Читать книгу Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age - Julia Neuberger - Страница 29

I wrote at the beginning of the book about how much my mother wanted to go back to work when she was in her eighties. There is no doubt that older people wish to feel that they are active providers in the community, that they are a useful part of society, and that they are not a burden on others. It is the other side of keeping up appearances: older people have to protect their self-respect, not just by looking as if they are playing a useful role, but by actually playing one.

Of course, people manage being active providers better if they live in their own homes, and are mobile enough to get to family, friends and shops. They also have to be in reasonably good health, but that is not an absolute. Even if older people’s health is getting worse, there are ways of making sure their quality of life holds up, or at least that it doesn’t go down at the same speed. There are a range of technological advances that can keep people independent.

Productivity means different things to different people. So many of my discussions with older people make it clear how much they long to be back at work. This might be because they need to earn more money, but it is about more than just money. For many of them, it seems to be a sense of being of value. The more our society judges people by what they do, rather than by who they are, the more older people are going to want to go back to work. Of course they will.

The point is that even those who have run their own businesses, or been very senior in some major corporation, and who have all the money anyone could wish for, still need to be needed, and long to be asked to do something, however unlikely, that gives them a role. In the United States, where people retire later – if at all – this is sometimes provided by continuing to go to work, and often by getting a more and more senior-sounding title, even though the role is in fact less influential than the one the same person held in their forties. It is hugely important that this has happened: the people concerned feel valued, still have an office, a secretary and a role, and are often wheeled out at all sorts of occasions to do some glad handing or to look after more junior staff.

In fact, when the bank HSBC carried out a huge survey of 21,000 people on the subject in 2006, it showed that more than 70 per cent of people in countries such as Canada, the United States and Britain say they want to work into their old age.6 Many of those who took part in the survey were clear that they wanted to work on their own terms, part-time or seasonally, with switches between periods of work and periods of leisure. Surprisingly, HSBC’s advisor on retirement said he thought the British were the most positive in the world in their attitude towards working in retirement, perhaps because the pensions are so poor here that people simply have to think differently. Or perhaps because opportunities are finally emerging for older workers to work differently from earlier in their career, more flexibly, and with increased satisfaction.

If so, there is still a very long way to go. An ICM poll for the BBC’s Newsnight programme in 2004 suggests that people are more than irritated at the discrimination against older workers. But there is a peculiar contradiction here. Only a few months earlier, when Lord Turner had published his pensions report, much of the media coverage had been about being ‘forced’ to work longer, to 67, 68 or 69. On the one hand, the polls suggest people want to work longer, albeit more flexibly; on the other hand, the commentators are telling us that people are resisting the idea.

The answer is that it depends what we mean by ‘work’. It depends on what the work is, whether we feel we are being cheated out of a pension we have earned, and a retirement date, whether pensions will be clawed back if we are earning, whether we are allowed to be flexible about how we work, whether the jobs can be rewarding in older age and, perhaps most significantly, how much we can feel independent. If people are self-employed, then they might reasonably expect to carry on working because they have customers, the most natural thing in the world. Maybe others can reinvent themselves to become self-employed later in life in order to do something totally different and, of course, find the customers who want to buy.

The Independent columnist Hamish McRae suggested that, a generation from now, a quarter of the workforce will be self-employed, which will change the nature of the pensions debate completely.7 The Turner proposals, and all the others, assumed that people are mainly employed by somebody else. But if McRae is right, then a large proportion of older people will be self-employed, carrying on working, perhaps less energetically than before, but possibly just as devotedly, and arguably with greater experience.

Some will be new self-starters, like Jacquie Lawson, of JacquieLawson.com, who became the market leader in online greeting card, at the age of 62.8 After six weeks of trial and error, having taught herself how to do it using Macromedia Flash, she sent a Christmas card to various friends in 2000, and went to Australia. When she got back, there were some 1,600 messages from people all over the world who had seen it and wanted her to set up a website. She did, but it crashed under the strain of huge demand. So friends and relatives helped her set up her business, investing in higher-grade technology, and she became an instant success. Not everyone does so well, but Jacquie Lawson is a shining example of someone who wanted to keep going as she got older, and had some good ideas.

There are also moves to keep people employed beyond retirement age. Older employees are being encouraged to stay at work longer to prevent a ‘dependency crisis’. That applies to both women and men, but women are more concentrated in poorer-paid and part-time jobs, so their financial provision for old age tends to be worse than men’s – and they tend to live longer too. As a result, we are seeing women in the workforce to an increasing extent, especially amongst older age groups.

There are 1.5 million women in the workforce between the ages of 45 and 64, and some 113,000 over 65, when women’s ‘official’ retirement age is still 60. For many of these women, the effects of working are wholly beneficial: more money, better mental health, better self-esteem and better social networks. A large body of evidence suggests that many women of all ages get much of their social support from colleagues at work, and this must be particularly true for women who have been widowed or whose children have moved away.