It's the poorer workers who need to clock on after 65
Sep 28 2009 by Kevin Rowan, The Journal
ON the face of it, last week’s High Court decision to reinforce the ability of employers to force workers to leave work at the ‘default retirement age’ of 65 was a classic example of different bits of public policy colliding.
Both pensions and health and wellbeing debates direct a conclusion that retiring from the workplace at 65 is increasingly unrealistic.
Age discrimination legislation would assume that terminating an individual’s employment simply because of age would be automatically unlawful.
Yet we have a decision that reinforces a legal position that contradicts these positions and, as the judge seemed to imply, belied common sense too.
This case should provide the opportunity to debate some of the realities that underpin all of these conflicting public policy dynamics.
It is true that workers, in general, are living much longer on average than even five or 10 years ago and are generally enjoying much better health and wellbeing for much longer.
This is something to be welcomed, of course, it is one of the measures of society progressing. This does provide some significant social and economic challenges, the balance between those in work and those in retirement is shifting toward what some have described as a tipping point and the impact on pension provision and how that provision is organised is one of the key contemporary debates to which there appears to be no convincing consensus.
Increasing the working age appears to be a logical inevitability. However, the health and wellbeing revolution has been neither uniform or universal. It remains the case that lower paid workers are not enjoying the same extension of good quality of life and good health as those who have enjoyed better conditions of employment, it’s a basic common sense, but one that needs restating, poverty and prosperity have significantly different impacts on individuals and their families throughout their lives. One size fits all public policy, especially relating to individuals, simply does not fit.
This reality is also starkly evident in accruing pension provision and retirement age. There is a world of difference in the provision of lower paid and higher paid workers. The average public sector pension, the source of much ill-informed derision from parts of the private sector community and the Conservative Party, bumps along at a little over £4,000 per year, while, even ignoring the fat cats, pension provision among industry leaders rolls in at around a quarter of a million pounds per year.
It is a cruel irony not lost on the trade union movement and organisations like Age Concern that the workers most likely to be forced to retire at 65 are the ones who can least afford to. The real challenge is to achieve much better equality for all workers and citizens.
Kevin Rowan is Regional Secretary of the Northern TUC
