Tag Archives: State Pension Age

Leaving school: how do work and family transitions affect women’s wealth and wellbeing later on?

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How have the early adult lives of a generation of young women who grew up after the war impacted on their lives now? Baowen Xue and Anne McMunn from the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies at UCL discuss two new papers which look at life satisfaction, mental health and economic wealth among older women. Their findings suggest early marriage and domestic labour are linked to worse outcomes later in life. 

The move out of education into work, marriage and parenthood is a sensitive time for young people and can set the course for their later lives. So which circumstances have turned out to be beneficial, and which have been less so?

We used data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, ELSA, to look for answers to these questions. Our study followed a sample of over-50s who have been interviewed every two years since 2002. A Life history interview was conducted additionally to collect information about their  education, work and family lives.

We identified a group of almost 4,000 women born before 1956 who answered questions on life satisfaction and mental health, and in our second paper a smaller group of just under 1800 for whom income data was also available.

Our hypothesis as we set out on the research was that those who married and had children later, and who therefore tended to have stronger ties to work early on, would have better mental health in later life. This largely proved to be true, though remaining single was not the answer: this group tended to suffer from isolation and loneliness later in life.

We identified six types of transition from education into work and family life: Early marriage and domestic labour, later marriage and domestic labour, later marriage and later work entry, later marriage and early work entry, early work entry and remaining single, and a group whose experiences were mixed and included lone parenthood, marriage with or without children and a mixture of employment types.

Early motherhood and domestic labour

The key finding in our study was that women who took on motherhood and domestic labour at an early stage were more likely to suffer from depression and lower life satisfaction in later life than those who went to work early and married late. Those with mixed histories and those who stayed single and childless were also more vulnerable to poor mental health and low life satisfaction. But those who started work late – often through staying in education – and also married late had the highest life satisfaction and the lowest level of mental illness.

We found that these effects could by and large be linked to socioeconomic status: those from more privileged backgrounds tended to gain higher educational qualifications, to enter work later and to marry later, and that set them on a path to a better quality of life later on. Conversely, those from less privileged backgrounds tended to gain fewer qualifications, to marry earlier and to have a poorer quality of life later.

A second paper, also using ELSA data asked a linked question: how does leaving full-time education and becoming a home-maker at an early stage affect women’s economic wealth later in life?

We took the life histories of just under 1800 women born between 1939 and 1952, and looked at when they left education as well as how their entry into work affected their financial situation in later life. 

We found those who left education early and went straight into domestic roles were four times less likely than their more educated peers to be in the highest household wealth bracket in later life.

Women who started work between the ages of 21 and 24 were 40 per cent more likely to be in professional or managerial jobs than those who left school by age 16 and started work early. They were 53 per cent more likely to be in the top earnings bracket for women of their age and were almost four times more likely to be in the top bracket for total household wealth.

We concluded that the age at which women leave education plays a pivotal role in their later economic, personal and mental wellbeing. For the generation of women who are now pensioners, an early entry into domestic rather than paid labour cast a long shadow, while higher education conferred particular advantages. 

As higher education and later partnership have become the norm for today’s young women, these studies will form a baseline which will one day enable us to see whether their experiences compare or contrast with those of their grandmothers’ generation.

The Long Shadow of Youth: Girls’ Transition From Full-Time Education and Later-Life Subjective Well-Being in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing is research by Baowen Xue, Penny Tinkler and Anne McMunn and is published in the Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences

Girls’ transition to adulthood and their later life socio-economic attainment: Findings from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing is research by BaoWen Xue, Penny Tinkler, Paola Zaninotto and Anne Mc Munn and is published in Advances in Life Course Research.

Anne McMunn and BaoWen Xue are based at the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies in Society and Health at UCL. Paola Zaninotto works with the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing at UCL and Penny Tinkler is based at the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing.

Are universal state pensions discriminating against those in lower-skilled jobs?

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With the state pension age likely to rise further in coming years, are policymakers right to link pension eligibility to average life expectancy? In a one-size-fits-all system, which social groups will lose out? Dr Emily Murray and colleagues* used census data to look at who lives longest after leaving work.

In most industrialised countries, the eligibility age for state pensions is being increased. Between 2011 and 2018, the United Kingdom government raised the State Pension Age for women from age 60 to 65, to match that for men, and a further increase to age 67 for both genders is planned by 2028. A further increase to age 68 by 2039 has been mooted.

Yet our state pension system ignores some very basic facts – it doesn’t take into account the wide disparities in health and life expectancy between different social classes. Those in professional occupations can expect to live longer and to enjoy good health for longer than those in manual jobs. For example, the average 50 year-old man in a professional job can expect to enjoy a further 25 years of good health, while a man the same age in a manual occupation can only expect 18: a seven-year difference. That is why lower social class groups are more likely to find themselves on disability benefit.

We wanted to look more closely at these occupational social class differences in the amount of time older adults live after they stop work, and in particular at the extent to which these differences are due to health.

We used the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study, a one per cent representative sample of respondents to the English and Welsh censuses since 1971.  For our analysis, we included respondents who were aged 50-75 at the time of the 2001 census and who had stopped work by 2011 – the average age of stopping was 58 for women and 60.2 for men. These workers were born in 1951 or earlier, so men would have been eligible for state pension at 65 and women at 60.

That gave us a sample of 76,485 people, and over the next 10 years we were able to monitor deaths  – by 2011 14.6 per cent of the women and 25.1 per cent of the men had died.

We could see that for both genders, those in lower social classes tended to die younger – professional women lived two years longer than unskilled women, and professional men three years longer than unskilled men.

We estimated professional women in good health would live five years longer than unskilled women in poor health, while for men the gap would be five and a half years.

But despite these longevity gaps, those from lower social groups were facing more years between leaving work and being able to draw their state pensions – because they left work earlier.

We estimated that if two women were 65 in 2001, the woman who had worked in an unskilled occupation would live five years longer after leaving work than the professional woman with good health – because the unskilled woman would have left at a younger age. Two men in the same circumstances would live on average 25.0 and 19.5 years from stopping work to death.

The most likely explanation is that poor health has a greater impact on the ability of manual workers to continue working than it does on non-manual workers.  It is however important to note that associations between social class and post-work years were not entirely explained by health, and we feel more research is needed on this.

Poor health

But the conclusion is clear: our results show that a uniform state pension age disproportionately affects the poorest among us, because on average they must wait longer between stopping work and qualifying for their state pension, at a time when they are likely to be in poor health. This is despite the fact that they are likely to have started work younger and therefore to have worked and paid contributions for just as many years as their better-off peers.

The solution to this inequality is not straightforward. The preferred strategy for UK policymakers is to support individuals to stay in work for longer, and there is evidence that the average age of leaving work exit is increasing.  However, over half of women and two-fifths of men  still fall out of the labour market before state pension age.

Some researchers have suggested that pension ages should directly reflect life expectancy differences.  Alternatively the age requirement could be dropped and pension eligibility could be based solely on the number of years in work.

We believe a two-year earlier pension age may be more appropriate for individuals who work in manual occupations, given that they leave work earlier than professional workers not in good health.  With rises in pension age already in law, and evidence of stalling life expectancy, it is vital that researchers and policy-makers assess how these rises will influence financial security and health for the most vulnerable in society.

Inequalities in time from stopping paid work to death: findings from the ONS Longitudinal Study, 2001 to 2011 is by Emily T Murray,  Ewan Carr, Paola Zaninotto, Jenny Head, Baowen Xue, Stephen Stansfeld, Brian Beach and  Nicola Shelton.

*Emily T Murray, Ewan Carr, Paola Zaninotto, Jenny Head, Nicola Shelton and Baowen Xue are based at the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London.

Ewan Carr is also based at the department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London, London.

Stephen Stansfeld is based at Queen Mary University of London, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Centre for Psychiatry, London, EC1M 6BQ, UK

Brian Beach is based at the International Longevity Centre – UK, SW1P 3QB, London, UK.

Job prospects: does it matter where we live when we are young?

What are the influences on our employment prospects across our working lives? Could where we live when we’re young be important when we’re older – regardless of our social class or level of education? A new study by Emily Murray and colleagues from UCL, King’s College, London and Queen Mary, University of London, finds if we live in an area of high unemployment when we’re young, we’re more likely to leave the labour market at a younger age.

Which factors can help improve our prospects of employment – and of good health – in mid-life? One reason the question is important is that if we can stay healthy longer and work longer, we are less dependent on the state. And the cost of our ageing society is a major issue for governments and individuals across the developed world.

In the UK the state pension age will be raised to age 67 by 2028, but in fact most employees leave work well before they reach that stage. For some that’s a positive thing, but for others it’s forced upon them by unemployment or poor health – and that contributes to social inequality among older people.

Who is at risk? We know older workers in areas of high unemployment are more likely to be on disability benefits. And older people are more likely to leave work for non-health reasons, too – if they are made redundant, they find it harder than their younger colleagues to find another job.

But until now we didn’t know much about how unemployment and other factors experienced by the young might affect their prospects of being in work as they approach the state retirement age.

‘Scarring effect’

There are good reasons to suspect there might be an effect –research has shown that periods of unemployment in young adulthood can have a ‘scarring’ effect – so it stands to reason that early work experiences could set some people on good trajectories and others on less positive ones.

Higher-level job opportunities aren’t evenly distributed, and so we might speculate, for example, that workers in the north – where access to careers in finance, for instance, would be poorer than in the south – would be less likely to start out on one of those ‘good’ pathways.

And education might make a difference, too. We know those growing up in poorer areas are likely to end up with fewer qualifications, and therefore to be disadvantaged in the jobs market. That, too, could continue to affect them throughout their lives.

So health, employment status, occupational class and education might all influence the length of our working lives and lead to unequal retirement outcomes.

Survey of health and development

We used the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD), a sample of all births in one week in March 1946 across England, Scotland, and Wales, to test our theories.

This group of people have been questioned 24 times throughout their lives, most recently in 2014 when they were aged 68. We used data from when they were aged four, 26, 53, 60-64 and 68 – a total sample of 2526 people, all of whom had given information on their retirement age or were still in work at age 68 years.

We found there was a correlation between increased unemployment rates in the area a person lived in mid-life and the likelihood of an individual retiring earlier.  However, this relationship was explained by where people lived earlier in life.

For example, cohort members who lived in an area with higher unemployment when they were 26 were more likely to be outside the labour market at age 53. Compared to those who worked full-time, those who were unemployed at aged 53 retired on average 4.7 years earlier.

Similarly, mid-life health problems were more common among those who had lived in areas with high unemployment at age 26, even when taking account of age 26 health status.

We did not find a direct link between educational achievement by age 26 and retirement age. We did, however, find indirect links: for example, those who did not obtain any educational qualifications by age 26 were more likely to live in areas of high unemployment than those who gained degrees. There was no association between area unemployment at age 4 and educational achievement at age 26.

Adulthood is key

Our findings show for the first time that early adulthood is a key life stage at which local labour market conditions can affect our eventual retirement age. We found this happened through two interlinked factors – high area unemployment and worse health status at age 26.

So, there are clear messages for governments: strategies to extend the working lives of future generations will be most effective if they address youth unemployment rather than focusing on older workers in areas with high unemployment.

Policies to extend working life should focus not just on individuals but also on the wider labour market context in which those individuals reside. Maintaining employment and good health in mid-life are key to ensuring that individuals can work longer. And large-scale interventions that create new jobs in areas with high youth unemployment could bring long-term positive consequences for future generations’ extended working lives.

Linking local labour market conditions across the life course to retirement age: Pathways of health, employment status, occupational class and educational achievement, using 60 years of the 1946 British Birth Cohort, is published in Social Science & Medicine.

Emily T. Murray,  Paola Zaninotto, Maria Fleischmann, Nicola Shelton  and Jenny Head are based at the University College London Department of Epidemiology and Public Health.

Mai Stafford and Diana Kuh were based at the Medical Research Council Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at University College London when this paper was written. 

Ewan Carr is also based at the Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London

Stephen Stansfield is based at the Queen Mary University of London, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Centre for Psychiatry.

Having a family – how might the decision affect the length of your working life?

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Across the developed world, people are living longer. In response to this, governments are looking for ways to encourage people to work for longer. In the UK, the State Pension age is being raised and future generations will have little choice but to work. But how will the decisions they made earlier in life – whether and when to have a family – affect their later employment prospects? A new study from the RenEWL project by Dr Mai Stafford and colleagues at UCL and Queen Mary University of London has some answers.

Many of the post-war baby boom generation retired before the State Pension age began to rise. But subsequent generations must plan for longer working lives, and government policy needs to find ways to facilitate that.

We know more people are living longer, and we know that our decisions about having a family can affect the likelihood of us staying in work for longer. But we wanted to get a more nuanced view of how family and working lives can interact.

Would those who delayed starting a family until their thirties be more likely to work into their late sixties? How would those who never had children differ from those who did? And how would the prospects of women who took time out of the workplace be affected by that decision as they neared State Pension age?

We looked at data from the MRC National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD) which has followed the lives of more than 5,000 people born within a single week in 1946. Participants have been studied 24 times during their lives from birth, through childhood and adulthood, and most recently when they were aged 68-69 – at which point more than 2,700 people responded. The men in the study reached state pension age at 65; the women at 60.

We found that almost half the men had been continuously married with children and in full-time work since their early twenties. Women’s lives tended to vary more, with the largest group working full-time until their early twenties then taking time out to raise a family before working part-time and then returning to full-time work in their late thirties.

In their early sixties, just over two thirds of women and a third of men were not in paid work.

Women who did work at this age were more likely to be in part-time work, while men were more likely to be in full-time work. By the age of 68-69, just one in five men and one in 10 women were still in paid work.

 Work and family

Those who became fathers in their early twenties and who had jobs were more likely to be in full-time work at age 60-64 than men who remained single and childless. They were also more likely to be in work at age 68-69 than men who had partners and jobs but no children.

When we looked at how the age at which participants had their children affected their later employment, we found this made no difference for men. But women who had children later were more likely to be in full-time work at age 60-64 than those who had them earlier.

Having children early then returning to full-time work after a break, rather than continuous work through the childrearing years, made no difference to women’s later employment prospects.

We considered whether these differences might be driven by earlier health and socioeconomic circumstances that result in different kinds of family-work patterns. The links between work-family patterns and later life work participation remained when we statistically controlled for childhood health, educational attainment and childhood socioeconomic factors.

Why did the age of family formation make a difference? Women who have their children later may still be providing financial support to them in their sixties – though if so we would expect that men who had children later would also be more likely to be in paid employment, and this was not the case.

Women who became mothers later may also have started working later – possibly because they stayed in education longer – and therefore might have accrued less pension entitlement by age 60-64, though we do not think this fully explains the difference because we controlled for educational attainment.

British baby-boomers

So, what can this cohort of British baby-boomers tell us about how family decisions affect later working lives? We found that the timing of having children was related to women’s but not men’s employment in later life.

Both men and women who remained childless, regardless of whether they had a partner, were less likely to be in paid work in their sixties than those who had children.

And both men and women who worked full-time and neither had children nor a partner were also less likely than their peers to be still in paid work after the age of 60, though women in this group who were still working were more likely than men to be working part-time.

Mothers who returned to work were more likely to be in work in their sixties, while becoming a father made no difference to a man’s prospects.

It’s important for policymakers who have an interest in extending our working lives to consider these results. Mothers, and parents more generally, may stay in the work-force in later life if they have access to jobs which allow them to combine family and work. Our study underlines the need for both part-time jobs and flexible working to be available to parents.

Work–family life course patterns and work participation in later life is research by Mai Stafford, Rebecca Lacey, Emily Murray, Ewan Carr, Maria Fleischmann, Stephen Stansfeld, Baowen Xue, Paola Zaninotto, Jenny Head, Diana Kuh and Anne McMunn and is published in the European Journal of Ageing.

Working after retirement age: who benefits?

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Recent reforms have made it unlawful for employers to force their workers to retire. So what are the reasons why some people stay on after state pension age while others choose to leave? How do those decisions affect quality of life for those who stay, and for those who go? A study by Giorgio Di Gessa and colleagues at King’s College London and the University of Manchester sheds new light on the issue.

We know that more of us are working after we reach retirement age – but until now we haven’t known much about how people make that decision, or about what effect it has on their sense of wellbeing afterwards.

In our research, we used English data from a panel study of older people to find out more about who chooses to stay on in work and why. We then went on to ask whether those who chose to work felt differently about their lives when compared with those who felt they had to work.

We took a representative sample of 2,500 men aged 65 to 74 and women aged 60 to 69 who had previously been in work, and we found one fifth of them still had paid jobs. Of those, two thirds had chosen to continue to work because they enjoyed their jobs or because they wanted to keep fit and active. The other third said they worked for financial reasons: either they couldn’t afford to retire or they wanted to improve their pension provision for later.

We placed the retired respondents into three groups: Those who had had a ‘normal’ retirement when they became eligible for a state pension (28 per cent), those who felt they had to retire because of ill-health or redundancy (2 per cent); and those who retired voluntarily – because they could afford to do so or because they wanted to spend more time with their family, for instance (28 per cent).

Quality of life

On average, those who had retired experienced a lower quality of life, when measured on the CASP-19 scale for older people. The highest quality of life was reported by those who had stayed in work voluntarily, while the lowest was reported by those who had retired involuntarily. The gap in quality of life between these two groups is similar to the one observed between respondents who said they had a long-standing illness and those who did not. As expected, respondents who were financially better off also had higher quality of life scores.

When we considered changes in these CASP-19 scores over time, we found that on average people experienced a drop in their quality of life over a six-year period between two ‘waves’ of the study: about a quarter experienced a decrease of 5 points or more whereas just over 16% experienced an improvement of 5 or more points. Those working voluntarily experienced a slight increase in their quality of life when they eventually retired. On the other hand, the wellbeing of those who were working out of necessity did not improve after retirement.

Health benefits

As one might expect, the scores improved among those whose health got better after retirement, and worsened among those whose health deteriorated.

It’s worth noting that our study sample is skewed towards the more advantaged – the proportion with no qualifications is significantly lower than in the census. It is therefore likely that our study underestimates the percentage of people who work out of financial necessity.

What does our study tell us about working after retirement age? In particular, it reminds us how important it is for people to feel they have control over these key decisions about their lives. Those who continue working because they have to have lower quality of life than those who continue working because they want to – and even once those people have retired, this wellbeing gap is likely to persist.

We know that people who experience a higher quality of life tend to be healthier and to live longer.

Government initiatives aimed at helping workers maintain control over their decisions are worthwhile – but policymakers should also consider how people might be given more support throughout their lives to protect their financial and personal wellbeing if they do have to work for longer.

Further information

The decision to work after State Pension Age and how it affects Quality of Life: Evidence from a 6-year English panel study is a research paper by Giorgio Di Gessa of King’s College London, Laurie Corna of King’s College London, Debora Price of the University of Manchester and Karen Glaser of King’s College London. It is published in the journal Age & Ageing.

Never too early to intervene to get us working longer

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Working for longer is something we are all having to get our heads around. It’s certainly a priority for the Government, which wants to encourage more older people into satisfying jobs that will help them stay happy and healthy as they age. For older people already in good jobs that they enjoy, who have been fit and active for most or all their life, this could be a great opportunity for them and their families. Of course that’s not the case for everyone. Dr Charlotte Clark has been looking at what having poor mental health as a child could mean for our working life in our mid fifties. Here she explains why policy makers and businesses need to pay close attention to the mental wellbeing of the nation if they want to extend people’s working lives successfully.

Working beyond traditional retirement age has been the focus of much attention in recent years as policy makers, businesses and working people across the UK get used to the idea that more of us need to work for longer to take account of the fact that more and more of us are living longer and that this reality comes at a cost.

As things stand, by their mid fifties, many people are not in work because of early retirement, long-term sickness or disability, being or becoming unemployed or because they are long term homemakers. So the onus for working longer tends to fall on those who stay employed through all or most of their lives. But could more be done to encourage and support those most likely not to be working at 55 to do so and then to continue to do so?

Looking right across people’s lives to track what may have influenced a person to leave or not be working at 55 provides us with a much clearer and more nuanced picture than a simple snapshot in time. We wanted to see whether having poor mental health as a child or as an adult might be an important part of that picture and give us some ideas for interventions that could extend the working lives of this group of people in a way that would benefit them and society more widely.

Increasing psychological support

It’s fair to say that the Government’s ambitions to get more people working for longer have been laid out quite clearly already, as has their commitment to putting people’s physical and mental health on an equal footing. Saying that, their commitment has been called into question recently in a report from The King’s Fund, which says parity is a long way off.

When it comes to specific groups not working, the Department for Work and Pensions has tended to focus its attention on benefit claimants rather than other groups who, for one reason or another may choose not to work – housewives and husbands for example.

Government initiatives to try to help people with mental health problems find work have included the ‘Improving Access to Psychosocial Therapies’ (IAPT) programme, which has increased provision of therapies for benefit claimants with depressive and anxiety disorders.

Evaluations of IAPT suggest that ‘Nationally, of [adult] people that finished a course of treatment in IAPT, 45% recover. . . and a further 16% show reliable improvement’. Encouraging results that have led to modest increases in employment, and it’s hoped there will be more positive news on this front.

However, things don’t look quite so encouraging when it comes to younger people with mental health problems and that’s what our research is shining a spotlight on. It’s also an area we believe should be a focus for policy makers and those working with young people including parents and schools. After all, successfully extending people’s working lives can only be done once they successfully enter and then remain in employment. This is less likely for youngsters with poor mental health.

55-year survey

We used information from the National Child Development Study which has followed the lives of thousands of people born in 1958, and collected detailed information about their lives and circumstances.

This included their employment situation and, first and foremost, we were able to see that, at age 55, nearly 19 per cent of the 9,000 participants in the study were not working: 2.8 per cent were unemployed, 5.2 per cent were permanently sick, 3.3 per cent were retired and 7.5 per cent were homemaker/other.

From a very young age, the study also collected information on whether the individuals in the study exhibited signs of depression or worry, whether they were hostile, disobedient or aggressive.

Even when we took account of a wide range of other things such as whether they suffered poor mental health as young or older adults, numbers of other children in the household, whether their partner was employed, qualifications etc. the association with problems as a child were still really strong.

Drilling down into whether those mental health issues were ‘internalized’ or ‘externalized’, we were able to see that those who were depressed or anxious as children were about one and a half times more likely to be unemployed or permanently sick as their peers without problems.

It was a similar story for those who had shown externalised signs such as aggression. They were more than twice as likely to be unemployed or permanently sick, and also more likely to fall into the homemakers/other category too.

Interestingly there was no strong link between poor mental health in childhood and taking early retirement or being employed part-time.

Children’s mental health

Of course there is a lot more at play in children’s lives than we have taken account of in this study. Nevertheless, it is clear from our research that addressing the mental health problems of the very youngest in society could and should be an area for focus and schools, together with parents and those with a responsibility for the wellbeing of young children have key roles to play here.

It seems it is never too early to intervene proactively to try to help young people get and stay on a healthy happy path that will lead to them a productive and satisfying working life that extends well beyond the age of 55. Equally, given that people identifying themselves as ‘homemakers’ rather than unemployed are the largest group not working at age 55, policy makers could consider ways to get this economically inactive group into the workplace, in tandem with its efforts to support the mental health of those people on benefits.

There is also a message here for policy makers about just how important it is to make those promises about parity of esteem between mental and physical health a reality sooner rather than later.

Impact of childhood and adulthood psychological health on labour force participation and exit in later life is research by Charlotte Clark and colleagues and is published in Psychological Medicine. The research is part of the ESRC funded Research on Extended Working Lives (RenEWL) programme at UCL.

 

Staying at work longer – a matter of geography?

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There are lots of reasons why people end their working lives early, and the relationships between those reasons are complex. We know, for instance, that if you’re a carer for someone close to you, if you’re unwell yourself or if you don’t have higher level qualifications then you’re more likely to stop working sooner. But how does the area in which you live affect your prospects of working for longer? What if you live in an area of high unemployment, for instance? A new report by George Holley-Moore and colleagues at the International Longevity Centre – UK highlights how people in such areas are less likely to extend their working lives – even when those other factors are taken into account.

All too often the debate about how best to help people to work into later life stops at physical health. But research from the renEWL project suggests there is much more to be considered. In a new report, Working for Everyone – Addressing Barriers and Inequalities in the Working Lives Agenda, we look at these complex relationships – and we find there’s a great deal more policymakers could be doing to help.

Interlinking factors such as physical and mental health, working conditions, family life and lifestyle are all important. And it’s vital that regions should use their devolved powers to ensure that people in all parts of the population have the opportunity to extend their working lives.

The importance of geography

But how does where you live affect the length of your working life? We know older workers living in areas of high unemployment tend to leave work earlier: A study by Emily Murray and others looked at a one per cent sample of the population, aged between 40 and 69 and working in 2001, and at the same sample again 10 years later. Using local area statistics on unemployment, it mapped whether they left work, and their reasons for leaving, against the level of joblessness in their area.

It found that people who rated their health as poor in 2001 were almost six times more likely not to be in work 10 years later.

Thinking about this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that older workers in areas of high unemployment were less likely to be in work 10 years on – after all, if you live in an area with high unemployment you’re more likely to suffer from a long-term health issue. And that’s bound to affect your ability to work. Furthermore, if you have poor health earlier in life you are more likely to be sick or disabled later in life.

But was there a geographical factor even after these health inequalities were taken into account? Murray and colleagues found that even those in good health were more likely to be out of work a decade on if they lived in an area of high unemployment – that is to say, this economic factor operates separately from all those other things that can affect the length of a person’s working life. People in poor health were more likely to be out of work regardless of where they lived.

Evidence-based planning

It’s clear that there is a need for strong regional and national planning on these inter-related areas of work, health and geography. Creating policies tailored to the unique pressures faced by the local population will be necessary to address the scale of the problem:

National Government should focus infrastructure spending on areas of higher unemployment with a view to increasing job opportunities and making employment more accessible for older workers.

Regions need to use devolved power to tailor their own integrated strategies to enable fuller working lives.

Local authorities should be given power and funding to coordinate local partnerships that tackle employment challenges. These should include councils, businesses, health and social care providers and charities: supporting fuller working lives in at-risk areas would require a joined-up approach that targets the various at-risk groups.

Fundamentally, policy must move away from focusing exclusively on physical health conditions. We need a holistic approach which incorporates physical and psychological health, growing care needs and socio-economic disparity if we are to extend working life for everyone.

 

A question of support: working longer and what works

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As more of us work for longer, it’s important to recognise the needs of older workers: and that includes the fact that as we age we are more likely to suffer from long-term illnesses. To what extent do our working conditions affect our decisions about whether or not to continue in a job despite having a chronic disease? Maria Fleischmann, research associate in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London, has been asking what might help to prolong working life for older people. Could factors such as having supportive colleagues and managers, or a clear understanding of who does what, make a difference?

There is strong evidence that people with long-term illnesses leave work early. While three quarters of healthy European 50-somethings have jobs, the figure from those with chronic disease is much lower. Among those with one condition such as diabetes or heart disease, the employment level is around 70 per cent – and for those with two or more that drops to around 50 per cent. Conversely, those who are able to stay well are significantly more likely to continue working beyond pensionable age.

As our working lives grow longer, it’s important to acknowledge that older workers with chronic diseases may have different needs from those who are well – they may not be able to work such long hours, for instance.

So, what are the factors that can make a difference? We know, for instance, that people are likely to remain in work for longer if they have a high level of control over their own hours. Shift workers, on the other hand, are more likely both to become unwell and to leave work early.

Deciding to stay on at work

But what about the factors that are harder to see? What about a worker’s sense of his or her own job stability, or of how harmonious the relationships are between co-workers? Does it help if an employee feels he or she generally knows who does what, or how to respond to a given situation? These types of factors – collectively known as ‘psychosocial factors’ – are also believed to affect peoples’ decisions about whether to stay on at work.

We used data from the Whitehall II study, which has been following the lives, work histories and health experiences of just over 10,000 London-based civil servants since the mid-1980s, when they were all aged 35-55. We looked at the participants in mid-life, around 14 years before retirement age, to see how factors such as levels of autonomy and of support from supervisors or co-workers might affect their decisions if they became ill with diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke or malignant cancer.

And we found that while good ‘psycho-social’ working conditions were helpful generally in supporting workers to stay on in their jobs, they didn’t appear to make any extra difference for those who became ill.

The participants in the Whitehall II study were asked questions such as: ‘Do you have to do the same thing over and over again?’ and ‘Do you have a choice in deciding how to do your work?’ They were also asked whether they felt they had good support from colleagues and superiors and how demanding they felt their job was. They were also asked to describe their level of education, their mental health and whether they had a partner who worked.

We were able to use their answers to assess whether these factors made a difference when they developed illnesses later in life.

Chronic illness

We could see that six out of 10 participants left work between the first phase of the study in 1985 and the last one used for this study, in 2007-9. During the same period the proportion suffering from chronic illness had increased from less than two per cent to almost 30 per cent.

So why had they left, and how might those ‘psychosocial’ working conditions have affected those decisions?

Among the whole group of participants, we found clear evidence that those who felt they had reasons to be happy in their work were more likely to stay on. Specifically, those who felt they were using a wide range of job skills – known as skill discretion – and those who felt they had good social support at work were more likely to stay on for longer.

However, we did not find evidence that those ‘psychosocial’ factors would make more of a difference in whether or not a worker stayed on if he or she were chronically unwell. Or rather, good working conditions were equally important for workers both ill and well.

So, we know that good social and psychological conditions at work are likely to be helpful in keeping employees at work as their careers near their end. And we know that chronic illness is a major reason why people leave work early. But from our study, we cannot say that such good working practices will be a particular deciding factor for those who become unwell.

How and why people leave work

There were some interesting factors in our results: first, we were able to look at the different ways in which people left their jobs, and the reasons why they did so. So those who used a wide range of skills had a reduced risk of leaving work earlier through retirement or ill-health, but this was not related to the risk of leaving work earlier through unemployment; while those who had good social support had a reduced risk of leaving earlier through ill health or unemployment, but not so much when we looked at leaving earlier through retirement.

And while previous studies had tended to measure working conditions at the time of leaving, ours looked at those conditions several years beforehand.

There is certainly scope for more detailed research on this issue – and there is plenty of reason for both researchers and policy advisors to continue to focus on how employers can help chronically ill workers to stay in their jobs.

Can favourable psychosocial working conditions in midlife moderate the risk of work exit for chronically ill workers? A 20-year follow-up of the Whitehall II study is research by Maria Fleischmann, Ewan Carr, Stephen A Stansfeld, Baowen Xue and Jenny Head. It is published in the BMJ Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and is part of the renEWL project on Extended Working Lives.

Unretirement: can it be a positive story for all?

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“When I was sitting around at home I would just get grumpy. I’ve also lost five stone since working here. This is like a vitality camp for me.” Retired British Transport Police inspector Brendan McCambridge, 56, interviewed in The Telegraph, describes how his new role at Waitrose has improved his life. He is one of the one in four retired British people who return to paid work, a phenomenon called “unretirement”. New research, led by Dr Loretta G. Platts from Stockholm University’s Stress Research Institute, explores who ends up unretiring. In this blog post, she considers the implications for individuals, business and policy of retired older people returning to paid work.

Retirement can be an abrupt and one-way change marking the end of paid work and the start of a time of leisure. But people’s lives often don’t look like this. People may gradually retire over a period of time, or even unretire, returning to paid work after retiring. We found that around one in four retirees in the UK returns to paid work, mostly within five years of retiring.

Our information came from the longitudinal Understanding Society data and its predecessor the British Household Panel Survey. We followed more than 2000 50–69-year-olds through the 1990s and 2000s. Participants were defined as unretiring if they reported retiring and later returned to paid employment, or began full-time work following a period of semi-retirement.

While all sorts of people unretire, men are more likely to unretire than women, as are people in good health and those with post-16 qualifications. Unretirees are also more likely to have a partner in paid work. After ten years, a retiree’s chances of taking up paid work are low.

What motivates unretirement?

Unretirement was a positive experience for Brendan McCambridge. Having a job helps to stay mentally and physically active, provides a meaningful activity, and unretirees often appreciate the social side of paid work. Some may appreciate the extra money earned which supplements a pension and provides funds for little extras. For others, earning money is an important part of the decision to unretire.

Our findings suggest that financial factors play a role in the decision to return to paid work. Retirees paying off a mortgage are more likely to unretire than those who already own their home outright. Unretirees may wish to prepare financially for retirement or to supplement a pension. With a basic state pension of £122.30 per week for people who retired before 6th April 2016, some people may have found a new job because they could not afford to retire.

Former Pensions Minister Steve Webb, now director of policy at Royal London, contends that some retirees may have little other option than to get a job. In an interview for People Management, Webb noted that although many of those heading back to work after retirement do so because they “miss the stimulation and social contact”, there is a “real danger” that a whole generation of people will be unable to retire in the first place because they have not managed to save a big enough pension pot.

He says: “If employers do not address this issue they could find themselves with an unhappy older workforce that does not want to work but cannot afford to stop.”

Why retire and then unretire?

Some people may unretire as a result of finding out that they like being retired a lot less than they thought they would. Researchers call this a “retirement shock”, in which recent retirees, just like Brendan McCambridge, discover that they do not like their new lifestyle.

Others may have known all along that they wanted to remain in paid work, but were unable to. More than one million people over 50 are out of work for reasons beyond their control and would like to be in paid work if the appropriate opportunities were available. Some people may be forced out of work directly or indirectly as a result of age-based stereotypes, in particular through not being offered training programmes to learn new skills, or from their updated skills being undervalued.

In their second Missing Million report, Business in the Community has argued that far too many older people are being denied the chance to enjoy meaningful employment in later life and calls for stronger age discrimination legislation to tackle this.

Employers of older people also often deny them the flexibility they require to stay in paid work. Workers aged between 50 and 69 years are more likely than other age groups to want to work fewer hours than they currently do, even if this were for less pay. Around 8 per cent of workers in their 50s are working more than 45 hours per week while also being in ill health. Such older workers, locked into working long hours, may retire from jobs because they do not offer sufficient flexibility of working times.

Retirees may then take a more suitable job if it comes up, or negotiate more suitable working times later on if their former employer asks them to come back. Dr Jill Miller, diversity and inclusion adviser at the Chartered Institute for Professional Development believes that simple adjustments to working times or job roles could be the key to employers attracting and retaining a “significant talent pool” of older workers who can contribute to the success of the organisation.

Does everybody get to unretire if they want to?

While people in financial straits may be wanting to unretire, we found they did not necessarily manage to. People who were struggling to make ends meet were not more likely to unretire than people in a more comfortable financial situation.

Similarly, those who had lower earnings before retirement were not more likely to unretire. The reason is probably that it is harder for people in a precarious financial situation to find a suitable or good quality job.

These findings are worrying in terms of the broader picture of inequalities in later life. If those retirees who most need to supplement their incomes in later life are not able to find suitable paid work, unretirement may be part of processes that increase inequalities in income between older people.

The findings are also worrying in the context of skills shortages currently faced by British industry, which are predicted to be exacerbated over the coming years. By 2022, the skills gap is expected to reach 7.5 million vacancies. Government and business should not forget about the experience and skills of recently retired workers who are often ready and keen to be re-engaged in the workforce. These workers may need more support and legislation to protect and promote their rights to work more flexibly to take into account their preferences and also the fact that they may be caring for grandchildren and other family members.

Specifically, the government could improve flexible working legislation by providing employees with the right to request flexible working from the start of the job application process, rather than waiting 26 weeks from the beginning of employment. Since older employees are less likely to be offered training, and are less likely to take it up, employers could monitor access to training and development by age as well as proactively offering training to employees and being open to additional training requests.

Where older people manage to find new jobs, it is a result of their own efforts and networks, and not because they accessed effective support. Older people reported in focus groups that Job Centres in particular provided poor guidance and assistance. Government could consider how to develop age-appropriate support services and guidance in Job Centres. Both government and employers could offer mid-life career reviews.

In the long term, we need to work towards a society in which unretirement becomes a positive story for all. Business and wider society stand to benefit from the ambition, experience and skills older people bring to the labour market. For financial and other reasons, many older people want to be in paid work. Currently, they are all too often left out.

Returns to work after retirement: a prospective study of unretirement in the United Kingdom is research by Loretta Platts, Laurie Corna, Diana Worts and Peggy McDonough and is published in Ageing and Society.

Photo credit: Scott Lewis

Downshifting and long-term part-time work could be key to a healthy retirement

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A secure, comfortable and healthy retirement is something most of us aspire to. But, as we live longer, we are all being encouraged to work later, increasingly well into our late 60s, so what might that mean for those aspirations, particularly the desire to be fit and healthy? Whilst the number crunchers have done their homework about how the sums add up around the available money to support more retired people for longer, very little is known about how working longer will impact on our health and what the knock on personal, societal and economic costs of that might be. Peggy McDonough at the University of Toronto, together with colleagues at UCL and Kings College, has been using US data to get a clearer picture of what the latter part of working life and health look like for men and women. Here she explains the research and why flexible working policies, particularly those concerning part-time work, could be key to ensuring a healthy retirement is a reality as well as an aspiration.

Across the developed world falling birth rates and the so-called ‘baby-boom’ cohort’s retirement have raised the spectre of unsustainable State pension costs. This has led to a range of reforms, many of which have seen a rise in the age at which we can collect State Pension. In the UK in 2020, men and women will have to wait till they are 66; this will rise to 68 by 2028. In the States, the age will be 67 in 2027. In addition, other incentives to work longer and disincentives to take our pensions earlier have been trialled or introduced.

What we don’t know much about is what the health consequences are of stepping up the workplace participation of older adults. Will working longer make our health better or worse? And what if those consequences undermine other social and economic goals, such as those around wellbeing and inequality? In addition, are there differences in the way these things play out for women and men?

Research to date has tended to focus on retirement as an exact or single point in time, which doesn’t necessarily reflect the more complex things happening during the run up to and after retirement. Findings are also ambiguous and it’s not clear whether retiring early, partial retirement or working longer is generally associated with better health.

Our research looks across a much longer period, viewing retirement more as a project that unfolds over time and drilling down into what is going on as we move from the ‘family- and career-building years’ to the ‘frailty years of old age’. This way we hope to get a better and more nuanced picture of how our work and our health interact over this part of our life and get some pointers about what seems to work best when it comes to staying as healthy as possible into the Third Age.

Patterns of work

Our data come from the Health and Retirement Study, which has collected information from more than 25,000 Americans aged 50 + since 1992. Working with the original cohort, all of whom were born between 1931-41, we examined the working lives and health of some 6,500 men and women over 18 years.

It was interesting to see that only 14 per cent of the men in our study followed a ‘conventional’ path involving full-time work until retirement at around 65 years of age. More of them (21 per cent) acted in line with recent policy initiatives and worked longer or did the complete opposite and retired in their early 60s (18 per cent). Slightly less than one in ten men stayed working but shifted from full to part-time work; it was rare for men to have had a substantial period of the time in part-time work.

Less than half as many women (10 per cent) worked full-time throughout the period. They were three times more likely than the men in the study to have worked part-time from the outset. The largest proportion, double that for men, was not working across this period, but, if they were, they were more likely to retire around the age of 62 than 65.

Health at 70

 When we took into consideration a range of other background factors, like education, income, marital status, and minority background, we could start to get a picture of the most ‘advantaged’ people in terms of health.

One group of men stood out: those who downshifted from full-time to part-time work around age 65 had the lowest chance of being in poor health at age 70. Women were slightly different: being in work (either part-time or full-time) was associated with the best health, as was retiring in the early to mid 60s. Women in long-term part-time work were especially advantaged.

At the other end of the spectrum, men retired early or worked very little in middle age were more likely to have poor health than others. The same was true for women.

 Downshifting is key for men; long-term part-time work, for women

Whilst it was interesting to note that long-term part-time work for men was not linked with better health for men when it was for women, we think that is probably because for this generation, women (traditionally caregiver) would have perhaps engaged in part-time work through choice, whilst for men (traditionally breadwinner) the reason may have been linked to earlier poor health.

Our research certainly provides a more detailed picture of how people’s working lives pan out in their fifties and sixties and shows quite clearly that men who are able to shift to part-time work in their 60s are most likely to have better health in their 70s whilst for women a long-term part-time arrangement seems to reap the most health benefits.

In short, it seems there may be considerable health benefits to part-time work but in ways that play out slightly differently for men and women. It should provoke interesting discussions among employers, unions, policy makers in the areas of employment and health and, of course workers themselves as they think about the sort of retirement they want and the options they have (or don’t have) when it comes to flexible working.

Given that less than 10 per cent of men and less than 5 per cent of women in our study followed these ‘optimum’ pathways for better health in their 70s, it’s an area that could serve as a real focus in the coming months, preferably before the pension reforms outlined earlier come into force.

Later-life employment trajectories and health is research by Peggy McDonough, Diana Worts, Laurie M. Corna, Anne McMunn, and Amanda Sacker and is published in the journal, Advances in Life Course Research.