Bleeding Boomers

Changing the retirement age is all to nought if the private sector will not hire or keep anyone who was around before the first moon landing

I wait with bated breath to see how the corporate world actually deals with the grey army it may have to employ deep into the 2000s.

In countries around the world, governments are realising that they can wipe hundreds of billions of dollars of forecast debt off the slate just by raising the official retirement age by a couple of years, reducing their pension and health liabilities at a stroke. Australia has modest public debt (despite anything Tony Abbott might say), but still smartly gave notice in the 2009 budget that it would lift its official pension age, well ahead of most other developed nations. Boomers born in the mid-1950s will be the first invited to wait two more years before they go off to reminisce about the 87 crash, The Smiths, shoulder pads, and other important things.

But changing the retirement age is all to nought if the private sector will not hire or keep anyone who was around before the first moon landing, for example. Big companies and their lobby groups will drone on endlessly to business journalists how they face a battle for skills. What they actually mean is: ‘we are short of skills; but we still want the taxpayer to cough up for skills training, and we still want to be free to ditch the skills in (expensive) people over 50’.

Something clearly has to change. Companies who find in future that they need to hang on to their over-50s cohort (and the vast body of knowledge, insight, and simple slimy cunning they possess) may find that they are racing against the disillusionment of older workers with the corporate world.

An astonishing number of my contemporaries are cutting down on work commitments, or even changing their work lives completely, turning their backs on the baubles the business world can offer. An old colleague who did fabulously well in his career – from magazine reporter to head of European equity sales for a very large investment bank – has now chucked it all in to retrain as a history teacher, returning to an old love.   

Mind you, he can afford to be picky. I would love to retreat to some academic project. A PhD on “Byzantine diplomacy towards the Visigoths in the eastern Aegean islands” sounds just the ticket. But my accountant has forbidden it, so I will continue chronicling here on the Business of Boomers for a while yet.

BRW

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