Freedom 75 or work, work, work

0:27Here's the thing. that, given our expectation of a longer and healthier existence, many of us will want to remain connected to the outside world, to stay in the game, and a job offers those opportunities. It all sounds good, right? But whether late-life work is an aspiration or a necessity, one point is clear. We need to expect the unexpected.

1:02From the Toronto Star, this is How to Live to 100 or Die Trying. And I'm your host, Moira Welsh.

1:23The topic of work and aging, it's a big one. Long-term employment helps us earn enough money to hopefully avoid outliving our savings. Work delays are economic irrelevance, the ageist way that society discards those who retire and disappear into their homes, which of course can lead to a downward spiral. On the other hand, it also means that the workforce, the managers, have to rearrange the way they employ people because older workers might have different needs. Some will have a hard time standing for an eight-hour shift. Others want part-time hours to care for an aging spouse. And let's not forget another important consideration.

2:07Delayed departure of older workers can also impact the career trajectory of younger people. All of these considerations, and there are many, mean that the future of work is one of the most important societal shifts of our time. Our first guest is Beth Truesdale, an American sociologist whose research focuses on the future of work, retirement, and the inequities of aging. She is also the co-editor of a book called Overtime, America's Aging Workforce and the Future of Working Longer, a series of essays written by academics, economists, sociologists, and political scientists, among others, who challenge the long-held belief that employment is a good, even beneficent deal for older people.

3:00I mean, there are so many existential issues. And it overlaps with other ones that are existential. So, for example, the issue of how do societies respond intelligently, creatively to aging populations overlaps with questions about climate change, for example. So, already we have issues with how, say, you know, forest fires, the smoke that comes from them, the extreme heat that's now being produced on a much more regular basis. How does that affect people's ability to work, especially people who are working, you know, not in offices? And these are disproportionately people who don't have college degrees, who are working outside, who are working in un-air-conditioned warehouses, who are working in delivery vans, and for whom climate change becomes a real health hazard.

3:57So that's a problem for work at any age. And then you overlap that with increasing expectations that people are going to work at older and older ages. And then it's a problem for older workers who may be more vulnerable in terms of their health, less able to work in extreme weather conditions. So, you know, existential issue, yes. Overlaps with other things that are also important. Overlaps with, you know, just competent functioning democracies. To respond to any of these things, you need competent functioning democracies. It probably seems rather obvious, but not all jobs consider the changes that naturally evolve with age.

4:45Some jobs require heavy lifting or some level of physicality that can decline as we grow older or leave us prone to injuries that could accelerate that decline. For those who use their bodies for work, that could be a problem. And yeah, for people who are, you know, if you're 52 and you are a construction worker and your knees go and you can't do it anymore, figuring out what you do next is really hard. And some people can find a way to make a transition to something that continues to use their skills in a different way, but not always. And I think, you know, we've been talking about physical job demands, and those are hugely important in terms of the kinds of jobs that are available to older workers.

5:28You think of things like nursing, like construction, but also jobs that are growing areas like warehouse work. So as more and more things are delivered to us from these enormous warehouses, working in a warehouse where you may be walking miles and miles a day on your feet picking products for shipping. Those are crazy physically demanding jobs and often employ a lot of older workers at some cost, sometimes to their health. Another job area that's growing that's really physically demanding and also very low paid is home health care. And this loops back to as we have more older people who would like to age at home and who would benefit from having some home care to help them stay there.

6:17The people who are doing that work are very often older women themselves, and that tends to be pretty low paid and extremely physically demanding work. If you're helping your client to be able to get from the bed to the bathroom, you're doing this kind of lifting and bending and twisting, and injury rates are very, very high. Work-life balance is generally considered necessary in all stages of a career, and that's no different for older employees. even if the life part of that balance might take greater precedence, say to recover from an injury if you have a physical job, or perhaps take time away to care for an aging parent, a role that, as Beth says, often lands on the shoulders of women.

7:05Physical job demands are not the only thing that gets in the way of people being able to work longer. As we were doing the research, there were three or four areas that we identified as being really important. and one of them is health, which might include these kinds of things of how your health changes relative to the demands of your job, but also things like, you know, if you have a health crisis and you need to take some time off to recover, does your workplace allow you to take the time off? Do they provide paid medical leave and sick leave that allow you to take the time that you need to take care of your health and then to get back to work.

7:44Caregiving is a really big one that we haven't talked about yet, especially caregiving for the elder generation. And this falls especially hard on women because women are traditionally the caregivers in their families. So the statistic here is that for America, anyway, of older people, about a third of women at some point during their fifties do intensive caregiving for a parent or a parent-in-law. And by intensive caregiving, I mean, not just like running errands for mom on the weekend. I mean, help with eating, bathing, dressing, these kinds of things that need to happen on a daily basis and can make scheduling your work around them very difficult.

8:25Many types of work don't accommodate that kind of caregiving. So about a third of women experience doing that caregiving at some point during their fifties, which are exactly these years during the kind of run up to retirement ages, where if you step out of the labor force in order to care for a parent or you cut back your hours, it can be very difficult to get back in because of age discrimination. And there's a reason why inspiring stories about the 85-year-old yoga teacher are actual news, because that's not reality for most of us. And even with longer lives, that's not going to be reality for most of us.

9:08We'll be right back.

9:21In Canada, a lot of older people are in a financial bind. One in five aged 65 to 74 worked in 2022, almost half by necessity. Many more would have kept working if the conditions were attractive enough to keep them, which of course is in the eye of the beholder. If employers want to create incentives to keep older, experienced workers, Statistics Canada says those workers want the following. Part-time jobs, jobs with less stress and physical demands, or the opportunity to do more interesting work. Of course, that does not mean these opportunities exist, particularly for those who spent their careers doing physical labor.

10:08These are universal challenges. The book that Beth helped co-edit, Overtime, was written by more than 25 Americans who did a deep dive into research and policies that could reshape U.S. society, though there's plenty in there that can be applied to Canada and beyond. Beth highlights what she thinks are three essential points. One is that social inequalities in work and retirement are absolutely key. And I think you alluded to this in your question by saying that half of the people who are still working for pay in these older years say that they're doing so out of financial necessity. One of the things that's very striking that I think is similar across different nations is that the people who are able to work longer are disproportionately people who start off with the advantages.

11:01So people who have college degrees, who have good health, who are able to continue to work, who have jobs that accommodate them continuing to work. People who start off with the disadvantages are much more likely to be forced to retire earlier than they would wish. And in a sense, this is what you might think of as the paradox of working longer, is that the people who most need to continue to work to meet their financial needs are also those who are least likely to be able to delay retirement. The second insight is that working longer starts younger than we might think. So oftentimes people talk about working longer as if it's this thing, you know, people have this mental model, right, where you hit, I don't know, 65, and then you like retire, you get your gold watch, and you sail off into the sunset or the golf course or whatever.

11:54So that if we're thinking about delayed retirement, it's just like, well, if you're going to, you know, work to 65, maybe you could keep on to 67. You know, that's the kind of thing that's in people's minds. But that's just not realistic for so many people in the US. Only about half of Americans are consistently employed all the way through their 50s. So very far from sort of sailing through their 50s into their 60s and 70s in employment. A lot of people are struggling to stay in the labor force at younger ages. So what that means is that the policies that if you were interested in trying to increase the number of people who are in a good position to work at older ages, you need to be thinking about the people who are not only those people who are hitting those older age is now and what their needs are, you also need to be thinking about people who are in middle age.

12:49What are their needs and how do you help them to stay in the labor force in productive roles so that that puts them in a position to be better able to continue working into their 60s or even beyond? And then the third insight that I think really applies across countries is that policies affecting work and policies affecting retirement are two sides of the same coin. And often we talk about these policy arenas as if they were separate. So these things need to overlap a lot more if we're really going to find the solutions that we need. Because the fundamental insight here is that you can't delay retirement if you don't have a job to delay retiring from.

13:33Many older people believe they have aged out, as if they will never get a chance to get a job, such as retail work, because of their age or appearance. If there is a hiring spree, older people might read the room and check out, embarrassed to have thought they had a chance. So that does a few things. It eliminates an opportunity for a paid job, leaving an older person with less money for good food, or even just options to meet up with friends for lunch. And it destroys the opportunity for society in general to see that older people can quite happily coexist with all age groups. You know, you see these advice columns online about, you know, how to age-proof your resume by taking dates off of it so that people don't realize how old you are.

14:26You know, most of this advice amounts to like, pretend that you are not as old as you are, which always strikes me as particularly cruel advice. And I think for me, the question is less about like, how do we advise individuals about their situation? It's more about letting them know that they're not alone. I think so many people as they get older, if they can't get hired, they feel real shame and embarrassment, especially if they've got good skills and they're hard workers and they have a whole history of really contributing to the organizations that they've been part of and being able to support themselves and their families through paid work.

15:07And then something happens. And this is not only the people in the physically demanding jobs. These are people who have, I talked to somebody who had an MBA from a pretty prestigious institution and had had, a very productive, high-skilled, well-paid career and got to his mid-50s and his organization did a round of layoffs. And he just couldn't get hired again to do the kinds of work that he was qualified to do. And he felt great shame as if it was his fault, as if he should be able to find some way to make himself attractive to employers. And I think maybe it's not much of an answer, but at least for people to know that it's not them, it's the system, that there may not be a way for that person who is 70 and wishes to work in a restaurant to get a job that's going to meet her needs.

16:05As always, the solutions are job dependent. There is no one size fits all to support older workers, of course. But Beth says it's not really as complicated as some make it out to be. In many ways, the goal is universal. Older workers want what all workers want. They want jobs that pay them a reasonable amount, that use their skills well, that allow them time to take care of their health and that of their families, that don't overtax their bodies. So for me, the critical thing here is that sometimes we talk about older workers like they're some weird special species, but they're not. Talking to Beth, delving into her expertise, one particular truism comes shining through, the universality of the worker experience, no matter what your age may be.

17:03All workers have a better experience when they have options, the bargaining power to make their jobs manageable with life. This is especially true for those who may be a bit more vulnerable through age or disability, or both. So, the actual big question is how do policymakers and governments create conditions that satisfy desired productivity while offering both livable wages and support when it comes to the evolving needs around work-life balance throughout the life cycle of their employees. Failure to take that seriously, as people live longer and therefore need to work longer, can have consequences if ignored by companies and governments.

17:49If you improve people's ability to retire, the options that they have to be able to retire with financial security, you increase their bargaining power and then they're not desperate. They can choose jobs. They can bargain with their employers to be able to have jobs that meet their needs because they have the option to retire. The countries in the world that have some of the highest employment rates at older ages are some very poor countries that have no retirement system to speak of at all. So if all you want to do is increase the rate of employment at older ages, you just take away the retirement system.

18:31And then people must work. They have to work until they fall over. That is not a solution that improves people's well-being. So keeping a focus on how do we keep the options so that working longer is a good option but not the only option, I think is an important framework for thinking about this. We'll be right back.

19:08Laura Tamblyn Watts is a lawyer and co-founder of CanAge, an advocacy organization for older adults. She teaches law and aging at the University of Toronto and is the author of Let's Talk About Aging Parents, a real-life guide to solving problems with 27 essential conversations, a topic so relevant that the book has since been translated into multiple languages. Before the presidential debate between Trump and Biden, which seems so very long ago now, I interviewed Laura for a story on the link between political leadership and the cognitive decline that some suggested was present in both candidates.

19:48It led to an unexpected discussion on the struggles that companies are more regularly beginning to face when it comes to gently removing executives with dementia out of the C-suite or other leadership positions. Laura has begun consulting with companies on that issue. So, as society increasingly examines the value of future work for older employees, It seems interesting to take a counterintuitive approach and discuss what happens when some of those older workers develop cognitive decline and can no longer properly do their jobs. I have heard stories of once brilliant people who began showing signs of Alzheimer's in their early 60s, and over time, their work understandably suffered.

20:37But other than a growing frustration with the employee, managers seemed unaware of the actual health issue, which led to a terrible experience for the worker and probably for the managers too. It wasn't good for anyone. As people remain in their jobs, this will inevitably happen more often. So there has to be a more compassionate way of managing dementia in the workplace.

21:06One of the big problems that we have is that nobody wants to even imagine that they could possibly have dementia. And sometimes the way in is through a mental health conversation. Because now we talk a little bit more openly around mental health issues, which of course has cognitive impairment as part of it in some cases. If you've got very deep depression, you will certainly have some cognitive impacts. If you have bipolar and you're in a manic episode, there's cognitive impacts. Even if you're taking a lot of medication for something, you can talk about cognitive impacts. And what I would offer is sometimes you need a way into the conversation that doesn't scare people.

21:47And why do I say that? It's because we know absolutely scientifically that the thing that people are most afraid of is not actually getting older. What they're afraid of is losing their marbles. They're afraid of losing their cognitive sharpness. What that means is that there's very little planning in the workplace. The way that we used to think about kind of forced retirement, and that's really what I'm going to call it, mandatory retirement, is it often served as a placeholder for a whole bunch of other things. Whether you weren't a very good worker, that's okay. They'll be retiring in a couple more years.

22:27I don't want to invest in this person anymore for new training. That's okay. they'll be retiring in a few years. Or I'm worried they're kind of losing it, and I use that with parentheses around it. That's okay. We'll put them with safe files, and they'll be retiring in a few years. The reality is we actually need our workforce to work up to seven years longer with our change in demographic. And what that means is we have to start thinking about what is it going to look like if we have people with significant cognitive changes like dementia. And so we start out with an older person conversation.

23:02Again, that often leads us up to the C-suite or boards of directors because seniority sometimes means authority, but not always. What we see is younger workers may have more comfort talking about changes. Certainly the conversations around menopause, brain fog, and so on are kind of opening things up and maybe around mental health. Typically, older workers are not comfortable talking about that. So sometimes the people who you need to talk to the most are the people who are less likely to be open to it, and yet, in fact, are the biggest risks. Obviously, there is a difference between age-related forgetfulness, which can start in the 40s and 50s due to hormonal changes in men and women, and cognitive decline diagnosed by a medical expert.

23:53There has to be a way to deal with legitimate concerns without making a person feel shame or making them feel as if they're being singled out for no reason.

24:05If you're starting to see that somebody is really deviating in their thinking or their risk assessment, which is often that frontal temporal executive function challenge, right? You can see some things are changing. If we have a mental health framework at the office, and now many people do, you can actually fold it into that because it is brain health. Fundamentally, it's a health issue. If you see that the person is starting to be making really, you know, again, erratic choices or lashing out at a person and so on, instead of moving straight into a disciplinary approach, I would say pull out that health-based set of responses and see what's going on.

24:48The best thing you can actually do is get them into health care because it may not actually be dementia. It might be a brain tumor. It might be a bleed. It might be that they're getting early onset Parkinson's. Many, many things can affect it, some of which can get better. What that means, however, is you need to be aware that you need health supports that can deal with a person's brain health. And lots of employers need to get that right. When Laura came to be interviewed here in the Star Studio, there was something else on my mind. The younger workers and how they might fit into this new work cycle.

25:24Here's what I put to her. In the Toronto Star story last spring, you told me about the consulting you have done for companies that had legitimate concerns about leaders who ran the business for decades and were perhaps unaware that they needed to step away from financial decisions. It was, as you said, one of the challenges of succession planning. So, speaking of succession, among some younger people, there is a sense of, shall we say, wonderment about the longevity of an older person's career, questioning when a leader will hand off their power and allow for a generational shift. In this case, we are not speaking about people with dementia, but those who do not want to leave a role that offers power, identity, and purpose.

26:12If younger people have been sold the idea that they have the opportunity to climb the ladder, they could get waylaid as more people stay in the workforce longer. These are two understandable but conflicting generational views. How do we manage those in the workplace? because there is a generational conversation at play here. I think this is going to be such an interesting conversation to have in the next 10 years because I think there's three threads we can pull out. The first is the sense of that often younger person wanting to develop their career, which is a completely reasonable thing that they want to do.

26:51The second thread is about financial well-being, And that is something that we really need to focus on to some greater degree. 49 % of women in Canada have less than$5 ,000 in their savings account or any assets. About a third of women in Canada have no savings whatsoever. So there's a gender piece to it as well. Homelessness over the age of 65 is doubling every year in the last couple of years. Food bank usage by seniors, often for the first time in Canada, is up 44%. So these are people who are feeling a squeeze and also have new costs that they never had before. And so when we think about the amount of money people need, this notion of, remember Freedom 55?

27:37I just laugh. Freedom 65 is also quite laughable. So younger people may not realize that older people actually still need to work. And they even maybe thought, well, maybe I would be able to retire, but no, they can't. One of the other reasons why people who are in that often 60-year-old bracket, sort of 60 to 70, are not leaving work is because they thought that they would inherit money. But the people for whom they thought they would inherit money are still alive. So those intergenerational transfers of wealth are starting, but it's not meeting the need. And so younger people who, in many cases, have been very alive to the cost of things right now, assume that older people, because of the trappings that they may have, are financially well and they're not.

28:19So we need to understand that in both of those circumstances, financial well-being is the concern. And the third piece is we need to address the fact that without a workplace, often many people, often men in particular, don't have a sense of purpose and they don't have relationships. We know that when people are older, if they lose a sense of purpose, that that is the beginning of the end. But one of the things that I think workforce planning should have is not just retirement planning, but actually how are you going to maintain that sense of purpose in your life? And I do think that if people felt less insecure and understood that they might be able to continue that sense of purpose and they don't need to work, there would be more flow through.