Suchergebnisse

AbstractWir untersuchen aus einer Lebenslaufperspektive die Arbeitsmarktsituation älterer Personen im internationalen Vergleich und beziehen dabei sowohl Frühverrentung als auch Arbeitslosigkeit ein. Zentrale Hypothese unserer Analyse ist, dass die Wirkung von Sozialpolitik auf die Beschäftigungschancen Älterer nicht einheitlich ist, sondern von der individuellen vorangegangenen Erwerbsbiografie abhängt. Datengrundlage ist der "Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe", insbesondere die Lebenslaufdaten der dritten Welle (SHARELIFE, 2008/09) aus zwölf europäischen Ländern. Unsere Analysegruppe sind männliche Befragte ab 50 Jahren. Als kontextuelle Faktoren beziehen wir institutionelle Frühverrentungsanreize sowie Kündigungsschutzregelungen ein. Um Interaktionseffekte zwischen sozialpolitischen und individuellen Charakteristika zu schätzen, verwenden wir Mehrebenen-Regressionen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen unterschiedliche Mechanismen für Arbeitslosigkeit und Frührente. Unterschiede im Arbeitslosigkeitsrisiko Älterer sind vor allem auf individuelle Faktoren zurückzuführen; Personen mit vormals instabilen Erwerbsverläufen und atypischer Beschäftigung sind besonders betroffen. Das Gegenteil trifft auf Frühverrentung zu: Personen mit stabilen Erwerbskarrieren in regulärer Beschäftigung weisen hierfür eine höhere Wahrscheinlichkeit auf. Dieser Zusammenhang wird durch generöse Frühverrentungsmöglichkeiten zusätzlich verstärkt. Strikte Kündigungsschutzregelungen erhöhen dagegen die Beschäftigungswahrscheinlichkeit von Personen mit stabilen Erwerbsverläufen, allerdings nur, wenn die institutionalisierten Frühverrentungsanreize dem nicht entgegenwirken.

The Age Limit Adjustment Act, which was adopted in 2007, constitutes a climax in the developments of a paradigm shift in pension policy towards remaining at work for longer. This development entails profound changes and restrictions on benefits for assured persons. In future, many of the insurable employed will not receive a pension without incurring deductions until they reach the age of 67. Both employers and employees are faced with new challenges if they wish to avoid pension reductions in the event of an early retirement and consequently possible precarious incomes at old age. Especially women need particular support in this regard, given that in structural terms, they are in a weaker position on the labour market.Against this background, a representative nationwide survey of 1,800 female workers born between 1947 and 1964 was commissioned by the New Quality of Work Initiative (INQA) and conducted by the Institute of Gerontology at the Technical University of Dortmund in cooperation with TNS Infratest in 2007. These cohorts are to be affected by the increase of the age limit from 2012 onwards. In addition to structural data, this survey studied the respondents' assessment of their current ability to work and to continue to work until reaching the standard age limit. Further, the survey explored specific working conditions and strains of work. The results show that more than 40% of the female respondents are sceptical about the conditions of being able to continue their current work until reaching their statutory age limit. The only moderate to poor workability and the consequential danger of having to leave work result e.g. from work-related strains which accumulate in certain sectors and professional groups. The creation of appropriate jobs for older workers as well as the implementation of a staff policy in companies, which is sensitive to demographic developments and individual circumstances, can contribute to maintaining and nurturing the workability.

Der Autor untersucht vor dem Hintergrund der Wandlungen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt in Großbritannien die Frage, inwieweit die Flexibilisierungsprozesse die Erwerbskarrieren von älteren Arbeitnehmern und ihren Übergang in die Rente beeinflussen. Er betont einleitend die Tatsache, dass die Qualifikationen der älteren Beschäftigten mit dem beschleunigten technologischen Wandel und dem verstärkten globalen Wettbewerb zunehmend überholt sind und auf den Arbeitsmärkten weniger nachgefragt werden. Prekäre Beschäftigungsformen wie auch längere Phasen der Arbeitslosigkeit stellen dabei nicht nur eine unsichere Phase im späten Erwerbsverlauf dar, sondern haben darüber hinaus auch Folgen für das Renteneinkommen und das Risiko von Altersarmut. Es ist jedoch zu erwarten, dass die Richtung und das Ausmaß von Veränderungsprozessen stark von nationalen institutionellen Kontexten geprägt sind. Der Autor gibt zunächst einen Überblick über die Arbeitsmarktentwicklung in Großbritannien zwischen 1990 und 2005. Er analysiert anschließend anhand von Daten des "British Household Panel Survey" die Erwerbskarrieren von älteren Arbeitnehmern mit Fokus auf die Einkommensmobilität, das Risiko von beruflichem Abstieg und Arbeitslosigkeit sowie den Übergang in den Ruhestand und das Renteneinkommen. (ICI)

Population ageing and increasing employment rates among women have been well known trends for many years in many countries. This latter development means that the share of couples nearing retirement where both partners are working has been increasing. Surprisingly, little attention has been devoted to studying retirement in a couple context in greater detail. This article addresses the question whether and how couples coordinate their transitions from working life into retirement and which factors to consider when examining (non-)joint retirement patterns. The aim of this article is to improve the understanding of the complex interactions taking place in couple retirement processes that touch on the work and family sphere and to promote areas of future research along these lines. It contributes to the scholarly debate by providing a comprehensive summary of research devoted to studying couple retirement patterns and its antecedents from a life course perspective. To this end, research literature from more than 25 years is taken into account and various conceptual, theoretical and empirical aspects of couple retirement processes are discussed. Readers are provided with an overview of the concept of joint retirement, an idea of how widespread joint retirement is, and which factors to consider when studying retirement timing from a couple perspective.

We examine the association between pathways to retirement and patterns of subjective well-being in Germany. We argue that short-term development of subjective well-being is related to social status changes while long-term development of subjective well-being is related to resources and changes in life circumstances. Importantly, we expect that how a person's social status changes and his/her access to resources post-retirement both depend on the person's specific pathway to retirement, resulting in distinct patterns of subjective well-being post-retirement. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we categorized people as retiring from employment, short- or long-term unemployment, labour market inactivity or due to disability. We then used dual-change score models to compare trajectories of life satisfaction ten years before to ten years after the retirement transition. For people retiring from employment, life satisfaction did not change in the short term but developed more positively in the long term. In comparison, people retiring from unemployment or due to disability experienced a short-term increase in life satisfaction but had more negative long-term trajectories of life satisfaction. We found no retirement-related changes in life satisfaction for people retiring from inactivity. The findings suggest that different pathways to retirement are related to distinct patterns of subjective well-being and highlight the importance of late-life employment biographies for quality of life post-retirement.

In the context of population aging and growing numbers of older workers and older couples, this study examines how educational assortative mating earlier in life is associated with the division of paid work later in life between partners of opposite-sex couples in the Netherlands. We observe 20 years of linked partners' employment trajectories, when the male partners were aged 45–65. This longitudinal and dyadic perspective enables us to examine long-term patterns in couples' division of paid work, including the timing of retirement, beyond snapshots of the division of paid work between partners at specific ages. We consider labor supply and labor demand factors for older workers in connection to cumulative (dis)advantage over the life course and argue that educational assortative mating earlier in life reinforces social inequality between couples later in life. We innovatively apply multichannel sequence and cluster analysis using retrospective data from four waves of the Family Survey Dutch Population (FSDP) for the 1916–1957 birth cohorts. Findings support a typology of five groups of older couples: 1) high-status dual-earners, 2) low-status dual-earners, 3) high-status male breadwinners, 4) low-status male breadwinners and 5) dual-jobless/disabled couples. The male breadwinner clusters are more prevalent overall (53%), but even among these relatively old birth cohorts, a substantial share of couples is in a long-term, stable dual-earner arrangement later in life (41%). The majority of dual-earner couples consists of two high-status earners (24%). Multinomial logistic regression analysis supports that educational assortative mating earlier in life is associated with a polarization into resource-rich high-status dual-earners and resource-poor low-status male breadwinner couples later in life. We conclude that educational assortative mating sets in processes of cumulative (dis)advantage over the life course that leave an enduring imprint on couples' late-life employment trajectories.

Women play an increasingly important role in the labour market and as wage earners.
Moreover, in many countries, young women have outperformed men in terms of educational
attainment and qualification. Still, women's human capital investment does not pay off as it does for
men as they are still significantly disadvantaged on the labour market. Based on a qualitative empirical
investigation with women in their mid-career, this article investigates the role of learning for women's
labour market participation and career paths. Women's careers complexly intersect with role
expectations, family needs, the career of the partner and anticipation of low returns of educational
investment. This is typically reflected in discontinuous employment, part-time work and women's
secondary wage earner position in the family. Furthermore, women qualified at the intermediate skills
level are more likely to move horizontally in their career than vertically. Horizontal mobility thereby
requires significant engagement with learning as the German labour market usually requires a formal
qualification to realise a career change. Learning and further training thus become instrumental to
facilitate and support women's career transitions, which are often aimed at re-entering regular
employment after longer periods of family-related interruptions and/or to remain qualified in jobs in
the social, health and educational fields, all of which are female dominated. Ultimately, women's
significant engagement with continuing learning is not primarily expected to support career
advancement and vertical mobility, particularly as it can neither alter discontinuities of employment
nor the German-specific nexus between welfare, family and education policies and the labour market.
This challenges the lifelong learning rhetoric insofar as one key aim of lifelong learning policies is to
support labour market inclusion and the mobility of disadvantaged groups.

How are gendered work-family life courses associated with financial well-being in retirement? In this article we compare the cohorts born 1920-1950 in West Germany and Switzerland, whose adult life courses are characterized by similar strong male-breadwinner contexts in both countries. The countries differ in that Switzerland represented a liberal pension system, whereas Germany represented a corporatist protective pension system when these cohorts retired. We therefore assess how gendered work-family life courses that developed in similar male-breadwinner contexts are related to financial well-being in retirement in different pension systems. Using data from the SHARELIFE survey we conduct multichannel sequence analysis and cluster analysis to identify groups of typical work-family life courses from ages 20 to 59. Regression models estimate how these groups are associated with the individual pension income and household income in retirement. Results show that women who combined motherhood with part time work and extended periods out of the labour force have even lower individual pension income in Switzerland compared to their German peers. This relative disadvantage partly extends to lower household income in retirement. Findings support that male breadwinner policies earlier in life combined with liberal pension policies later in life, as in Switzerland, intensify pension penalties for typical female work-family life courses of early motherhood and weak labour force attachment. We conclude that life course sensitive social policies should harmonize regulations, which are in effect earlier in life with policies later in life for specific birth cohorts.

One consequence of demographic change is a longer average remaining lifetime after retirement. Many people, however, remain able and willing to continue work after reaching the statutory retirement age. Given the predicted shortage of skilled workers in the future, post-retirement activities have the potential to contribute to both organisations and society. This article elaborates the prerequisites for productivity in retirement age and the changed nature of retirement at present.It also quantifies the extent to which activities are continued at retirement age. Paid employment still occurs beyond the applicable retirement age, whereby with increasing age, self-employed persons and assistant family members make up the lion's share of the statistics. An empirical study shows the concrete situation of active retirees and the prerequisites for post-retirement activities. At the explorative level, individual experiences of the transition into retirement, the reasons for and the framework of post-retirement activities, motivational factors in job design, and physical and intellectual demands before and after retirement are characterised. The qualitative data indicate that retirement entails changes towards more flexible structures in everyday life. Decisive reasons for taking up post-retirement activities are the desire to help, pass on knowledge or remain active; personal development and contact with others; and gaining appreciation and recognition. Flexible job design and freedom to make decisions constitute major elements in shaping post-retirement working activities. Offering autonomy, skill variety, and task significance is important for the design of post-retirement activities. The paper closes with identifying relevant research fields and the concrete need to take action at individual, organisational, and societal levels. All in all, the transition from working life to retirement should be made flexible enough to do greater justice to the realities of life.

After childbirth, women often interrupt their careers. These interruptions are associated with negative consequences for later employment, which are greatly influenced by the duration of the interruption. We analyse the influence of occupational characteristics on this duration, as occupations are crucially important for career trajectories in Germany. Specifically focusing on occupational sex segregation, the occupational wage level and the share of part-time workers in occupations, we test two competing hypotheses: on the one hand, lower wages in female-dominated occupations should lead to longer employment interruptions due to lower opportunity costs. On the other hand, a higher ratio of part-time workers should lead to shorter interruptions due to better reconciliation between family and work. In addition, we analyse whether the proportion of women in a given occupation influences the duration of employment interruptions. We test these hypotheses using data from the National Educational Panel Study (starting cohort 6), combined with occupational information from the Sample of Integrated Labour Market Biographies and the German Microcensus. We focus on family-related employment interruptions after the birth of the first child between 1992 and 2010. The results of our discrete event history models indicate that higher wages lead to shorter breaks, while the part-time rate and the proportion of women in an occupation have no significant effects.