Abstract
Questions that people ask, when they hear that mandatory retirement has been repealed include: will people be forced to work longer to stay financially healthy? Will they change careers later in life to keep their interest in a subject or explore new interests? How will working longer affect their health? How will much older people affect the ambitions and working styles of younger colleagues? Will companies have to change their health and benefit plans to accommodate older people? This chapter discusses implications for both individuals and companies about hiring/retaining workers beyond the mandatory retirement age including differences in power relationships that place older workers who want to stay in their job in a compromised position. Issues related to international political economy will be addressed.
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Notes
- 1.
The Superannuation Act of 1870 provided an early occupational plan for federal government employees. The purpose of the plan was to “… get rid of persons who had arrived at a time of life when they could no longer perform their work efficiently” (Morton and McCallum 1988, p. 6).
- 2.
In 1910 in the course of a bitter strike, the Grand Trunk Railway wiped out the pension rights of the workers who had struck the company, only to return them in 1923. when the grand Truck became part of the government-owned Canadian National Railways.
- 3.
The pension system of Canada has three pillars: the first pillar consists of public plans (Old Age Security, the Guaranteed Income Supplement, and the Canada/Quebec Pension Plans for paid workers); the second, employer-sponsored plans (RPPs, deferred profit-sharing plans and group registered retirement savings plans [group RRSPs]); and the third, personal savings – including registered retirement savings plans (RRSPs) (Baldwin 2009; Gougeon 2009).
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McDonald, L. (2013). The Evolution of Retirement as Systematic Ageism. In: Brownell, P., Kelly, J. (eds) Ageism and Mistreatment of Older Workers. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5521-5_5
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