Readers of Robert Roberts’ famous book, The classic slum, will remember a photograph showing men standing at the doorstep of a pub, with the legend: “The shortest way out of Manchester”. What these men wish to escape by drinking is not work in itself, the book relates, but the combination of low wages, exhaustion and awful working conditions, together with miseries in everyday life, such as terrible housing, shortage of food, illness, and all the outcomes of these at the levels of public and private life, privacy and intimacy. These men want to escape from their life as a whole, including themselves.

Certainly fantastic changes have occurred since then, dramatically improving living conditions, not only in the UK but also in Europe, and not only among the working class but in society as a whole. The working poor became less and less numerous until a shift in the 1970s, when new forms of working poverty started to arise. In parallel, the meaning of work has changed. Being fully employed in a stable job became the guarantee of a good level of security and integration in the democratic society. Moreover, despite the fact that alienated work among manual workers and low-level employees remained massively the norm, the meaning of work gained a hugely enhanced value, being less and less associated with suffering, and more and more with self-realisation. It is amazing how deeply this ideology has penetrated society, to the point of receiving support among unqualified or low-qualified workers, not only at the ideological level, but also at the experiential level. Currently, and as things stand at the doorstep of the pub, we should rewrite the legend to read: “The shortest way out of unemployment”.

To provide evidence of the new meaning of work, and its outcomes, I will relate the journey out of work experienced by two early-retired persons in England and in France. Early retirement experience is an acute form of retirement. It is an intense experience because it occurs before it should. The bells are ringing earlier than anticipated.