Current and Emerging Trends in Aging and Work | Why Singles Prefer to Retire Later | The Ageing Workforce in Ireland | Sustaining the “longevity dividend”
Current and Emerging Trends in Aging and Work
Editors: Sara J. Czaja, Joseph Sharit and Jacquelyn B. James
Springer, Cham
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24135-3
This timely volume provides an up-to-date and comprehensive summary about what is known about aging and work and addresses the challenges and opportunities confronting older workers and organizations. The authors describe current and emerging topics related to work and aging adults such as working in teams, the increasing diversity of the labor force, work and caregiving, the implications of technology for an aging workforce, and health and wellness issues. The authorship is international; the authors are renowned for their respective work in the topical areas and represent a broad range of disciplines within academia, as well as offer perspectives from government and policy.
Why Singles Prefer to Retire Later
Eismann, M., Henkens, K., & Kalmijn, M. (2018). Why Singles Prefer To Retire Later: The Role of Retirement Anxiety and Spousal Pull. Innovation in Aging, 2(Suppl 1), 1011.
https://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igy031.3734
Due to increasing divorce rates and lifelong singlehood, a growing number of older workers approach retirement age as singles. Previous research has shown that singles intent to and actually do retire later than their partnered counterparts, but we know little about why the retirement transitions of single and partnered older workers differ from one another. We add to a literature that is dominated by financial arguments and hypothesize that retirement anxiety and spousal pull (due to preferences for joint leisure) contribute to the difference in retirement preferences by relationship status. To test our hypotheses, we analyzed data from the NIDI Pension Panel Survey (2015), a study of about 6,800 older workers (age 60–65) in the Netherlands. We used ordinal logistic regression and the KHB method to investigate mediation effects and we controlled for important socio-demographic and economic variables in all our analyses. The results lent support to our hypotheses, particularly for men. Differences between male single and partnered workers were fully explained by retirement anxiety about the consequences of retirement for social contacts and time structure and by spousal pull. For women, the hypothesized explanations were also at work, but they could not fully explain why singles preferred to retire later. Our findings suggest that the retirement transition has a different meaning for older workers who are single as compared to partnered. Moreover, singlehood seems to shape the retirement transition of men and women differently.
The Ageing Workforce in Ireland
Privalko, I. Russell, H. and Maître, B. (2019). The Ageing Workforce In Ireland – Working Conditions, Health And Extending Working Lives. Research Series Number 92. The Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin: October 2019.
This publication explores the retention of older workers (aged 55 and over) in Ireland, drawing on several sources of data to describe their experience in the Irish labour market. It finds that worker retention, i.e. the proportion of workers aged 55 to 59 that are retained in employment at age 60 to 64 years, depends on the occupation or sector of older workers.
Sustaining the “longevity dividend”
O’Neill, D.J. Ageing workforce: sustaining the “longevity dividend”. BMJ 2019;367:l5889
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l5889
An aspect often missed in discourse on ageing and the workforce, is the benefit of maturity to the workplace. The exemplar is Captain Chesley Sullenberger: despite slower reaction times than younger pilots, his experience and maturity were critical to the safe landing of his disabled airliner on the Hudson river.