There is a growing clamour to force upwards the retirement age for workers. Today the Government is scheduled to publish new proposals for future pension arrangements in Ireland. Minister for Social and Family Affairs Hanafin has already hinted that the age at which people first receive the State pension should be raised.
Bank of Ireland is currently floating the idea that its staff would not qualify for their full pension until they are 68. The Spanish government is attempting to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67 and the British government has already decreed that the retirement age will be 68, albeit in 2044.
This is another by product of the international financial crash and the current crisis in capitalism. It is another stage in the neoliberal onslaught that wants to squeeze more and more from working people in the interest of maintaining corporate profit.
The push to force workers to continue working until they are nearly 70 is socially regressive, and reactionary in the extreme. Should construction workers be still dragging concrete shuttering around building sites as they are approaching 70 years of age? Should women of a similar age be forced from their beds at 4am to clean offices in order to survive? Who believes that it is appropriate that teachers should be trying to manage classes of 35 four year olds at 67 years of age or nurses of that age be required to manage hospital wards with very heavy work loads.
It should also be remembered in this debate that , given how the present system works, forcing older workers to stay on means blocking openings for young people trying to move into employment.
While workers themselves are happy to continue working after normal retirement age either in the public or private sectors, and are fit to do so, that should normally be accommodated. But saying that is entirely different from a general compulsion on all workers to work long beyond current retirement age. And doing so is only ‘necessary’ and ‘inevitable’ in the context of the present system.
As the development of new technology gathered pace in the 1960s and early ’70s there was much speculation as to what this would mean for society and for the lives of working people. Commentators frequently predicted that with more labour saving devices and growing productivity one of the biggest problems into the future would be how we would spend all the extra leisure time we would have.
The reality of today of course is that very many workers are under greater pressure than ever in their working lives. So what went wrong?
As greater wealth was being produced in society inequalities grew accordingly. Powerful private corporations arrogated more control over national economies and more wealth to themselves.
Then there was the orgy of speculation that developed in the world’s financial markets. Junk bond merchants along with many of the world’s most ‘prestigious’ banking and financial institutions became parasites on society rather than wealth creators. The sub prime mortgage racket that developed in the United States leading to the phenomenon of massive ‘toxic debts’ by financial institutions epitomised that trend.
That billions of Euro and dollars of workers pension funds should be riding on the whims of junk bond merchants and various other speculators gambling on international markets shows just how crazy the current system of providing for workers retirement is. Not just crazy but criminal in fact, when those who laboured a life time and rightly looked forward to living their later years in reasonable comfort found their dreams broken on the rocks of the financial crash and the economic crisis that inevitably followed.
Virtually all right wing economists and most of the media support the demands for a higher retirement age. In recent weeks, as the financial crisis developed in Greece, they declared that the Greek public sector workers just didn’t ‘get it’ when they defended the right to retire at 61 while workers in other countries had to work many years longer. It never occurred to them to pose the question as to why workers in the other countries were forced to stay on much longer while the Greeks up to now could retire much earlier.
In a really civilised society it should be possible for all workers to retire at a relatively early age and enjoy a significant number of years post work. Even with growing numbers of people living longer it is entirely possible to create sufficient wealth in society overall to meet the needs of all. However this would necessitate democratic control over that wealth which means prising it from the grasp of the major financial and industrial conglomerates which currently control it and utilising it for the benefit of the all.
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