The Gerontologist 40:302-304 (2000)
© 2000 The Gerontological Society of America
Conflicting Trends in The Netherlands
Jan Baars, PhDa
a Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Correspondence: Jan Baars, PhD, Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands. E-mail: jbaars{at}kub.nl.
The Netherlands, at first sight, may seem to be a very age-integrated society. Retirees study together with younger students at the universities, and their instructors are often much younger than they are. This phenomenon of age integration in the domain of education has appeared only in the past decade. When I was a student in the 1970s, the few older students at the university tended to be ex-priests who wanted to become social workers or psychotherapists. At that time I never encountered pensioners who were studying at a regular university, but now this has become quite common. Further, both younger students and pensioners often engage in work in addition to their other activities. Students work part time to earn extra income, and pensioners are economically active in such ways as redecorating or painting houses, bookkeeping, or gardening.
Below the surface, however, one can see important age-related dividing lines. For students, these dividing lines are dictated by the entrance and exit codes operating in the central economic domain of official labor. Young students must move quickly through university programs (which are much shorter now than they were 10 years ago) in order to keep their grants and to be "young enough" to start careers in such areas as science, economics, or advocacy. In contrast, older students are able to study at a more leisurely pace, either at the university if they have good pensions, or in inexpensive courses specifically organized for older people.
 |
Gray Work: An Area of Age Integration
|
|---|
The unofficial jobs that students often work at are referred to as "gray jobs." For example, students may work in a bar, where they avoid paying taxes and do not receive proper insurance. Students prefer this type of secretive work because if they were officially paid, some amount of their pay would be deducted from their grants. Retired people often engage in the same kinds of gray work, because official payment would be heavily taxed or deducted from their pensions. There is, in fact, a huge area of gray work that is age integrated, where we find not only students and retirees, but adults of all ages who are either unemployed or working for extra income. It is worth noting that the gray economy reflects social inequality: Retirees who study at the university are typically not the retirees who have gray jobs. It is difficult to estimate the extent of this gray economy; some specialists have set it at 3% of gross national product, which for a small country like The Netherlands would be around 10 billion U.S. dollars. In other countries (e.g., those in Eastern Europe) the importance of this age-integrated area of gray work is certainly much larger.
|
Volunteer Activities: Another Area of Age Integration
|
|---|
Many older people join women of all ages in volunteer activities. In the past, individuals often were not allowed to remain in official leadership positions of volunteer organizations after they reached age 65 or 70. But this type of age discrimination is declining. The Netherlands has a government-sponsored National Bureau Against Age Discrimination (of which I am a member of the advisory board), which has helped to set this topic on the national agenda. As a result, age restrictions on roles of volunteers have become less common. But results of the battle against age discrimination stop at the borders of the central economic domain. In other words, age integration is an aspect of social integration, not of system integration (Baars and Thomese 1994
; Habermas 1984/1987).
|
Official Work: An Area of Continuing Age Segregation
|
|---|
In the central sector of the economy, however, there is a partial reversal of the structural lag which, according to the Rileys, (see pp. 266–270, this issue) presses for age integration. Here the "dynamism of structural change," rather than lagging behind the "dynamism of human aging," is now outpacing it, as the economy no longer needs the same input of labor as before. As shown in the excellent comparative study, Time for Retirement, by my copanelists Martin Kohli and Anne Marie Guillemard (Kohli, Rein, Guillemard, and Van Gunsteren 1991), over a long period of time the large number of exiting older workers was not compensated for by employment of young people. A form of economic growth that was not translated into a need for more workers ("jobless growth") had followed the shrinking economy of the recession years. More recently, however, although some concern has been expressed over labor shortages, this has not meant a general shortage of workers. Rather, the labor shortage involves only workers with specific qualifications. The demand for workers with specific qualifications may, nevertheless, undermine age segregation in the central economic sector in some limited ways. There was a very minor, but interesting, indication of this when older computer programmers were invited back to service because they knew how to change the computer programs responsible for the Millennium problem.
|
Official Work: An Area of Age Discrimination
|
|---|
Although the extreme exit of older workers from the labor force was not regulated by the pension systems, these early retirees were nevertheless regarded as having become "old." It is astonishing to see how the definition of becoming "old," in much gerontological research, in social policy reports, and in many organizations of the aged, has dropped in a short time from age 65 to 55 or even 50 years. A cultural pattern, originating in the early phases of the retirement systems, defined people as old when they no longer worked (which usually meant that they could not do heavy physical work anymore). But this pattern has continued to the present so that people who are amazingly fit and quite young, especially in light of increasing life expectancy, are referred to as "old" because they have retired. People are now likely to be defined as "older workers" when they have reached the age of 45 years. Here the separation of "normal" adults from "older" adults takes on ironic proportions: 20 years growing up, 25 years as a normal adult, and from age 45 until 100 or more as "old."
From these examples we conclude that "becoming old" appears to be defined by a changing relationship to the labor market. The cultural tradition has emphasized the importance ("youthful normalcy") of formal work, with age as a dependent variable. But chronological age then is often used as an "independent" variable to legitimate the process that gave it its meaning. The paradoxical result is that as people live longer and are healthier, they are defined as "old" at younger ages than before because they are not working anymore. I have called this the "paradox of the younger elderly." Victims of this paradox are, for instance, women in their forties who want to reenter the labor market after educating their children, but who are regarded as "too old."
Recently we have seen a slight increase in labor force participation rates for those aged 55–59. Between 1994 and 1997, the participation rate for men in this age category rose from 55% to 60%, and for women the increase was from 20% to 24%. These small increases in labor force participation may be partly due to recently developed flexible retirement schemes, but they do not reflect any extension of the working life beyond the traditional retirement age of 65. It is theoretically possible to continue working until 65, but then all flexibility ends. In The Netherlands, retirement is compulsory in all public sectors (civil servants, etc.) and in all formally organized and collectively negotiated work situations.
In sum, we are confronted with a central economic domain that still patterns the life course because, in it, age is highly relevant. A new dynamic of age integration is evident, however, in more peripheral areas. Seen in the context of rising longevity, official work is taking on a less important place in life. Official working hours and years of working are gradually being reduced. But these changes affect people differently. There is one segment of people who, after obtaining a higher education and working for 30 years in interesting jobs (which absorb much more than the officially stated amount of time during this period) have acquired good pensions and other cultural assets that prepare them for a long period of interesting retirement. In contrast, there is another large group of people who arrive at old age with only a minimum state pension because they never had regular jobs over their work lives. These less privileged people are forced to continue to work in gray jobs in later life. It appears that important social problems are (and will be) created through the complex configurations of changing economic conditions that shape the form and content of work vis-à-vis the changing dynamics of the life course.
|
References
|
|---|
- Baars J., Thomese F., 1994. Communes of elderly people: Between independence and colonization. Journal of Aging Studies 8:341-356.
- Habermas J., 1984/1987. The theory of communicative action (2 vols.) Heinemann, London.
- Kohli M., Rein M., Guillemard A.-M., Van Gunsteren H., , ed.Time for retirement: Comparative studies of early exit from the labour force 1991Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.
TOP
Gray Work: An Area...
Volunteer Activities: Another...
