Abstract
Ageing population leads to numerous changes in the structure of the labour force. Extending working lives is one of the main responses to those changes, yet opportunities to extend working life are not equally distributed. The aim of this paper is to present experiences of older workers across four jurisdictions: Poland, Germany, Sweden and UK in order to unpack inequalities in extending working lives from their perspectives. We use the qualitative component of a larger mix-methods international study Exclusion and Inequality in Late Working Life (EIWO) funded by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (FORTE). We apply life course perspective to analyse 100 semi-structured interviews (25 from each of four countries) with men and women aged 55-75 years old. Findings show that health, skills, and opportunities to keep working are not evenly distributed across sectors and kinds of business or across geographical regions. Analysis shows that the resources on which older people can draw to shape a ‘good’ experience of work late in life, or a good experience of retirement, depend on their access to material and personal resources for a period of years or even decades before they reach the retirement age. Policies for ageing should reflect this.
Presenters
Anna UrbaniakPost-doctoral researcher , Sociology , University of Vienna , Austria Rachel Crossdale
The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom Indre Genelyte
Assistant Professor, Ageing and Social Change (ASC), Linköping University, Sweden Nehle Penning
PhD student and research associate, Social Sciences, TU Dortmund University, Germany Maria Varlamova
Doctoral researcher, Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Poland Jolanta Perek-Bialas
Associate Professor, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Population, Working Lives, Sweden, Poland, UK, Germany
