My concern is as a senior who's approaching a pensionable age next year. I've been seeing a lot of articles about seniors being kept in the workforce. My concern isn't with seniors 55 plus, but with 65 plus. The stats seem to be going up, with people 65 and over working. That is not a future I look forward to.
There are also a lot of articles and studies. I have one by the C.D. Howe Institute. The title of the paper from the institute is “Boomers carry a time bomb”. They're calculating how much it's going to cost to take care of seniors, health care, and otherwise. I find that is a little scary too, when we start talking about seniors costing too much, so perhaps it would be a good idea to keep them working until 70 or 75. I think that's pretty scary.
First, I have stats on the U.S. workforce, and all of the stats show a gradual increase in seniors, women more so than men, who are staying in the workforce. I think that is due in great part to not having enough money to survive on the pensions we're given, especially if you're in the lower-income bracket.
In the one sense, there are still employers.... I haven't anything against people wanting to stay in the workforce, if they really want to do it. And there are going to be seniors who have to because of their financial situation. But I think the government has to look at addressing that by raising the pensions for those who really need to have an increase.
In Europe, these countries are finding ways to.... They're also challenged with an aging workforce. I've given specific industries here. This is on the second page. They find they must invest in training to increase their productivity. In a study from 2002 of more than 500 German companies, 22% stated aging of their workforce represented a problem for their organizations; 39% indicated they were facing challenges associated with shortages of labour.
The government says that, on the one hand, we don't have the young population, so we're going to save on education and taking care of the young in the workforce. But I think it's incumbent to really find a way to train our young people, mentor them, perhaps through the older workers too. That is what I've suggested here.
There is a program by IBM Global Services that recommends consideration and preservation of critical knowledge. One approach elicits employees' experiential or tacit knowledge through detailed interviewing or documentation explicitly capturing and storing these insights. Mentoring arrangements and communities of practice can also encourage mature workers to pass knowledge down to the next generation.
I think that's one way employers could benefit, not by keeping workers on until they're 70 or 75, but by garnering the knowledge they've gained over the years.
On page 3 I talk about how our lives have changed over the years, why women entered the workforce, what sorts of roles or careers they took, and how that changed in wartime, and then after the war women went back into the home. Then in the sixties and seventies many were forced, economically, to take jobs outside, whether they wanted to or not. Many did want to as well. But it was an economic necessity, because the cost of living had increased and because of raising children, and so on.
I go over how I feel that in this day and age women are not the ones who are so much wanting to stay in the workforce as are men, because I think that men haven't had the full duties of the household, along with raising the children.
When women reach age 65 they are perhaps looking forward to a little leisure in their lives, or maybe they're at a loss over what to do because they're used to working for much longer--that being their only job in many cases, but maybe not so much now.
I talk about the working poor. Perhaps some solutions are a guaranteed annual income, or raising the minimum wage. There are some examples here of collective bargaining and EI reform.
I talk about health. I don't buy it that we're healthier people. I think we're supplemented and sustained through medications. We have more of them now. That doesn't necessarily mean we're healthy people.
As we age everything changes--our ability to grasp new technologies, our reflexes, our mobility, our mode of life, and our outlook on life. I'm working part-time, and every time new developments come along with the computer--and they change every year--I have a problem. I have to admit it.
I've summarized my paper pretty much.