Post Retirement Working

Kathryn Ryan’s interview with Brunel University’s Dr Alexandra Farrow on Radio New Zealand’s National Radio’s Nine to Noon programme on 7 October 2014, concerning well-being and safety of post-retirement employees, was perfectly adequate in terms of Dr Farrow’s study and its conclusions, but raises issues that go beyond the subject which Radio New Zealand seems to ignore.

Every job held by a superannuitant means that there is one less job available for a younger person.

The world of work is entering a new era.  Jobs are deteriorating in quality (unpaid interns in an expanding list of employment sectors, zero-hour contracts with exclusionary clauses, ‘Mac’ jobs, enforced ‘flexible’ working conditions, and incomes below a ‘living wage’ standard requiring secondary employment to meet costs) which will result in the disenfranchisement of middle and working classes from normative expectations of prosperity. 

The Economist (18/1/14) notes that 47 percent of jobs are at risk of becoming automated in the next two decades, affected by the zero marginal cost society (Prospect Magazine 15/5/14), robotics, computerisation as in the case of university lecturers by massive open on-line courses, and social networks as in the case of prostitutes and taxi-drivers.  The digital revolution has altered retailing in ways unimaginable just twenty years ago yet we live in a society which hasn’t changed its structure to accommodate these changes.

Ms Ryan’s interview follows the discourse of the contrived necessity of post-retirement employment and its concomitant, postponed superannuation.  In so doing it contributes to New Zealand media’s unquestioned reinforcement of these concepts at the expense of the wider picture, one which includes job quality, availability and remuneration; superannuation costs, structure, affordability, and tax base remodelling to adapt to this new era; and issues of male employment and identity coupled with societal cohesion and well-being.  Considering current government policies, along with Nine to Noon’s gratuitous endorsement, this country is creating a ‘precariat’ generation that will reach a nominal retirement age sans work, sans super, sans housing, sans savings, sans anything.

Dr Farrow no doubt could have contributed a worthwhile opinion to the wider picture, but the impression left by the interviewer was that there wasn’t one.  Why is that?