogue, NZ Herald, 5 August 1999
 

Paid work past about age 45 is vanishing fast. This change of the past 20 years has been huge and relentless, touches all levels of society, spreads right across the developed world and shows few signs of halting, let alone reversing.

And if present trends continue, then within a decade a third of all New Zealand men by their later 40s will be "retired" (without significant prospects of getting paid work again) and half of them by their mid-50s. Even fewer women will have substantial paid work - perhaps 40 per cent at their mid-50s.

Consider just how deeply we are already into this "post-work world." Until the 1970s, 96 in every 100 men had fulltime paid work through their from their 20s to their early 50s: only then did employment fall off.

Using data from the population census, in which fulltime work is 20 or more hours a week, we find that by 1996 the proportion of men in fulltime work was below 80 per cent at every age - 77 per cent for those in their later 40s, 65 per cent in their later 50s and 40 per cent in their early 60s. Only a few per cent more had some part-time work.

Moreover, each successive birth cohort now begins paid work (and earning) later in life, reaches its employment peak at a lower and earlier point and sees its work fall off sooner and faster than for any predecessors.

For those born in the early 1950s, for instance, full-time employment peaked at 90 per cent in their later 20s and was down to 75 per cent by their early 40s.

Among Maori and Pacific Islanders it is all happening sooner and faster still. Where 96 per cent of Maori men had full- time work at age 40 in the 1960s and 1970s, just 65 per cent do so now.

Among women the trends are different - yet similar. Through the past half-century, growing fractions in their 20s, 30s and 40s have had paid work. But that historical rise has ended, with a peak at 60 per cent fulltime employment around age 45 and after that employment is now falling steeply.

Nearly 60 per cent of the women born in the 1930s had fulltime paid work at age 45, but just 35 per cent of the same group had it at age 55. That fall-off around age 45 is evident for every other cohort too, without exception.

The nature and quality of the shrinking work are changing also. More and more of it after age 45 is self-employment, much of it uncertain, insecure and low paying.

Twenty years ago 75 per cent of men aged 50 to 54, for example, received wages or salary for 20 or more hours a week and 20 per cent were self-employed. By 1996, just 50 per cent had wages or salary for 20 or more hours and 27 per cent were self-employed. The rest included some part-timers, but most were simply without work.

Wages and salaries often now come in smaller amounts and with less security, continuity or "perks" than they did 20 and more years ago. The decline in "work" and its rewards is greater than the simple figures might hint.

None of this is peculiar to New Zealand, and it likely points to a permanent, historic shift in modem capitalist economies.

International studies suggest the important explanations for the trends are not poor health (today's middle-aged are healthier than ever), mandatory retirement laws (most people finish work long before any compulsory retirement age), state pension age (again, most "retire" long before reaching this), or employment in the public or private sector (both drop older workers equally readily).

More unexpected - and unwelcome perhaps - is that overall economic performance matters little either. Booming and stumbling economies alike have for 20 years been shedding their mature employees, as "jobless growth" policy takes hold.

Several key forces are at work. First is automation, or the computer revolution, which helps to do away with many routine procedures or lets them move to cheaper places and people.

Secondly, the blind drive of global capital for short term "efficiencies," which leads to retaining as few staff as possible and as young, pliant, insecure and cheap as is possible. For many, it leads to an unpleasant, pressured workplace which we want to leave when we can.

Thirdly, the disappearance of much manufacturing from developed economies and with it large numbers of better- paying jobs once dominated by the middle-aged.

Fourthly comes attitudes, or the (questionable) belief that older workers are more expensive, slower; less enter prising, adaptable or retrainable than younger ones.

Fifthly, and easy to overlook, is life- style choice, or a rising "culture of leisure" - the expectation among the middle-aged of an extended period free of work while still physically vigorous.

All this is likely to intensify in the next few years, for the middle-aged are the fastest-growing segment of the population. In 1996 there were 750,000 New Zealanders aged 45 to 64. By 2011, just a dozen years away, there will be about 1.1 million.

The implications are enormous - for individuals, families, workplaces, public services, personal and collective retirement savings, taxes to support an ageing population and much more.

Yet ordinary citizens and policy- makers alike remain in denial about the changes facing us. We blame individuals for their joblessness in mid-life, and urge them to retrain as if jobs will be there for all who do so.

We press everyone to save for retirement, with vague threats about the shrinking of national superannuation in future, and with advertising campaigns built unthinkingly around the assumption that full and unbroken employment will last until age 65.

We muse on raising retirement pension age next century to 70 or beyond, as though this will somehow make jobs available and so "solve" the problems of an ageing population. And we kid ourselves that economic growth will deliver full jobs for all.

It will not happen: large-scale, later-life joblessness is here to stay, and it is time to debate some difficult matters.

Do we care if some people past 45 have jobs (are "job rich") and most do not (are "job poor")? If we don't, then how are we to find income for the many with- out earnings. Or won't we bother?

If we do care, then how might we bring about a different sharing of work so that older workers stay on? Through "elder-friendly workplaces," part-time work, job-sharing, flexible hours to allow for parenting duties, more holiday breaks, extra retraining budgets?

Through subsidies for employers who take on those past 45 - or regulations enforcing it anyway?

Or to take a different tack, can we afford to have those past 45 out of work?

What of the enormous lost taxes or support payments needed at the same time as the numbers over age 65 mushroom? And if we cannot afford it all, how far are we willing to go in forcing individuals to stay on longer or find some other work if pushed out?

By denying them welfare benefits at all before 65, perhaps, or by changing the law and removing our rights to take out private occupational pensions before 65 or 70?

Perhaps we could be more visionary and abandon the idea that work for pay is normal and good and proper, welcome the release from the drudgery of it all, embrace a working life totalling 25 years or less and enrich personal and community lives through the resources and time thus freed?

None of this suggests easy options. But they are beginning to be confronted and debated elsewhere in the developed world. It is time we addressed them, too.