Sarah Vickerstaff

The domestic and gendered context for retirement

Against a global backdrop of population and workforce ageing, successive UK governments have encouraged people to work longer and delay retirement. Debates focus mainly on factors affecting individuals’ decisions on when and how to retire. We argue that a fuller understanding of retirement can be achieved by recognizing the ways in which individuals’ expectations and behaviours reflect a complicated, dynamic set of interactions between domestic environments and gender roles, often established over a long time period, and more temporally proximate factors. Using a qualitative data set, we explore how the timing, nature and meaning of retirement and retirement planning are played out in specific domestic contexts. We conclude that future research and policies surrounding retirement need to: focus on the household, not the individual; consider retirement as an often messy and disrupted process and not a discrete event; and understand that retirement may mean very different things for women and for men.

Employers and the Management of Retirement

In the UK early withdrawal from the labour market is seen as a risk and a cost, worsening the dependency ratio, raising public and private pension costs and threatening additional welfare expenditure over the longer term. Explanations of the retirement process have focused on the welfare state and the impact of pensions and other social security policies. This paper argues that a missing actor in these accounts is the employing organization. Early retirement in the UK has been predominantly driven by the labour requirements of employers rather than state policies to encourage older workers to take early retirement. There is a case for arguing that significant change in retirement behaviour in the UK will come primarily from the modification of employers’ policies. This research is a case study of three employers: one public-sector and two commercial. It examines the dynamics of the retirement decision. This paper reports the public-sector case. The findings indicate that employers, in order to reduce their pensions liabilities and stem the cost of early retirement, are trying to regain control of the retirement process. The employees interviewed felt they experienced little choice concerning their retirement, had limited knowledge of the options open to them and found pensions complicated and confusing.

The Future for Older Workers: New Perspectives

Introduction ~ Wendy Loretto, Sarah Vickerstaff and Phil White Older workers in the Labour market: the demographic context ~ Mike Danson The American experience of age discrimination legislation ~ John Macnicol The employment of older people: can we learn from Japan? ~ Bernard Casey Moving older people into jobs: incapacity benefit, Labours reforms and the job shortfall in the UK regions ~ Christina Beatty and Stephen Fothergill Womens knowledge of and attitudes to pensions ~ Sue Ward Sustaining working lives: the challenge of retention ~ Donald Hirsch Healthy work for older workers ~ Amanda Griffiths Flexible work and older workers ~ Wendy Loretto, Sarah Vickerstaff and Phil White The employability of older workers: what works? ~ Tony Maltby Is extending working life possible?: research and policy issues ~ Chris Phillipson The future for older workers: opportunities and constraints ~ Sarah Vickerstaff, Wendy Loretto and Phil White.

Gender, age and flexible working in later life

In many countries economic and social concerns associated with ageing populations have focused attention onto flexible forms of working as key to encouraging people to work longer and delay retirement. This article argues that there has been a remarkable lack of attention paid to the role of gender in extending working lives and contends that this gap has arisen because of two, inter-related, oversights: little consideration of relationships between gender and flexible working beyond the child-caring phase of life; and the prevailing tendency to think of end of working life and retirement as gender-neutral or following a typical male trajectory. The findings of a qualitative study of people aged 50+ in the UK challenge some of the key assumptions underpinning the utility of flexible work in extending working lives, and provide insight into the ways in which working in later life is constructed and enacted differently for men and women.

‘I'd rather keep running to the end and then jump off the cliff’. Retirement Decisions: Who Decides?

Government in the UK, as elsewhere in Europe, is keen to encourage individuals to delay their retirement, work for longer and save more for their retirement. This article argues that much of this public discussion is based on the debatable premise that most people are actively choosing to leave work ‘early’. Research on retirement decisions hitherto has concentrated on individual factors, which dispose towards early retirement and has neglected the role of the employer in determining retirement timing. New research reported here, undertaken in three organisational case studies, explores the management of retirement and how individual employees experience these processes. It employs the concepts of the ‘retirement zone’ and retirement scenarios to demonstrate how the interaction of individual attributes (themselves subject to change) and organisational practices (also unpredictable and variable) produces retirement outcomes. It concludes that there is considerable management discretion over the manner and timing of individual retirements. Hence, government needs to recognise that the majority of individuals may have relatively little personal discretion over their departure from work and hence concentration on urging them to work for longer and delay retiring may be missing the real target for policy change.

Labor relations and political change in eastern Europe : a comparative perspective

Bespreking van: J. Thirkell,Labour Relations and Political Change in Eastern Europe: A Comparative Perspective : ,1997

Entering the Retirement Zone: How Much Choice do Individuals Have?

Traditionally the factors affecting retirement are correlated with individual difference variables such as level of income, health issues and caring responsibilities. Studies have shown how these factors interact to predict the individual retirement process. However, the demand-side factors which structure opportunities for older workers have been somewhat less studied. This paper explores the employer role in retirement. By investigating the experience of employees and retirees from three organisations this article demonstrates that the employing organisation’s policies and practices are key to understanding retirement transitions. In the conclusion the impact of forthcoming age discrimination legislation is considered.

‘I was just the boy around the place’: what made apprenticeships successful?

This article seeks to add to current policy and debate on apprenticeships and youth transitions more widely by reflecting back upon the historical experience of the apprenticeship model. The research comprises in‐depth interviews with 30 people who undertook apprenticeships in a range of trades in Great Britain in the period 1944–1982. The discussion focuses upon the socialisation aspects of apprenticeship and concludes that a key feature of good apprenticeships in the post‐ war period was that they offered a sheltered and extended period in which the young person was able to grow up and become job‐ready. Reconstructing the social, industrial, familial and community conditions that made this possible is very difficult in the contemporary period, although further work in oral history has considerable potential.

Instrumental Rationality and European Integration: Transfer or Avoidance of Industrial Relations Institutions in Central and Eastern Europe?

This article reviews the early phase of transformation of industrial relations in central and eastern Europe (CEE). It considers how far these countries have been able to consolidate institutions based on western European models and processes: an index of the ability of the European Union to influence institutional development. After summarizing the main features of industrial relations change in CEE, the article examines works councils as an emblematic case of the development of an industrial relations institution. The discussion concludes by outlining the limits of the impact of the EU on the development of industrial relations in CEE.

Transitions from Corporatism: The Privatisation of Policy Failure

The defeat of the Labour Party in the last election reinforces the search, already under way in the 1980s, for new explanations of British political culture and practice. For some conservative commentators the defeat presents few theoretical problems, it is merely the inevitable return to old political philosophies and state forms from the past. The neo‐liberal and anti‐state political predilections of the English have once again triumphed. In the immediate aftermath of the last general election it appeared that social democracy in Britain had finally withered. As Gamble has commented: ‘. . .it underlines what we all know and try and conceal from ourselves from time to time, namely the long term historical dominance of the Conservatives in this country, in this political culture, and in this electoral system’.1 This leaves the question as to whether Britain is unique amongst its Western European partners, or merely in the vanguard of a new right trend that will extend to our European neighbours in due cou...