Chapter 4 What age for employment?¹ The need for a new social organization of the working age

Two preliminary remarks on the theoretical framework for the analysis
Age and the labour market: some considerations
Configurations of policies of welfare and labour market policies, and cultures of age
From public management based on age to management of the diversity of the ages
Bibliography

Traditional conceptions of work and retirement are today profoundly changed. They have been changed in two ways; on the one hand due to demographic factors (aging and increased life expectancy) and, on the other, because of globalization, the advent of a post-industrial society or of a knowledge-based society, according to the different definitions of analysts.

What should be reconsidered are the ways in which we distribute, during the life cycle, work and compensated leisure, that is, retirement. Indeed, retirement represents a contract between generations on how to distribute work time and compensate non-work time during the life course.

Our current retirement system rests largely on a tacit contract between generations that has been in place since the Second World War. This contract is based upon the principle of a division of the life cycle into three phases. Firstly the phase when youths are educated; another when adults and young adults work, and finally when the elderly have the right to retirement. In this framework, the essence of the phase of 'compensated inactivity' has been granted to the elderly in the form of retirement. The main issue in post-war industrial society was to build a universal right to retirement for the elderly. They constituted the poorest fraction of developed countries. In return for this right to leisure in old age, youths and adults take on stable and durable jobs, after a short period of training for youth.

However, this division of the life cycle into three phases is no longer operational. We have entered into a knowledge-based society, in the post-industrial era and we are witnessing a real revolution in the social organization of time. Traditional patterns of the social organization of ages and time are challenged in our new society of mobility and longevity. Consequently, the question of retirement cannot be posed independently of the question of work and organization of stages of life. For this reason I have adopted in this chapter a theoretical perspective that addresses the interdependent evolution of three central dimensions-the labour market, the welfare system, and finally the social organization of the life course.

This line of thinking has stimulated my last work, L'âge de l'emploi. Les sociétés à l'épreuve du vieillissement (Guillemard 2003), which attempts to discern, in terms of international comparisons, how developed countries address aging, notably that of the economically active population.

Two preliminary remarks on the theoretical framework for the analysis

Before entering the core of the subject, that is to say the economic activity in the second part of the career and age management at work, two preliminary remarks should be offered.

In the first place, as sociologist, I would want to recall the relativity of the definition of age. Age takes its social meaning only in a precise historical and societal context. The definitions of an older worker, as well as the level of his inclusion or relegation in employment, are social constructs. Thus, the same demographic reality, aging of the population and of the labor force, takes on different meanings from one country to another. Indeed, although population aging represents a set of relatively homogeneous constraints, the public responses to it are quite diverse. Policies pursued in each country are contingent on the manner in which each society constructs relationships across generations and ages, in this new society of long life and low fertility.

The second element to which I wish to attract attention is the influence of public policies in the process of the social construction of aging at work. Take note, for example, of the impact of welfare and labour market policies on the definition of the older worker.

I will devote a part of this chapter to analyzing the process of construction, by public policies, of the social definition of older worker. We will see that, by the norms and chronological thresholds of age that they produce, they frame the life paths of individuals and fix the temporal and symbolic horizons according to which the different actors behave in the labour market. And on that basis, they contribute to the creation of what I have designated as distinct "Age cultures". These last represent a network of values and shared norms concerning the manner in which the advance in age becomes an issue, as well as the rights and obligations attached to age. Thus, are we lead to observe that public policies are not only models and instruments of public action. They represent also normative structures that format representation of the world, as well as representations of what is possible and desirable in each society.

Age and the labour market: some considerations

Today, how are employment and inactivity in the second part of workers' careers distributed? One possible indicator is the employment activity rate and its evolution over thirty years in a number of developed countries in Europe, North America and Japan.

Data in Table 4.1 and Chart 4.1 show that globally there has been a decline in activity for those 55 to 64 years of age, but this is not reflected to the same extent everywhere.

There seem to be some countries where the 50-year-olds have preserved a future in the workplace. In contrast, for continental European countries (France, Germany, Netherlands, Finland) the economically active have become a minority after 55, and the decline in the rate of male employment² over thirty years is around 40% (Table 4.1). We observe therefore in these countries a large trend to an early exit from the labour market.

In some countries, such as France, employment has had a tendency to concentrate in the middle years (25 to 49), while the young and old are on the margins of the labour market. A single generation at middle age is solidly anchored in employment. For the youngest, entry into stable employment has been increasingly late, thus lengthening the period of education. For aging workers, the transition between employment and retirement has become equally blurred and uncertain, and early inactivity has become the rule.

On the other hand, this early exit from the labour market of 50 and 60 year olds has not affected a second group of countries to the same degree - Canada, the United Kingdom, Portugal and Spain. There of the decline in activity has been more moderated, around 25% (Table 4.1).

Finally, there is a third group consisting of the U.S.A., Japan, Sweden, Denmark (and other Scandinavian countries not included in this table). The decline in activity is limited in this case. The rate of employment of 55 to 64 year olds has fallen slightly in thirty years (between 10% and 15%). Japan has had the lowest decline (less than 10%). It is the leader in all categories for maintaining activity of those beyond age fifty.

Notice that Finland and the Netherlands, which were until 1995 among the countries in the first group (i.e. with a large decline in activity at the older ages), have since shown a very notable rise in activity for the group aged 55 to 64 years (Chart 4.1).

These cross national comparisons of activity illustrate the contrasting paths of the second career phase among countries. The 50-year-old Japanese or Swede remains in the labour market until an advanced age, yet this is not the case in continental European countries. This makes employment a more fragile experience in the mid-forties and incites early exit³ from the labour market among 50-year-olds.

This means that at the same chronological age, workers are appreciated differently according to country. This data indicates that we should not regard the depreciation of the aged wage earner as natural. Instead it should be interpreted as a reality of culture, whose influence we will attempt to clarify.

Configurations of policies of welfare and labour market policies, and cultures of age

How can we understand the contrasting paths during the second part of careers that we have noted?

The underlying hypothesis of our comparative analysis is that participation in the labour market in second part of the career should be regarded as a social construction. It is a result of the network of interdependences among normative structures, welfare policies, labour market policies, and professional relationship systems; all elements that give a special social context to participation in the labour market.

Our starting point has been to identify the stylized policy configurations relevant to our topic. Each configuration creates welfare regime, which is expressed by the level of compensation offered to those by inactive in second part of their careers; along with labour market policies characterized by their capacity to insure employability and job mobility during this portion of the career.

On one level, institutional configurations of policy directly affect the careers of employees in each country. Indeed, by the rights and benefits that they grant, and the statuses that they offer in employment or in the welfare system, they determine the range of alternatives open to wage earners in the second part of their careers - opportunities for employment, or for combining wages and pension and paths to early retirement with compensation. Consequently, they structure the possible pathways and form the expectations of all actors in the labour market concerning their future in paid employment as they advance in age.

On another level, the political configurations produce a collection of significant normative orientations. This is their cognitive dimension Muller 2000). The social state, by intervening and arbitrating in the domains of employment, training and social protection, produces the norms of age. Its activity gives birth to a real government, which we designate as "une police des âges", by resuming the ancient meaning of government that this term conveyed under the Ancient Regime.

In a given national context, a particular dynamic is created by the interactions between the different "polices des âges" contained in the provisions for social protection and employment and, on the other hand, the manner in which the different actors in the labour market seize and make use of them. This dynamic stabilizes gradually into what we designate as a specific "age culture".

Each typical institutional configuration of policies can thus be examined in terms of the particular age culture that it tends to promote. In a simplified schema, four stylized institutional configurations of policies can be identified by crossing two polar axes: that of the labour market policies and that of the welfare policies. The presence of several instruments in order to maintain work capacity and employability of workers in the second part of career tends to multiply opportunities for integration into the labour market. In contrast, generous compensation of the risk of non-work at the end of the career provides many alternatives for early exit from the labour market for the aging worker.

The four institutional policy configurations, and the typical professional pathways that they tend to encourage, can be synthesized in the following typology (Figure 1). Countries most closely approximating the stylized configurations are identified for the purposes of this illustration. This typology should not be the object of a mechanistic or deterministic interpretation, rather they should be interpreted dynamically.

Four configurations of public policies that shape economic activity in the second part of the career

The limits of this text do not allow one to go into great detail of what has been demonstrated. We have shown, through a thorough study of four national cases (France, Sweden, Japan, United Kingdom), and an analysis of the public policies pursued for two decades, a close correspondence between, on the one hand, the dynamics of the configurations of policies, their normative structures and the age cultures that they construct and, on the other hand, the tendencies they create towards certain pathways in the labour market. Here it is sufficient to briefly evoke the processes by which each political configuration builds a specific age culture, which tends to shape professional itineraries with the advance of age.

Type 1: marginalization/relegation. This type is clearly illustrated in the countries of continental Europe and especially by France. It combines a generous compensation for the risk of not-work for the older employee with a quasi-absence of instruments of integration or reintegration into the labour market. At the level of principles adopted to legitimate the distribution of employment and of transfer payments among the ages, this configuration clearly places the emphasis on the security of income. It focuses on a principle of financial compensation for the loss of employment among older workers.

The priority granted to this principle gradually builds an "early exit culture" where soon the norm for the older worker no longer will be employment but access to social transfers. The French example allows one to understand how the intertwining of devices and the production of the norms and rules that they contain, builds an early exit culture.

The jurist Marie Mercat-Bruns (2001) has shown how French laws on economic dismissal enacted , around the end of the 1970s, moved from a principle of protection against loss of employment, to the notion of the aged worker as vulnerable in employment and whose age will soon become a legal basis for exempting from work. The "mesures d'âge", designed to protect these workers by means of early retirement reinforce this new principle. They "widen the gap between the wage earners who are beneficiaries of the reclassification plan and the others, especially the older ones who are deemed to not be subject to reclassification" (Mercat-Bruns 2001:129).

Gradually a definition develops of the aged wage earner as vulnerable in employment and not capable of being reclassified. From then onwards, it is just and equitable for this group to strengthen its access to social transfers. Thus is legitimated the early exit from the labour market for this age range. It will be come soon a right to retire early.

Therefore, the creation of an early exit culture relies on a reductionist view of aging at work where the question is solely formulated in terms of access to resources for transfer payments. Once they are produced and integrated into different devices, judicial rules serve as framework of action for all actors in the labour market. They constitute systems of justification and reference to all that are implicated in the action.

From then on, a process develops of the depreciation of the aging worker, which, little by little, spreads to younger generations. If employees older than 55 are reputed as not being re-deployable, then their immediate successors, the 50-year-olds, are suddenly labeled "half-old" and are at risk in the labour market. One forgets too often that by lowering the effective retirement age from the labour market, one raises simultaneously the social age of the younger generation. Little by little, this process of depreciation affects equally the forty year olds. Some companies hesitate to promote them or train them, because they are nearing the end of their career.

One can thus observe that the development of the culture of early exit promotes a process in which there is a "spiral of fragility" for everyone in the second part of the career. Notice that the principles that have legitimated the access to transfer payments for older workers have ended by working against employing those advancing in age who are economically active.

Type 2: integration/reintegration into the labour market. The second configuration tends to build a culture of age and a definition of the older worker diametrically opposite to Type 1. This configuration evokes the Scandinavian regime of social protection.

Here, the generous compensation for the risk of non-work in the second part of the career is closely linked to the mobilization of an active labour market policy. Thus, maintenance in employment with the advance of age is encouraged, thanks to an extended range of instruments of integration or reinsertion into employment and the extension of social services linked to employment targeted to the active aged. From then on, another system of rules prevails. It aims to make the aged wage earner the target of interventions toward rehabilitation and reinstatement into employment, in order to respect their right to work. In the name of equal opportunity, one is no longer happy to replace the income from work by transfer income.

Programs of reinsertion into labour market, rehabilitation and maintenance of employability should provide all citizens with the means to remain at work. Presumed fragile in employment, but re-deployable, the older worker, along with other vulnerable groups should benefit from targeted and strengthened services related to employment. Representations of the age of work, as principles that guide action, are in this case turned toward active aging. This model tends to build a culture of the "right to work" at all ages, and the reversal of the culture of early exit.

Type 3: maintenance in the labour market. This type evokes the case of Japan. It varies from Type 2 because it offers older workers few possibilities of indemnification of an early exit from the labour market. The right to activity of the older worker is not counterbalanced by a right to indemnification. There is, for Japanese employees, no alternative to active aging, which is considered as desirable for the individual as for society.

However this duty of activity demanded by society is balanced by the obligation of society to offer older workers the opportunity to remain in the labour market. Thus, there are different public measures offered in Japan, in a continuous manner, in the direction of aging workers. There are a variety of motives and justifications to remain economically active until an advanced age. In the case of Japan, the older worker has been defined, in the first place, as one that passes from the stage of employment to live, to that of flexible employment.

Labour market policies have accompanied and regulated this passage to flexible employment, either by directly lowering the cost of work for this age range, or in regulating the behaviors of companies or again by opening up the possibility of public employment as a last resort.

Type 4: rejection/retaining. This configuration combines limited benefits concerning the risks of non-work with a few instruments of integration into the labour market. In this configuration, the largest part of regulation is left to the market. There is therefore no alternative, for the active ageing person, to remain, at all costs, in the labour market, due to the minimal protection offered by social assistance.

If we refer to the typology of welfare states proposed by Esping-Andersen (1990), this configuration embodies the liberal or residual welfare state. This type offers the weakest level of de-marketing and grants the largest place to the whims of the market. Depending on developments in the labour market, one will observe pathways of rejection of the labour market for active ageing or, on the contrary, in case of shortages in the labour force, the pathways of maintenance [in the labour market]. These pathways will directly result from the game of supply and demand of work in the market. British or American cases are fairly illustrative of this public policy configuration.

One can observe, on the one hand, a weakly developed social protection that is largely subject to the availability of resources and, on the other hand, limited employment policy measures that are reduced to "welfare to work" (Scharpf and Schmidt 2000:332); that is to say an assistance toward a rapid reinsertion into the labour market, such as it is (Barbier 2002).

The age culture associated with this configuration can be illustrated in terms of the American example of the law on non-discrimination by reason of age in employment Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). This illustrates the minimalist character of public intervention in the area of the contract of work, within liberal regimes of social protection.

De facto, the framework of action created by the ADEA law⁴, offers neither the system of motives sufficient to protect a culture of the right to work to all ages, as in the Scandinavian model, nor that which could support a culture of the right to early retirement, as in the continental model, nor even the principles of a culture of activity associated with a right to remain employed, as in the Japanese case. The code of good practice toward the diversity of ages at work, put in place for the use of employers by the Labor Party government of Blair in 1999, could be evaluated in the same manner. The distribution of normative frameworks for good practice in non-discrimination has had little impact on effective behaviors of companies (Walker 2002).

At the level of a comparative theory, we have been able to demonstrate the system of interdependences according to which specific institutional configurations engender the differentiated age cultures and produce contrasting pathways, according to country, in the second part of the career.

A first observation flows from these results. Countries, that have opted, during the last two decades, to face the aging of their population by developing a large range of integration instruments concerning employment of seniors, have been better able to preserve the mobilization of work for this group (types 2 and 3). Consequently, Scandinavian countries and Japan do not today face the same dilemma as continental Europe.

The acceleration of demographic aging, as that of the labour force, requires only adjustments at the margins: reform of pensions, revision of professional pathways, as well as the strengthening of activation efforts which have been already undertaken. The goal is to increase the propensity to work among senior employees.

Altogether different is the situation of continental Europe, immersed in a culture of early exit. It will need a real "cultural revolution" in order to thoroughly change the behaviors of actors in the labour market. To cope with the acceleration of aging, the continental model requires an unprecedented remobilization in employment of 50 year olds. An effort to mobilize to this extent does not arise naturally. It develops over the medium to long-term.

To keep the 50-year-olds in the labour market presupposes that they have maintained their employability and their competences. There is also a need to known how to develop the conditions of work and develop an organization adapted to the aging of the labour force

Finally, there is a need be able to conceive of motivating professional pathways, insuring the preservation and transmission of experience within a framework of a rapid renewal of the generations in the workplace.

From public management based on age to management of the diversity of the ages

Government by and segmentation by age, up till now preponderant, particularly in continental Europe countries, seems today to have reached its limit.

The arrangement of the life cycle into three stages of age is falling apart. Blurring of the [social] ages, the erasure of thresholds, uncertain and complex biographies lead henceforth to a new temporal organization of the cycles of life. We are witnessing a new individualization and temporal flexibilisation of the life cycle.

These evolutions imply transformations of work and the advent of a knowledge-based society. They engender a radical change in the risk profiles that individuals undergo over the course of their life. Consequently, we are witnessing a growing disjunction between, on the one hand, our rigid instruments of social protection, which lean largely upon chronological age thresholds and, on the other hand, new needs for security associated with the more diversified pathways.

To remedy these issues it would be preferable to develop new forms of social protection that are more fluid, and new public policies bringing security to pathways that are no longer compound but rather are diverse.

These new imperatives point to a de-specialization in the management of the ages and to a society where all ages would be integrated. This society would represent, according to the word of the European order of 1999, "a society for all ages", in which one manages the totality of the ages and their diversified pathways, where one struggles against barriers of age and discrimination according to age.

This management of the ages is waiting to be invented collectively. It implies a redefinition of security and welfare. Welfare can no longer today be contented to compensate for risks. Henceforth, the major issue is to promote and sustain the development of human capital and of professional mobilities.

It is certainly not by accident that the reflections of different authors who are concerned with ways of reforming social protections tend toward proposals⁵ that focus on the central character in the maintenance of professional capacity by people and the development of social policies of the life cycle, which should be neutral with regards to age.

Bibliography

Barbier, J.-C. 2002. « Peut-on parler d'activation de la protection sociale en Europe? » Revue Française de Sociologie. 43, 2: 307 to332.

Esping-Anderson, G. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton. Princeton University Press.

Gallie, D. and S. Paugam. 2000. Welfare Regimes and the Experience of Unemployment. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

Guillemard, A.M. 2003. L'âge de l'emploi. Les sociétés à l'épreuve du vieillissement. Paris. Armand Colin.

Mercat-Bruns, M. 2001. Vieillissement et droit à la lumière du droit français et du droit américain. Paris. Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence.

Muller, P. 2000 « L'analyse cognitive des politiques publiques : vers une sociologie politique de l'action publique. » Revue Française de Science Politique. 50, 2 : 189 to 207.

Scharpf, F.W. and V. Schmidt. 2000. Welfare and Work in the Open Economy. Oxford. Oxford university press.

Walker, A. 2002. "Active strategies for older workers in the United Kingdom." Pp. 403 to 426 in Active Strategies for Older Workers. M. Jepsen and D. Foden (eds.). Bruxelles. European Trade Union Institute (ETUI).

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Notes

1. This text is a translation of the original French version.
2. The rate of male employment is used here as a reference since, for women during the same period the evolution of the employment rate lacks clairty. In effect, this cohort of women relects two contradictory tendencies that intervene simultaneously: a large entry of women in the labour market, and their early exit from employment.
3. We speak of early exit rather than rejection in the case of continental Europe. By early exit we determine that there is retirement from the labour market accompanied by the transfer of resources replacing wages.
4. This is true of other anti-discrimination legislation since October 2000 when European guidelines dealt with equal treatment in employment and included age.
5. However the formulas are defended: social investment, social drawing rights, transitional markets, asset-based welfare.