Demographic Developments
Retirement Time Inequality: Strategic Responses to Risks and Opportunities in the Migratory Life Course
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shamette Hepburn
Retirement time is the period between labour market exit and the end of the life course. Scholarship on the inequality of retirement time has primarily focused on its distribution among racialized and non-racialized retirees in the United States. This paper explores the findings of the first qualitative study addressing the inequality of retirement time among ageing Jamaican Canadians following their long-term participation in the Canadian labour market. It utilizes data from a grounded theory study of 20 Jamaican Canadian retirees (aged 60 and older) that followed their retirement time experiences after long-term labour market participation. Participants’ migratory life courses and transnational and diasporic perspectives, provide insight into the interconnections of earlier life course trajectories, livelihood strategies and fears of perceived improvidence, as key factors circumscribing retirement time, retirement risk and well-being. Findings revealed that the inequality of retirement time is a mirror of identity-based inequalities that permeate the life course. For example, the study’s ground-breaking documentation and analysis of the retirement experiences provides key scholarly insights into the intersections of age, race, gender, class and immigration. Further, it foregrounds migrants’ precarity and agency and problematizes their fears of improvidence. The latter is often tethered to discourses and misperceptions that pit migrant and non-migrant populations against one another, and obscures the sources of perilous later life outcomes. The research expands understanding of this lesser-researched phase of the migratory life course and brings into view the immediacy of economic security among immigrant retirees.
Inequalities in Late Working Life: The Role of Macro-Social Conditions and Change
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Annika Heuer, Andreas Motel Klingebiel, Susanne Kelfve, Gülin Öylü
European populations are ageing, which is challenging European welfare states. To ensure sustainable pension systems and the availability of skilled labour, many European countries reverse the early exit trends from the 1980s and 1990s. However, opportunities and abilities to continue working in late working life are distributed unequally across social groups and countries differ in the conditions they provide to extend working lives. The aim of this paper is to examine the role of macro-social change for the development of late working life inequalities. In specific, it examines how gender inequalities in late working life evolve in different European countries and how this is connected to macro-institutional, -economic and -demographic change.
The Impact of Work-Family Spillover on Nurses’ Retirement in Ireland and the Czech Republic: A Life-course Approach
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Áine Ní Léime
Understanding retirement decisions is increasingly important due to demographic ageing and longer life expectancy. Contributing to the theme working into older age, our study adopts a qualitative approach to investigate the retirement decision-making of nurses over 50 in Ireland and the Czech Republic, focusing on work-family spillover. We employ a life course perspective, considering how past experiences, current circumstances, and future expectations with regard to caring influence retirement decisions, supplemented by a political economy of ageing perspective. Based on interviews with 23 Czech and 40 Irish nurses, we explore the dynamics of managing both formal and informal caregiving roles. Findings highlight the unique impact of work-family spillover on nurses, who leverage their professional expertise in informal care and seek to balance the challenges of providing both formal and informal caregiving. The research illustrates how work-family spillover affects retirement planning taking into account not only current circumstances but also previous experiences with caregiving, previous policies and anticipated future informal caregiving roles. Through comparative analysis, we examine how the distinctive retirement employment and family friendly policies in Ireland and the Czech Republic influence these decisions. This paper discusses the importance of considering a life course perspective together with work-family spillover theory in retirement decision-making, and for policies that reflect the complex caregiving challenges faced by nurses.
