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Lowering the retirement age - why doesn't it work in practice?


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So the retirement age is to be dropped to 60 here (at least he seems to be keeping his promises thus far.)  Can somebody please explain to me why the theory that fewer older people in the job market will help the employment situation for the young doesn't seem to work in practice?  Is that just my  perception or does it actually work but I don't know it?  If it's a flawed theory, can somebody please explain in simple terms (without the "young people prefer to be on the dole" cliches, svp.) why this is so.
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There are conditions with retiring at 60 and always were. And the key always was having enough trimestres to get a full pension. So the age in fact always was 65, because at 65 the pension had to be paid, at least under the rules for most of my time in France. Under what conditions they paid the people who lacked trimestres, I'm not sure, and have never checked up on this aspect of it all. Nor do I know anyone in this situation.

I do however, know of at least one woman who retired at 60 and lacked trimestres and her pension halved.

 

edit, you ask why it doesn't work. Well it is still in existence in France, it hadn't really changed. And as before some people are replaced and these days some are not.

There is the other thing in France and that is retiring early when doing travail penible. And in many cirumcumstances that appears to me to be a great idea. And strangely whilst I was doing my shopping this morning and old bloke had nabbed a young assistant and was telling him one job he did at the blast furnace was four 12 hours shifts then four days off. He said that by the time he got to his mid fifties he couldn't do it any more. Fair enough.

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Taking the specific case of France out of the equation though, I still am never quite sure what's wrong with the theory (apart from Andy's point.)  It has always seemed to me to be bonkers to pay young people dole money so that old f*rts can stay in their jobs for a bit longer.  Somebody has to be supported by the state if there are not enough jobs to go around so why make people work for longer when they're older? Why not give the opportunities to the young who have more energy and who, it seems to me anyway, need to start work pretty quickly if they are not to be marginalised for a lifetime?

But somehow when working weeks are made shorter and retirement ages lowered it doesn't seem to help.  France appears, at least on the face of it, to have a shorter working week and a shorter working life than many other countries in Europe and yet its unemployment figures are very poor.  Why is that?

I do agree, Idun, there are certainly some professions where even 60 is old as an age to retire.  I think many of my ancestors who, on my father's side, were miners and farm labourers, would have been delighted if they'd lived to be 60, let alone had the chance to give up work.

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I think that it would need a more pro-active government, offering (for instance) incentives to companies who agreed to release older workers and take on the same number of people under 25.

Young people seem to be getting a poor deal currently; hard to get a job, little chance of buying a home, student loans etc etc. I wish that governments would concentrate their efforts and cash on helping 18 - 25 year olds into long term jobs.

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I believe there is talk of a (French)  initiative to offer incentives to encourage firms to take on young workers at the same time 'twinning' them with older ones approaching retirement, but I can't for the life of me think where I heard this ..

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[quote user="cooperlola"]

 bonkers to pay young people dole money so that old f*rts can stay in their jobs for a bit longer.    [/quote]

From experience one does not necessarily follow the other, the old f*rt may be the most pedantic old job's worth that you think you'll be pleased to see the back of, but at the end of the day his work is satisfactorily done; when he finally shuffles orft, a few interviews with bright young things later you realise the depth of ability and experience is missing even in the most arrogant graduate, despite their opinion that they can single handedly replace him (and you for that matter) just doesn't happen; even after optimistically taking them on you discover that they need years of training and experience. Once around this block leads the employer avoiding retraining programmes they can't afford; searching around for the experienced people who are already safely esconced somewhere. Young guys still unemployed and waiting to find the elusive company able to train and take the long term view, but that cycle has already been broken. Except of course flipping burgers at maccy d's . . .

 

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Kinda sums up my recent retirement.

I took with me some 40+ years of experience in the field of electronics and communications and practically the only sort of people who could fill my vacated position would be those of a similar age who of course are either already retired or too settled where they are to be playing the job market and even if they were nobody is going to be interviewing 60+ year old's for jobs in the offshore industry !

My departure therefore created no openings or opportunities whatsoever that any young person could realistically benefit from.

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AnOther while I wouldn't doubt for one moment your technical ability, I must disagree with part of your posting. Yes experience is terribly important and can only be achieved with increased  age, but advanced age is no guarantee of technical ability. Lots of youngsters coming along are well educated and bright,  also I can't believe you arrived into this world with your technical expertise, and after all who taught you? yes thats right; the older generation. Nobody leaves school and could expect to step into your shoes for arguments sake, but people down the line tend to move up in steps, so that virtually every promoted person has a good background but then has to pick up extra knowledge as they progress up the company ladder.

                    Its difficult to asses other peoples jobs, but in my case my job was part technical and a large part physical, involving rigging, climbing and moving and operating heavy equipment, so when it came my time to pack up my body condition was the decisive factor. I was lucky to increase my working life as I spent the last six years of work teaching youngsters and acting in a consultancy capacity for recognised industry training bodies and industry machinery manufacturing companies. So in my case I know for sure that me moving on allowed others to move up and fill my old job. Having said all that no one does my old job as well as I did it, and as it is a publicly visible job, and I do keep my eyes on it and remind my long suffering wife how good I was. [:D]

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[quote user="AnOther"]
My departure therefore created no openings or opportunities whatsoever that any young person could realistically benefit from.

[/quote]

I seem to recall you saying that after your employers jerked you around over a planned early retirement that you finished your sentence operating a sort of work to rule régime, I may well have remembered incorrectly though.

If it was so was that not the reason why no younger person was able to benefit from your wisdom or did they simply not appreciate what was going to leave with you?

I worked for a company where lots of good people were overpromoted to positions beyond their competence where they performed badly which caused them stress causing them to perform even worse despite their best efforts, it was a real problem but sadly was resolved in quite a brutal manner by redundancies almost every year.

The works manager (ex storesman) was one and I had to take over his responsibilities in addition to mine whilst searching for a successor, finding a new head of production was far easier than finding a storesman who could hold a candle to the one that we had just got rid of, nobody could ever replace the knowledge and experience that went away in his head.

 

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When I was young (omg, so long ago!), I had plenty of work colleagues who certainly viewed me a great deal of scepticism.  Sadly, a lot of them - many of whom had been railwaymen for thirty or forty years - actually seemed to prefer not to teach me how to do things which could help them, but to protect the tiny bit of the empire which was theirs.  Even when I became an executive officer, and later when I moved into the private sector, I was plagued by these people who could not or would not delegate any responsibility, for fear that the person who followed them would either make a mess of it, or encroach upon their little bit of turf.

I just don't buy into this whole experience argument.  Of course we need it and the ideal workplace, imho, is made up of a mixture of those who know the job well and can impart their knowlege to others, and those who are young and enthusiastic and want to change and move forward.   It may well be that the people who come into a workplace at the bottom are less good at their jobs than the old 'uns, but we were all young once and had to start somewhere.  If  we want businesses to grow, thrive and change, then we need new blood mixed with the old. 

I think I was pretty good at my job but the departments I ran in my working life have not collapsed in a heap because I left.  One of my responsibilities, as I saw it, was to make sure that my staff knew how to do my job in my absence.  If they didn't, then it would just have proved I was rotten at judging people when I employed them or that I was a lousy boss, not that they were worse employees than I.

If you leave a job and take knowlege with you without imparting it to those who work for you, then that reflects badly on you, imho, not on those you leave behind.

But I digress.[:)]

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[quote user="cooperlola"] people who could not or would not delegate any responsibility, for fear that the person who followed them would either make a mess of it, or encroach upon their little bit of turf. [/quote]

Human nature realistically, especially in the old monopolies, Civil service, LEA, the list goes on . . .

[quote user="cooperlola"]   If we want businesses to grow, thrive and change, then we need new blood mixed with the old. [/quote]

Absolutely, though I would have included the word competent in there somewhere, and unlikely to slot young new bloods into majority of posts vacated by retirees surely?

[quote user="cooperlola"]  the departments I ran in my working life have not collapsed in a heap because I left.  If you leave a job and take knowlege with you without imparting it to those who work for you, then that reflects badly on you, imho, not on those you leave behind. [/quote]

Ahh, would that it were possible to replace competent knowledgeable people with the young bloods straight out of college,
usually there is a less productive period inbetween that being possible . . .

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In the offshore environment and the specialised discipline I worked in there are seldom opportunities for 'on the job' learning, many offshore installations simply do not have the accommodation facilities for non productive personnel. Anybody they manage recruit to fill my spot will be expected to hit the ground running with the consequences of not being able to promptly fix malfunctioning, sometimes very obsolete, equipment potentially running into 10's if not hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour.

To be perfectly frank I neither know nor care if the place has collapsed in a heap since my departure, I effectively gave them gave 5 years notice of my intention to retire so they had every and opportunity to bring in new blood and ease me out but they completely failed to capitalise on it so at the end they got one weeks notice that I was finally off.

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Thanks for the well wishes.

One of my jobs was to be in charge of the stores and responsible for all materials coming on and going off, so biros no problem [;-)]

Control of dangerous goods by sea and air, a job in itself and another skill set you're unlikely to find in a replacement communications engineer !

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 AnOther I'm not "having a go" at you, but I think your attitude has been affected by your perceived bad treatment by your ex company. Everybody has to be trained and taught skills that they aren't born with, all of us who do or did work with other people pass on knowledge to some degree. The clever people are the ones on the way up who take notice and learn as I'm sure you did to get where you got. As for finding a communications engineer to deal with dangerous or expensive goods by sea or air, there are plenty of logistics experts being made redundant by the MOD, that doesn't mean the job isn't difficult, just that there is always someone who can do what is needed. Indeed I think that people who want to get on tend to be flexible and a lot quicker to acquire new practises. Or are you saying that when you packed up work your job disappeared and the rig no longer gets supplies?
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Very true Nick, other than my apprenticeship and college training in mechanical engineering I am self taught in everything else by observing and learning, but when the old noble trades die out completely or more to the point go to the far east who are we to watch to gain experience? Mind you I have learned many things especially since being here in France by trial and error without anyone to watch.

I wonder whether learning skills is much more of a problem for French companies, whilst they have the word "autodidacte" the few people that I have met who are self taught have all been half French half Portuguese/Spanish/Polish, one pure Frenchman was brought up by an English step-father, all the others sincerely believe that you have to have a formation to do anything in this world witnessed by their constant asking of me where i did my formation when I tackle yet another trade.

Even those that are unemployed and that have some get up and go refuse to even contemplate attempting something other than what they are trained for without another formation, I wonder how they cope when a co-equipiér or key person suddenly dies.

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There is also the problem of a mismatch between the jobs and locations of people reaching retirement and the locations and experience (or lack of it) of people seeking work.  Is it of help to know that there might be a job in a completely different area, away from family and friends?  How many people are footloose and can move at the drop of a hat?

It is not a simple equation and thus the solutions are difficult too.

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At a time when many Governments are advancing the retirement age to save money and when low interest rates are reducing older people's incomes from savings it is going to be a hard sell to convince people to retire just to give jobs to younger people. I am afraid that most people are not sufficiently altruistic to find this attractive
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Coops

the reluctance to pass on experience reminds me of the old adage that Knowledge is power.

 

ANO

No one is irreplacable.  If you had be knocked over by a bus before you retired, do you think te platform would have come to a standstill?  There could have been some uncomfortable times, but things would have moved on - as I am sure they are now.

 

When I left my last post they had to farm out my activities to 3 different people, but they kept running without me.

Rabbie

 

When youth unemployment reaches a certain point (and we are probably there in the UK and France and well beyond in places like Spain), the differential cost between paying a young person on the dole, training courses, advice on how to write a CV and letters etc. versus paying a pensioner or paying someone to enter into early retirement is relatively small. 

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To add to andyh4's post, it's not just the financial cost which makes it economic to replace older workers with the young. The social cost of having a large number of unemployed young people with no hope of work, buying a home or car is already high, and as these people become totally unemployable it becomes higher. I'm not meaning so much the highly technical jobs, but jobs for the huge mass of average school leavers. I'd prefer that money and resources went into that than any other area because otherwise everybody will be paying the cost. 
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I am mathematically incompetent, so I have no doubt that holes the size of a Sperm Whale will be made in my argument by those who can do the sums, but here's what I see as the problem.

If you're older, ergo more experienced (and from the posts in this thread so far, it would seem that most feel that age=experience) then you're also earning more. As a result of earning more, logically, you're also going to be paying more into the system in taxes and/or social charges. If you are no longer earning, but are drawing a pension instead, then there will be an overall reduction, I assume, in the "income" generated for the state. You're not paying in anymore, but you're taking out.

If you're then replaced by a younger person, they'll be earning less, and contributing less into the system. Were that young person to remain unemployed for a longer period, their entitlement to benefits would, I assume, be lower than you're going to be getting as a pensioner.

All the above assumes a straightforward "one in/one out" replacement of retirees with unemployed younger people. Others have pointed out things such as the fact that the pesky public insist on living in inconvenient places or being inappropriately qualified, so that the retirement of a manager in Paris does little to create a vacancy for a trainee carpenter in the Creuse.

I also understand that there's a fairly significant demographic imbalance, which means that if everyone who's 60 or approaching it were to retire there and then, there wouldn't be enough people in the working population to sustain the pension pot, nor indeed enough younger people of the right age or profile to fill the vacancies created.

I've always seen it as my responsibility and a measure of my success at work if I have managed to train or develop someone up to a point where I've effectively worked myself out of a job. As an aside, I don't think it does anyone any credit to believe themselves irreplaceable, and it's almost delusional to assume you are.

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It's a good point you make YCCMB, but in all but small companies it is unlikely that Zachariah is going to retire and be replaced by Alphonse, straight in from the streets.

 

More likely is that Yevgeny will be promoted to Zachariah's post.  William then to Yevgeny's, Xavier to William's......... and Bob's post is taken by Alphonse.

The wage structure remains thereofre braodly similar in a large organisation.  There will of course be all points between as well.

 

However, even if the employee spending and tax power reduces, the company wage bill reduces and its profits should increase and ina just and Utopian world, it then pay more taxes and makes up the difference.

 

As for all 60 year old's retiring, in France only around 100.000 people will have sufficient time put in to be able to take the option and get any sort of sensible pension.  That would be true in most countries except the UK where the 30 years' contribution rule means that most 60 year olds could do it and get a full pension. 

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See? There's the Sperm Whale, right there!

I think another problem, whilst I agree totally with your "big company" scenario, Andy, is that no-one factors the cost of recruitment into many of these equations. Snot cheap to hire new staff, be they Yevgeny or Alphonse. And, of course, in France there's the issue that if Alphonse turns out to be as much use as a handbrake on a canoe, he'll cost a fortune to fire, hence the increasing reticence to hire anyone on a CDI.

A friend's son-in-law has just been made redundant in France and is now unemployed on full salary for the next two years...

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