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Jane Pickard
| 6 Oct 2008 | 16:14
Whatever happens in the Heyday case (see EU ruling delivers blow to age equality case and What does the advocate-general's opinion on the Heyday case mean?), it’s obvious that retirement ages will have to rise and eventually be abolished. The reason? The enormous size of the baby boomer generation to which I belong. I don’t mean we are getting larger (although middle age is certainly affecting our waist lines), but that there are just so many of us.
At every stage of life this has given my generation enormous buying power. When we were children, we had more toys than our parents had ever dreamed of. There was a boom in children’s books, from Enid Blyton to Puffins, and products like Lego and Barbie came onto the market. In adolescence, the word “teenager” came into common use as we consumed what our parents saw as outlandish fashions and pop music. As young adults we demanded equal opportunities, maternity rights, breast-feeding in public; we joined trade unions and took to the streets. The older generation bowed down before the onslaught and the younger generation simply took all the new stuff for granted.
Now, however, there are too many of us for the more youthful working population to support and our life expectancy is so enormous that the pathetic pensions we’ve built up will be stretched to breaking point. So there is no option but to carry on working, albeit mostly part-time and flexibly.
If society forces us into retirement and penury, all that spending power would be lost. Who will fill the supermarket aisles, the department stores, the DIY chains? There simply aren’t enough of the rest of you. Businesses will close for lack of custom. Current economic prospects are bad enough already.
So it is quite extraordinary that any government, especially one with a policy of ending age discrimination, should try to maintain any age limit at all. Let the baby-boomers continue to make their dynamic contribution - they may work until they drop but this means they will also spend until they drop.
Do you agree that the mandatory retirement age should be scrapped? Vote now in our online poll.
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