Banish Retirement

Banish Retirement.

By

U K Menon

You must take this thing about retirement that befalls you like some disease and throw it as far as you can fling it. Don’t ever fall under its spell or you will waste that part of your life that is likely to be the most important. Research has shown that skills and experience that you accumulate from work over a lifetime can compensate ageing processes that affect physical and even cognitive abilities. Retirement is a conditioning, a state of mind induced on the population because of weak policies on employment and ageing, and as a means to abdicate responsibility to those who have served. Retirement’s closest parallel is euthanasia, which at least is humane when administered. Have nothing to do with it.

If you were raised in a civil service family, as I was, in a civil service neighborhood of government quarters, retirement became a fact of life very early in your life. You realized that it was another important rite in the passage of life, like birth marriage and employment although retirement was more dreaded than celebrated. The very word and its correlate, pension, were mentioned only in hushed terms. A neighbour’s wife drops in to visit mother in the afternoon when the men are at work; there’s a hushed conversation with the words retire and pension mentioned several times. When the whispering is over they are both in tears, mother consoling the neighbor; don’t worry, she says everything will be alright, the children will finish school soon, and they’ll help you. It seemed to me then that there was something shameful about retirement that had nothing to do with age or physical or medical well-being.

At 22, when I started work in a statutory body as a correspondence clerk, the brief pre-employment orientation that I was treated to as a callow recruit was more about retirement and the number of years of uninterrupted service I had to put in to be eligible for a pension than the actual duties I was to be assigned. It was almost as if the end was more important than what you did in the space between the beginning and the end. Retirement age, I was told was 55; your retirement benefits would be these; you stopped work at 55.

At 22, 55 years was too far away to worry about and I paid no attention to any of the details about the internal regulations and policies that applied to my employment. In any case, I did not plan to work there for long as I had intentions to continue my studies. Why should I be interested in the end of employment when I had not even begun my career? Nevertheless, matters about retirement were part of the chatter of the office each day as the daily work was executed by a Chief Clerk, two typists and about ten other staff. To make things worse, one of my colleagues was an acknowledged expert on retirement regulations and skilled in calculating pension benefits. He was continually pestered to calculate the entitlements of not only those in the office, but also to forecast the entitlements of others in the statutory body who had retired or was nearing retirement. All this was amusing to the few of us who had just joined the service and were still decades away from that dreadful 55, but even we became alarmed one day by the consternation that befell Michael Chacko (not his real name), the Financial Clerk, when he received notice of his retirement. He still had a year to go, but the arrival of the letter turned him pale, made him sweat profusely and he had to be taken to the hospital in the office van. When he returned to his desk almost a fortnight later, he was a somber man bereft of all his former cheerfulness and humor. He would turn up punctually every day, complete his daily tasks with a vehemence not seen before, and for the remainder of the day sit at his desk staring at the clock on the office wall above the chief clerk’s head. After that episode that sent him to the hospital, there were no discussions about retirement in the daily chatter whenever Chacko was present.

Chacko’s reaction to the letter was baffling. After all, it was no lottery that set his retirement date; everyone who is employed in government service or a place where they have a retirement age, knows from the first day of service when his last day is. Even if you did not catch it when you started work, it is drummed into you regularly. Retirement looms like death the moment you start work, except that unlike death you know precisely when you will retire. You are 55 one day and retired the next. That’s how obvious it was. Yet, for Chacko and many others I would know in my life, the shock of the pension letter is as unexplainable as it is real. It is almost like Faust’s surprise when Lucifer turns up on that fateful night to claim his soul. Faust knew full well that Old Nick would turn up; yet when the door is opened and the devil walks in to claim his due, Faust’s surprise becomes part of his agony.

Someone once explained that work is a race against retirement. You have to complete all life’s expectations and duties before you retire and have accumulated enough during your working life to fulfill those expectations that you will have after retirement. Apparently not everyone wins the race and the shock of the letter is perhaps from the fear of the void of unfulfilled expectations.

The end of employment that retirement augurs and the consequent fear of being without work, is probably another reason. What you knew was inevitable, but paid no attention to, now stares you in your face. The arrival of the letter starts the final countdown. What was once remote and far away, suddenly becomes very near. The next stop is retirement. Twelve months to go. Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven . . ., then you clear your desk, hand over the keys to your desk and you are out of the office.

Retired.

No more work.

Yet, it is the work we do from nine to five on a working day that defines us and determines all our other relationships. Our entire adult life is configured around the work we do; everything from marriage to having children, buying a house and even taking a vacation is scheduled around the obligations linked to our daily work. Work, as in the Nine to Five occupations that I am talking about, is modern man’s primary reason for existence. Work distracts man from all other absurdities of life by adding a purpose. In fact the very sense of the self is lost without formal official work. I work, therefore I am. Retirement undermines our essence, which more than anything else, and for most of us, is an expression of our work. What do you do? I’m a clerk. I’m a teacher. I’m a Professor at the university. I work for . . . I am with . . All that goes with retirement. There are Professors Emeritus, professors who are permitted to retain as an honorary title their former rank as professors, but not all jobs carry an emeritus rank that can be applied once employment ceases. At best, you can only describe yourself as who you once did before retirement - and that’s really the rub, having to be someone who has been!

Losing the sense of self, of no longer having work to occupy us and define us is what makes retirement such a dreadful event. Someone who was very close to me as mentor and guide, went to bed after his farewell dinner on the last day of work and did not wake up the next morning. At some point in the night, his soul must have decided that there was no point in waking up to a life without work. Then there was the man who simply refused to accept retirement. Every morning he would get dressed, put on his tie, grab his briefcase and drive away in his car in the same way he did every working day. He would wander all day in shopping malls and cinema halls and return home only in the evening, as if he had been to work. Work is an anchorage, a safe port. Retirement cuts you adrift.

Society’s condescending attitudes and treatment of the retired add to the dread of retirement. Bromides like Warga Emas and senior citizens lack all conviction as salutations acknowledging value or seniority. They tend instead to equate the retired with the disabled, as a group who are drained of all abilities and without any capacity to contribute. Or worse, these descriptions serve as camouflage for ridicule.

Beyond the ridicule is the absurdity of the concept. There may be economic justification supporting the idea of forced retirement, but whatever that justification is, it certainly does not relate to the felt experiences of individuals who have been subjected to the vagaries of retirement. From childhood we are told that work is the end of life, its main purpose. We must work hard, we are told, and get a good job; then we become addicted to work, building a whole morality around work’s virtues which becomes the cause of much of our anxieties and guilt, only to be plucked out from it for no reason other than that we have reached a particular age. That anyone or government can make such a policy is itself a mind numbing phenomenon. You wait for the time when the person has reached such maturity as to be able to bring together knowledge and experience and from that alchemy produce wisdom - and at that moment you tell him, thank you very much, you are now retired, here’s your gold plated watch or other cenderamata, off you go and don’t ever bother to return to these premises. It makes no sense. Yet, the notion of retirement and the whole sociology surrounding it forms a major conditioning of how people live out their lives and determine their worth. Ageing is a social process arising out of the policies on retirement.

How can the policy makers who devised such a scheme and those who continue to implement it not realize the colossal waste of human resource that the scheme inflicts on society? Anyway, what is the justification for forced retirement? If it is that the old must retire to make space for the young, it is an arid argument admitting the impotence of economic policies, indeed of government. It is an admission that there has been no development to expand the economy since the time the retiree started work and the only way to accommodate one new graduate, for example, into the workforce is to compel the exit of one retiree. The argument that the aging worker must at a certain age make way for the young is symptomatic of poor economic policies that support political agendas that seek to create employment without increasing productivity.

If the argument is that people reaching a particular age are no longer capable of being productive or productive to some arbitrary standard, then that is an argument that lacks conviction. One may establish, just by observation, that there is no particular age, 55 or 60 or 65 when a person wakes up and finds himself or herself so weakened and incapable of work for no other reason than reaching that particular age. Research in fact shows the opposite.  Physical strength and even cognitive abilities may decline as a person advances in age, but there is no proven correlation between such declines and job output or performance. It has been shown in many studies that job experience compensates the other declines that are associated with age and that experience may even enhance the output of aging employees. If fears of incapacity or reduced capacity in some are the reasons for not allowing a person to proceed beyond a prescribed age, these fears can easily be averted through the contractual terms on which a person is employed without having to subject him or her to the indignity of a forced retirement. Policies of forced retirement whether in this country or elsewhere have no real economic justification and are generally symptomatic of lazy economic policies that are handcuffed to the past practices. What is worse is that these policies ignore the inhumanity of such a scheme and the waste it generates. If the old must be forced to retire to make way for the young, surely we have the genius to find ways of introducing another or accompanying system that will retain healthy, intelligent people in the workplace without looking only at their age?

Professional inactivity, the missing job syndrome, work deprivation, call it by whatever name you like, is not the only cause for dreading retirement. The fear of the gap between financial means and needs is another reason. There are obvious reasons for this. Salaries are at best designed to compensate work, not to meet the needs of the employee and his family. Since salaries also go to determine retirement benefits, whether under the government pension scheme or the Employees Provident Fund (EPF), personal financial inadequacies continue into retirement. Post-retirement financial obligations are placed fully on the head of retirees with only some mitigation in medical and hospitalization costs. The retiree is expected to live off his pension or his forced savings in EPF. I have no official figures to back me up on this, but my own experience and that of my friends and relatives show, that in many cases, neither the monthly pension nor the potential income from the accumulated savings in EPF are enough to meet the needs of the retiree to live out his life comfortably. This is not unknown to the authorities looking after pensions and EPF. However, the only response from them is to exhort employees to save more or to caution them on the inadequacy of EPF contributions and pension to support the retired life. Not only is this an insensitive response but one that shows how detached these institutions are from the realities of employment and retirement. Household debt has risen to record levels in Malaysia leaving fewer Ringgits for saving that will supplement the decreased income after retirement. In these situations, pension managers and EPF should be concerned with improving the lot of the employee in retirement rather than simply extolling obvious virtues. EPF’s investment policies should be directed solely at the needs of the retiree and direct its objectives in providing the ‘retired’ person a comfortable life. There are superannuation funds in Australia that have paid a higher annual average dividend than EPF, allowing employees a more comfortable existence in retirement. But EPF can do more by stepping out of the dividend norm to create plans for employees that go beyond the measure of the annual dividend. It is not untypical for retirement funds to be exploited for reasons unconnected with the welfare of the contributors, thus reducing the benefits of those who fund the scheme.

The waste of retirement is mitigated in some instances by re-employing retirees on contract. The elongation of employment beyond the age of retirement through this method resuscitates the retired employee into employment in the same organisation, often in the same job, but without violating retirement regulations. Permanent service is ended and replaced by contract employment that is limited to prescribed periods. The practice keeps the person employed beyond the retirement age, not out of compassion, but to fill a position that the employer cannot otherwise fill. Everything said, this is a reasonably effective strategy to keep in harness the enormous amount of human ability that is sluiced in the retirement process if it were applied with fairness and in an open manner. Stories from the coalface however, suggest that the re-employment contract is neither open nor fair and tends to inflict more hurt than good on those forced into retirement.

Demand for experienced workers from those parts of the private sector experiencing growth such as health and education has also put to good use the experience and expertise set free by retirement processes. The higher education sector, where, in recent years massification has created new demands for qualified personnel, is a good example of an economic sector that relies significantly on the skills, experience and expertise of individuals forced into retirement. Private sector universities and higher education institutions not only benefit from the annually refilling reservoir of talent of retired academics but have in turn helped reduce the many traumas of those forced into retirement. In fact, what the private sector has done for some of these retirees from the academe is not just giving them a new job but also restoring, in many cases, a feeling of lost dignity. There are full theses waiting to be written that will measure the varied contribution made by the retired workforce in developing the private higher education sector in this country.

No other sector has created such clear and ready avenues for reemployment of the retired, but similar trends may indeed develop in other sectors, especially in these days when fresh graduates from universities are under constant fire from employers for not being employment-ready, whatever the truth of such assertions. Good talent will also be lost when there are enough alternatives available to those who are discontented with the terms of service.

The growth of these opportunities for reemployment, whilst they may have brought new purpose (and no doubt joy) to those rejected by the blin