Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age

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 (#ulink_b01cace5-5cc0-5bd6-ad1c-09d79149cb96) 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 (#ulink_d48998d1-7f18-5c2b-a541-b70116bc3ba0) 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.

Official efforts

Despite a new official desire to keep people at work longer, and a plethora of initiatives to make sure that this happens, there are huge challenges in finding and keeping a job in later life, especially in areas of high unemployment, in the toughest regions or the toughest sectors. There is also real age discrimination. This is partly because of obsolete social protection schemes which means that older people get their earnings stopped to pay for their social support.

There is still a prevailing view that older workers are too costly and resistant to change. The Social Exclusion Unit of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister reported in 2004 that the low level of older workers in jobs costs the economy between £19 and £31 billion a year in lost output and taxes, and increased welfare payments, not to mention all those skills lost to employers.9 (#ulink_0c0574fe-6152-5c1a-a2c0-9e0fbd919afa) Yet nine out of ten older people believe that employers discriminate against them, and a quarter speak from experience. As many as ten per cent of companies refuse to employ anyone over 50.

The European Union is now resolved to do something about this, given the waste of resource so many older people not working represents. The idea of anonymous CVs certainly helps people from ethnic minorities, another group who are unfairly discriminated against in employment, but they are very little help to older workers, because a glance at the work history gives away the rough age of the applicant.

Some EU member states have tried to create incentives for employers to hire specific age groups by making them more attractive – that is to say, less protected – than the rest of the workforce. But this approach has not really helped either, though those countries which have a rather different approach, and a range of positive active ageing policies, are succeeding in attracting older workers. It works where working conditions are improved for everybody, with early retirement schemes being restricted to cases where major restructuring is inevitable, and where allowing part-time work to be combined with part-time pensions is the norm, so that people are not caught in a social benefit trap where it simply is not worth their while to work.

The European Union is worried about their ageing populations and falling birth rates. Japan is facing similar issues, and tackling them by paying grants to employers of older people and by other means of supporting older workers directly. The Japan Organization for Employment of the Elderly and Persons with Disabilities (JEED) does a huge amount of work trying to get older people into work, and they also work to police the new law which forces employers to take measures to keep people in work until at least 65.

JEED provides counselling and advice services on employing older people, and the measures – half of the costs of which are paid for by the government – include health management counselling, specialist advice services for re-employment, and much else besides. This is so far in advance of anything done in Europe that it seems amazing to us, and yet these are exactly the kinds of measures we need to see if older people are to be comfortable at work and not treated as slightly eccentric for continuing to want to be there. They are also working away at a long-term ‘Project to Develop a Solid Foundation for a Society Where People Can Work Regardless of Their Age (The Age-free Project)’, to find out what kind of systems would be needed so that anybody can work regardless of age.

But beyond the subsidies to companies that are making efforts in this direction, there is support for self-employment too. If three or more older people (aged 45 plus) have united to start an enterprise, and are themselves employing workers, they can get grants to pay their start-up costs. All this is serious stuff, and worth close examination if the UK, and Europe more widely, are to be anywhere in the same league in employing older staff.

What kind of work?

Thanks to a recent ESRC Report, Older People’s Experience of Paid Employment: Participation and Quality of Life, by a team from Sheffield University, we know that ‘the highest levels of well-being in any category were among those who were employed when over retirement age’.10 (#ulink_d3b14281-f2c9-52b9-9fcf-f90a4e81a932) But – and this is the most important finding – of all those who were employed, life satisfaction was highest among the part-timers, and lowest among those who were forced to carry on working because they needed the money. In other words, it is not just a question of whether one is employed, unemployed or retired, but whether one wants to be.

Whether people want to be employed depends on their finding work which suits them. So there really does need to be more room for part-time and flexible employment for older people, which many say is what they want. The 2003 Joseph Rowntree Foundation report The Role of Flexible Employment for Older Workers showed that the choice depends partly on who you are.11 (#ulink_361b30cb-c99f-5b14-add2-3f221569a991)

Leaving work tends to be a positive choice for workers with other advantages – including those (especially men) who have been with their present employer for longer, and are therefore more likely to have accumulated savings and pension entitlements, and those who have paid off their mortgages. People with health problems are also inclined to leave work early, especially low-paid men. But ‘early retirement’ for them is more likely to mean they were unable to stay employed, rather than something they chose.

Self-employment offers the job quality most comparable to that enjoyed by permanent full-time employees. Temporary employment rates next in terms of job quality, although this is more the case for people on fixed-term contracts than for casual workers or agency temps. Part-time employment offers the poorest job quality among the three types of flexible employment, and yet it is extremely popular amongst many older people. Overall, women appear more successful than men in finding flexible jobs for positive reasons, but they often find that these jobs are poor quality, or extremely badly paid.

It is worse than that for many part-time older women workers, according to the report Older Women, Work and Health (Lesley Doyal and Sarah Payne).12 (#ulink_b40cf85b-19a2-5336-b39b-2e6174f2e1b4) Some of the supposedly ‘light work’ offered to women often leads to musculoskeletal disorders as a result of repetitive strain injury from keyboards or simply from having to move heavy loads which no one had recognized as being necessary. Take French train cleaners, for example. Doyal and Payne found their labour force was mixed, but only the women were allocated to cleaning the toilets, which was work that was dirty, physically demanding and required considerable technical skill. It involved travelling over 20 kilometres a day and maintaining uncomfortable postures, with a quarter of the time in a crouched position. It is hardly surprising that those women suffered from high rates of back pain and other problems and were often absent from work.

‘Work is usually a healthier occupation for a 60-year-old white solicitor, for example,’ says the report, ‘who has a high degree of control over her working life and can buy domestic help if she needs it, than it is for a 60-year-old African Caribbean office cleaner, with little job security and a heavy domestic burden.’

Even our own community nurses, coming up for retirement at 55 with relatively generous pension settlements, show little sign of being lured back to work, even when they are told that they will be able to keep their full pension and earn on top, so desperate is the need for their skills and experience. So, despite all the evidence of older women gaining benefits from continuing to work, it is clear that for some women the thought of carrying on – perhaps because they are burnt out by what they have been doing, because they do not trust management, or because they have seen too many upheavals in organizational terms in recent years – just doesn’t appeal very much.

So there is a paradox here, at least. Most research agrees that staying in work for women provides them with better social networks and keeps them healthy. Yet whether they actually want to work depends on a range of other factors, like flexibility, stress, respect, conditions and safety: the rate of slip, trip and fall injuries rises significantly with age for women, but not apparently for men. So we have to do more to prevent accidents, more to appreciate those women and what they do, and perhaps more too in those health professions where they are in short supply to give them control over their own work.

Age discrimination

The real question, behind all of these questions, is more fundamental. Why has government in the UK, and governments more generally, not made it easier to carry on working? Why have they only woken up to the need because they are frightened of the demographic time bomb? And why is there such a culture of retirement at 60 or 65, which clearly does not suit many people – especially when research shows that, if all the older people who wanted to work actually found jobs, they would generate economic output as high as £30 billion?

There are excellent economic reasons like this why society needs to make it easier to carry on working, but the real reason our governments have been so slow is probably the same reason employers have been so slow. They discount the skills and experience of older people, and cling to an increasing faith in those of the young.

‘If the offices of the FTSE100’s chief executives had a theme tune, it would be the refrain of Bob Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages’: ‘Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,’ wrote The Times’ then business editor James Harding, in 2007.13 (#ulink_8b66d2a2-068a-518a-a615-6db4517e7e2a) The average age of FTSE 100 chief executives had fallen by nine months to 52 over the preceding five years and, at the beginning of 2007, there were more top British chief executives in their 30s than in their 60s.

Strangely enough, Europe is going against the trend in the USA and Asia in this respect, where average ages are rising. It is almost as if, as power is passed to an ever younger age group, they feel that much more uncomfortable about the voice of experience. ‘Corporate Britain is squandering experience, driving out good people … when they are in their prime,’ wrote Harding. ‘There is too much age concern in the executive suite.’

There is such double-think about all this, when 90 per cent of us think old people should be cherished and 60 per cent think the elderly enrich our cultural life. ‘Oh really?’ said the columnist Janet Street-Porter. ‘If that is the case, how come we don’t take the time and trouble to know any of these national treasures? Half those under 24 who were surveyed didn’t know anyone over 70, and vice versa. If old people are so supersonic, how come the country is full of homes where ageing relatives have been parked out of sight?’14 (#ulink_2b509915-6e57-5a18-8c48-f936d4ffe6e6)

Of all those organizations most active in their age discrimination, the most obvious are the broadcasters. The BBC ran into trouble for dropping Nick Ross from his own Crimewatch programme, which he started presenting in 1984, at the age of 59. They had already had negative comment about dropping the newsreader, Moira Stuart, on the basis she looked too old. Joan Bakewell was dropped from a TV show called Rant on Channel 5 because she was not within ‘their audience demographic’. Too old, it seems. Why is it that broadcasters are so dismally knee-jerk in their pursuit of younger viewers and listeners, forgetting that Terry Wogan still pulls in a huge audience at well over sixty, and that the oldies’ market is growing, not shrinking?

Those who depend on broadcast coverage are especially vulnerable as Sir Menzies Campbell discovered in 2007. But those who need no broadcast coverage are still heaved out of their jobs at 65. With new age discrimination legislation in place, is it legal – let alone morally acceptable, which it plainly is not – to discriminate against older workers on the basis that the right to claim compensation for unfair dismissal and statutory redundancy pay stops at 65?

If the FTSE 100 companies are not setting an example, who will? But those at the opposite end of the debate are not setting an example either. A huge number of public sector workers believe they have the right – or at least they exercise this opportunity – to take early retirement at 55. Many people are forced to retire early, admittedly on pretty well near a full pension, because of reorganization after reorganization, especially in the NHS. But the idea that we can leave a job and get a full pension at 55 as a teacher, a community nurse, a hospital nurse, when society is crying out for more people with real experience to do these jobs, is absurd. Yet any attempt government makes to convince public sector workers to stay longer, to forego their very generous pension rights – which were once seen as a compensation for not earning so well when working, which is less true now – has been met with a truculent refusal to negotiate.

There must be a better way forward, given the evidence that many older people find life more satisfying if they are still working. The 55-year-old teachers, social workers and nurses might be persuaded to work to 60 or 65, or longer if possible, if they could get a six-month sabbatical on full pay at 55. Sabbaticals are good for people, whereas retirement seems less beneficial than people used to think. They could learn something new, travel, see people doing their kind of work somewhere where they do it quite differently, and then come back and work at least another three to five years. It would save the public purse considerably in terms of training new people who would also expect to retire at 55. It would keep very experienced people in the workforce. But for those who feel burned out by the constant changes, or just worn out with dealing with difficult, inattentive children in the classroom, it would refresh them and excite them.

Surely before we accept the public sector’s refusal to work longer, despite the obvious need, as well as the benefits to the workers involved, we should try more of a carrot approach. Indeed, those older people who go on grown-up ‘gap years’ are obviously fulfilled by it, learn a lot, and have much to teach the rest of us, if only we would let them.

There is a proposal that older drivers should be given cognitive tests every five years to retain their driving licence, because studies have indicated that older drivers are more likely to be involved in accidents. At the moment motorists aged 70 or more have to report any medical condition which may affect their ability to drive. When this was first reported, the Times had an online debate, and some of the responses make appalling reading. ‘The elderly are dangerous enough as pedestrians without letting them drive cars!’ wrote Simon Moss of Kiev in the Ukraine. ‘The cognitive tests … look pretty ridiculous too. A five year old or a drunk could easily pass them. Wouldn’t an eye text be more relevant? Or a test of reaction times? Or would that be more politically incorrect?’15 (#ulink_705ca25a-d6ec-57fe-9e73-f903c536a227) Yet all the evidence suggests younger drivers cause far more accidents than older ones, though clearly we could all agree that older drivers with cognitive or visual impairments should not be driving. The point is not the age, it’s the condition that counts.

Volunteering

Huge numbers of volunteers, in all sorts of sectors of society, are in fact ‘older people’. About a third of us in Britain volunteer regularly, though some of that may be extremely infrequently. Many organizations rely heavily on older people to make their activities work, whether it is helping schools with reading or helping in care homes – in some care homes the average age of the volunteers is higher than that of the residents. Large numbers of older people volunteer at the National Trust – I met a National Trust volunteer in her eighties who had become one of the country’s leading experts in eighteenth-century furniture polishing. There are older volunteers in hospitals, working on anything from shopping trolleys to libraries, from showing people around to helping people who have mobility difficulties.

There has been a range of government schemes to encourage older people into volunteering, from the Experience Corps, which has sadly gone into abeyance, more or less, and was perceived to be unsuccessful by government, to Volunteering in the Third Age (VITA), and enormously effective operations run by charities like Help the Aged, Age Concern and CSV. But government has been obsessed with younger people volunteering – perhaps understandably – and has therefore mistakenly failed to keep a focus on older people becoming volunteers. The government can’t tell anyone, young or old, what to do, but financial support for older people volunteering – and organizing volunteering doesn’t come free – makes a huge difference to how older people feel, and to what they provide for the wider population. It also means they require less healthcare and general support if they are being active and feel useful.

The major focus of the government agenda on volunteering is on younger people, and particular groups of socially excluded people, those without educational qualifications, or with disabilities and long-term life-limiting illnesses, and members of black and minority ethnic communities, so older people do not always figure. Yet their contribution is vast: the VITA project’s final report in 2007 looked at 477 organizations, involving a total of 1.3 million volunteers, two thirds of them over 50.16 (#ulink_452282c5-167a-5430-b04b-c73b368d11c1) Older people are also disproportionately involved in the delivery of care to other older people.

One of the reasons they do it is to give them a reason for getting out of bed in the morning. The other benefits to the volunteers are obvious: enjoyment, health, a structure for the day, active participation in local communities, increased confidence and new experiences. The organizations that use them also gain, and so does society, from their long experience and skills, the ability to make connections between services and their users.

Take Roger Withers, for example.17 (#ulink_87128fdc-1cec-593e-8e50-1dda6b8c6c84) He spends his time as a befriender at a local day centre at the age of 81 and eleven years after the death of his wife. Or Peggy Crudace, 85, who lives in a high rise block in Newcastle, which has within it a community flat jointly owned by social services and Community Service Volunteers. Peggy’s ‘commitment to involving people is one of the reasons the community flat is so successful. When she is not acting as treasurer, and taking care of the book-keeping, she is helping with the lunches, baking cakes, buns and tarts, organizing raffles, going to art classes, making decorated birthday and Christmas cards and even abseiling when she has the chance.’18 (#ulink_ae133a80-6842-59c7-9224-34da7fe8d5b5)

Or Ted Howell, 80, who was told by his wife who was already volunteering as a befriender ‘not to be a slouch’. He takes people to hospital in wheelchairs, takes them shopping or to the hairdresser, and does anything else with them they want. Like so many, Ted is downbeat about what he does: ‘It drives me out of bed … it can be a pain in the backside,’ he says. ‘But it gets me to meet some very nice people.’

WRVS, well known for its work with older people, has suggested that we designate Christmas Day as ‘Independence Day’ for older people, in their honour, and, second, that we use the 3.5 million years of experience WRVS’s own volunteers have between them to help others have a stress-free Christmas. To do that, they set up WiseLine at Christmas 2007, by both phone and email, to advise on everything from keeping the peace in families to present buying, cooking for a variety of different diets to solving the mysteries of fairy lights that do not function.

In their press pack, they highlighted a Liverpool volunteer called Maria who suggested having diversions at hand when tempers look as if they might get heated, and Shirley from Devon, 72, who has volunteered for 18 years and has just stopped running the lunch club which feeds up to 100 people each week – including people whom the local GPs beg them to take on because of loneliness, depression and simply a lack of things to do. And they do Christmas lunch as well.

But her most important point was about how you can still function as you get older:

When it comes to ageing, I think some people think that the brain stops when the legs don’t work so well, but if people get out and stay active, it keeps them engaged. People in their eighties can use email. One of our ladies was given a laptop by her grandson for her 90th. She went to computer classes and used it to email him in Australia, and to tell me when she could not attend or start her car!19 (#ulink_4f897898-78ff-5046-8cf4-a49c7b801cd0)

These are not isolated stories. The truth is that, both in formal volunteering and in the enormous effort that individual volunteers make to help neighbours on a regular basis, old people are keeping the wheels of the community running. They are doing so even when they are frail and disabled themselves.

Barriers to volunteering

In some ways, the situation with older volunteers is the mirror image of older people in employment. They volunteer in overwhelming numbers and their contribution to society is huge and irreplaceable. But there are still barriers nonetheless, certainly according to 2006 research for VITA and Volunteering England by Colin Rochester and Brian Thomas.20 (#ulink_d9498a51-021f-5c79-9ffc-32da0a29df99) Some are about the sometimes forbidding image of volunteering, and having the confidence to put yourself forward. Some are practical barriers, such as transport, particularly for poorer or disabled people. There are bureaucratic barriers related to the prevailing risk-averse official culture. There are barriers because of jargon and technology.

Insurance is one area which simply has to be tackled. Where formal volunteer networks turn people away simply because of their age, it is often because this has been stipulated by an insurance company. This is, in itself, a terrible injustice – not just to the individuals who are sent home to moulder, but to all those people they were able and willing to help. If somebody is fit and able to make a contribution, it cannot be beyond the wit of society to insist that they should be allowed to do so.

Inter-generational volunteering