Introduction

Policies designed to extend working lives have been actively promoted to national governments by international organisations such as the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (OECD, 2006; European Commission, 2009, 2012). The extended working life policy approach has received a further impetus from the advent of the global financial crisis and the neoliberal policies that have typically been recommended and/or adopted to deal with its effects (Foster, 2012a). This chapter provides a critical overview, discussing the features of extended working life policies that have been recommended in recent years as the appropriate response to demographic ageing and associated concerns about the costs of pension provision and health care.

As discussed in Chapter Two, critics from feminist political economy of ageing and life-course perspectives note that extended working life policies have been introduced without adequate consideration of the differential impacts that they may have on women and men given their typically different work–life trajectories that are deeply gendered (Dewilde, 2012; Ginn and MacIntyre, 2013; Foster, 2012b, 2014). Among the problems identified with the uncritical adoption of extended working life policies is that they are primarily promoted with the narrowly focused objective of reducing future pension costs (Foster, 2014). However, most pension systems were designed for a male breadwinner model of family life and, as such, did not acknowledge the unpaid caring work usually done by women, which reduced their ability to qualify for or contribute to pensions (Ginn et al, 2001). Current reforms, which advocate the privatisation and individualisation of pensions – linking pensions more closely to earnings and requiring more contributions – are likely to result in increased gender inequality in pension outcomes. This is because women still typically have more interrupted work histories, earn less and are less able to contribute to private and/or occupational pensions (see Chapter One).

Insights from life-course scholars suggest thinking even more broadly, beyond pensions, by considering other aspects of working life, such as the impact of historical family-friendly employment policies that affected women earlier in their lives and current family-friendly and flexible employment policies for older workers approaching retirement (Ginn, 2003; Dewilde, 2012).