Eand one by one I went to all the heads in the lecture halls. There he sat, this had to be him: silver-gray hair, a weathered face, but looking at me with the same curious puppy eyes as the rest of the first-year students. That year, just as I would for his young fellow students, I would be his mentor and in that role I would show him around the university.
In his motivation letter, he immediately explained that he was 67 years old, continued to work after his retirement, believed that he could still make a social contribution and, above all, should make a contribution where possible, and that he considered himself completely unsuitable as ‘pensionado’ to sit behind the geraniums.
About the author
Kim Fairley is an economist at Radboud University. As a behavioral economist, she applies insights from experimental research to social themes such as education, health and personal finance. In April she is a guest columnist on volkkrant.nl/opinie.
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More and more pensioners continue to work for (a few) years. In ten years, that group has doubled from 118 thousand in 2013 to 236 thousand in 2023. Quite crazy, I hear you think, after all, there are simply many more 67-year-olds today than ten years ago.
Yet, according to a recent study by ABN Amro, three quarters of this increase can be attributed to increased labor participation and only a quarter due to an aging population. Even people over 75 are increasingly working steadily; their share in the total labor supply increased from 1.9 percent in 2013 to 3.2 percent in 2023.
Should we as a society be concerned about this ever-growing group that would rather continue working than enjoy a well-deserved retirement? For example, does financial necessity play a role? Not really. Of course, the purchasing power of the elderly has also fallen in recent years, but overall, the elderly are doing well compared to decades ago. Or in the words of Peter Hein van Mulligen, chief economist at CBS: the poor elderly person is dying out.
Why then do retirees continue working? Because they simply still enjoy it a lot and it feels good when colleagues and managers express their appreciation and thus strengthen the feeling that they can still be of value, according to a survey into the motives of retirees to continue working.
To be honest, we are used to these ‘oldies’ in good Dutch extremely hard necessary. The number of vacancies has exceeded the number of unemployed since 2021, which indicates how exceptional the tension in the labor market is. This is expected to be structurally tight, given the shrinking working population from 2027.
So it is fantastic that many pensioners are eager to continue working. The enthusiasm for continuing to work among future retirees, the current 55 to 65-year-olds, is also as great as ever. 73 percent of this group wants to actively explore whether working longer is a possibility. This generation is more vital, healthier, better educated and has produced many more working women than previous generations.
In short, continuing to work after reaching state pension age will become the norm. At least, if it is up to the employees themselves. Although continuing to work after retirement is financially very attractive for employers, many recruiters are still not keen to attract older employees. An employee who is allowed to continue working for the same employer after retirement is one thing, but an older employee who applies for a new position at another company is a different story.
Ageism is a widespread phenomenon and much more prominent in Western Europe than in the United States. That is why there are subsidies to encourage employers to give older employees a chance in their workplace, also in the Netherlands. However, a very recent study now shows that the effect of this subsidy is actually detrimental to candidates.
The right to a subsidy sends a signal to recruiters: older candidates will generally be less fit and less technologically skilled. The subsidy encourages statistical discrimination: recruiters apply stereotypes of certain groups (subsidized older workers) to individual candidates in order to form an image of their potential productivity.
My 67-year-old student concluded his motivation letter by indicating that he was very much looking forward to his studies because of ‘the opportunity to immerse myself in the study in the company of young, intelligent people, the most meaningful form of ‘daytime activities’ that there is’.
However, it was far from complete. All the students would run away with him. Before my eyes I saw a smooth interaction between young and old and a fusion of skills that led to 1+1=3. Lifelong learning, it’s not that crazy after all. Let’s make that the new stereotype.
