Why raising the retirement age is a spectacularly crap idea

Among the many things to make your blood boil coming out of the comprehensive shafting we all received at the hands of the government on Wednesday was the really crap plan to make us all work longer.

By 2018 (2 years earlier than previously planned) the retirement age will be equalised for men and women, and then by 2020 everyone will have to work on until they’re 66.

You’ve probably heard the argument from right wing tosspots about why this needs to happen: we’re all living longer than we did in the past. As a result of socialist ideas like the NHS people don’t always drop down dead in late middle age any more. The problem with this argument is that it treats retirement as if it was something in isolation from the rest of the universe, and decisions that need to be taken about retirement as being completely unaffected by anything else the government does.

By saying that because people are living longer they will therefore have to work longer, the government isn’t stating a fact, it’s making a choice. And that choice is to make workers pay more for their right to a decent life in old age, and to let the super rich and big companies get away with paying fuck all.

The retirement age is a promise that we as a society made to working people as they got older. That promise was: pay in to the social security pot by national insurance coming out of your pay. In return, you’ll get to retire at 60 or 65 and have an income to live on. People have worked their whole lives based on this promise. Now the government wants to break that promise, to betray workers and make them get less out of retirement, and work closer to the age at which they’ll die.

They’d rather do this than by putting very moderate taxes on the rich and big business. They’d rather finance the ongoing bloodbath of the Afghanistan occupation than let us have a decent old age. These are the choices being made, the priorities exposed.

The other problem, as most reading this will already know, with the “we’re all living longer” argument is that the average life expectancy is just that, an average. It includes the high end of the rich who will live in healthy conditions all their life and have access to the very best healthcare at all times. And it includes the low end, the people who do hard, physically demanding work, can’t afford to eat well and live in polluted communities, who die much younger. In fact, research published this year found that health inequality is worse now than during the Great Depression, and life expectancy for poorer people might actually start to fall. Health and wealth are easily proven to be directly related, and the more the government encourages the rich to hoard it, the sicker the majority will become.

That’s why it’s particularly unfair that those who need to be least worried about the attack on the right to retire, because they can afford private pensions, are likely to live longer than those who this will directly affect. Work in a capitalist society is hard and alienating, especially since the economy has moved from one where people made things to one where they answered phones or other less socially useful service businesses. Brutally put, hard work can kill you, and the effect is obviously going to be more serious for those who work harder. And hard work isn’t restricted to manual labour; even working class desk jobs are still stressful enough to have a serious impact on your health.

School students in Bordeaux fight back against raising the retirement age

That’s why society has for about 100 years recognised that there reaches a point in your life where you should get to retire. Older people have earned this right, more than that they’ve paid for it all their working lives. Why should the right of the rich to hold on to the majority of wealth in our society be prioritised over this right?

But it’s not just unfair on older people today and in the future. Raising the retirement age is also a disaster for young people right now. Youth across the UK are suffering disproportionately from the economic crisis, with way higher than average unemployment rates. It’s not hard to work out why – if we can get a job it’s likely to be insecure with little rights or conditions, i.e. the people that get the sack first if a business is making less money.

In a context where young people desperately need jobs, raising the retirement age is the opposite of solving the problem, because you are forcing people to stay on in jobs they could have retired from and opened up for someone else. The government wants to do this to save money that they would be paying out in pensions, but they’ll have to be giving it out in dole money again from people that could have got that job.

Raising the retirement age is the issue that’s driving the brilliant mass movements of strikes and protests France, that has seen school students and unemployed youth linking up with workers. High schools across France have been shut down by their pupils. French youth understand raising the retirement age is an attack on them, not just older people.

GET BACK TO WORK YOU LAZY BASTARD

And as if that wasn’t all enough, let’s not forget about the hidden contribution of retired people that has been completely ignored. Think of how much Grans and Grandads do for their families in terms of unpaid babysitting – if they’re still stuck at work it’s going to make it all the harder for younger parents. Then there’s all the unpaid voluntary and community work contributed by pensioners. The National Pensioner’s Convention says that there’s well over £30 billion worth of work done by these voluntary contributions. The government are taking that away exactly at the same time as they’re cutting back public services that people rely on, which will make life more difficult for everyone.

In fact, if we were looking at the situation properly, as a society what we would do would be to lower the retirement age. The only real solution to the economic crisis is to have massive investment in things we as a society need – public services and ecological restoration to prepare for and try and prevent climate change. This could employ most of the people desperate for a job. At the same time, we should be reducing working time, so that people can retire when they want to and have to work less of the week, while raising the minimum wage to a liveable level. This would create loads of work, and leave everyone healthier, happier and able to do more things with their lives than just working all time. It’s a great idea, but the Tories and Lib Dems will never even discuss it, because they’re a government for themselves, for the rich.

Socialism is about us all having a decent life, where the work that we do is meaningful and is something we want to be doing. To be able to build a decent and better society, as a first step we need to reduce the amount of work those who are working too hard are doing. Defending the right to retire is defending the rights of everyone.