Work and aging
David Wegman

Recently a concern with aging and work and especially the impact of work on the aging process has become an important focus of industrialized economies, particularly in Western Europe. This is related to the aging of the workforce which has resulted from the aging of the post-World War II "Baby Boom" generation. In many nations, the large population increase of the specific age cohort represented by the Baby Boom is now being felt in the form of an aging workforce.

Retirement trends in the 20^th century

It is useful to examine the background of this new concern. Prior to World War II in Europe, as throughout the world, work did not arbitrarily terminate at a common, fixed age. But beginning in the period following the war there was a movement to introduce age-barrier retirement in many industrial countries.

Alan Walker, a British sociologist concerned with these developments noted: "In effect old age was defined, or manufactured, by this process and a dividing line created between economic productivity and dependency." These developments were not seen as negative at the time. They offered governments a means to reduce unemployment by transferring older workers to pensions, thus opening new positions for younger workers. They offered employers the possibility to "downsize" and increase productivity. And these developments were often supported by trade unionists and workers who saw the opportunity to retire early and rest rather than work until the end of life.

For a time, growth in social security benefits delivered on the promise and provided great opportunity for workers to gain early retirement or to benefit from programs providing disability retirement. This social commitment and capacity was possible due to the economic growth that occurred in the industrialized world during the second half of this century matched with the belief that the society could and should make it possible for its older citizens to rest and do things of their own choosing for a number of years after working life had ended.

Change in life expectancy

Interest in life after work was all the more important since another significant 20^th century development has been a striking improvement in life expectancy. Half a century ago, most people died before the age of 50. By 1995, average life expectancy at birth globally was more than 65 years, an increase of about 3 years from as recently as 1985. Life expectancy was over 75 years in industrialized countries, 64 years in developing countries, and 52 years in least developed countries with the number of countries having a life expectancy at birth of over 60 years increasing from at least 98 (with a total population of 2.7 billion) in 1980 to at least 120 (with a total population of 4.9 billion) in 1995.

More recently, however, the success of these developments have been questioned - to a different degree in the different nations of Western Europe. The simultaneous aging of the population and the increased costs of providing retirement benefits for this population has now led most nations to decide that the costs are too great. Increasingly Western Europe is turning to tightening the eligibility requirements for retirement and promoting work until age 65. While similar actions have occurred in the United States, in contrast with Europe, in the US there is now anti-age discrimination law that prohibits the forced retirement of workers at any age.

How long should workers work?

An important question facing all countries today is how long should workers continue to work. One suggestion makes clear how complex the answer will have to be and how much it will vary by country and by culture. Peter Hjort from Norway has proposed that there be at least four possible ages for retirement: a) voluntary early retirement with reduced pension but no medical cause needed (e.g., at age 60-65); b) voluntary retirement with full pension (e.g., 65-70); c) official retirement age where it is not discriminatory to terminate (e.g., 70); d) no longer permitted to work for safety of others; this age will vary by occupation and in some cases would have no final retirement age.

But interest in the health of workers as they aged in their jobs, has been largely ignored as society concentrated its efforts on providing for an adequate retirement. Whatever policy is chosen for retirement age, however, a prior question that needs to be addressed is how do both age and work affect work capacity and how can these effects be either minimized or accommodated?

The recognized effects of aging

Taken in the broad view the aging process can be considered at several levels. First there are biological aspects of aging - reduction in physical capacity and changes or reduction in mental capacities. Then there are psychological aspects of aging - a loss of self image despite gains in carefulness, experience and "wisdom". Third is the more complex relationship of the aging individual to the community or society - older people often accept a view of themselves as being "lesser" because "it is justified". Finally there is the paradox that older workers, despite objective evidence of chronic illnesses, consider themselves healthy - possibly a consequence of expectations as well.

Physical capacity: What has scientific study of the aging worker told us? The best evidence relates to changes in physical capacity. As we age there is a distinct change in joint mobility and body posture. While these changes are relatively small between 20 and 60 years old, arthritis increases fairly strongly after age 45. We also have good evidence that prolonged work in poor postures has cumulative effects. As for physical strength and aerobic capacity, we reach our maximum somewhere between 20 and 30 years of age and then gradually lose at the rate of about 1.5% per year. The losses in strength tend to be larger in the lower than upper limbs. While physical conditioning can improve baseline, this gradual loss occurs in Olympic athletes as well as "normal" workers.

Mental capacity: When it comes to mental capacity or ability, the information is much less clear. Laboratory studies show clearly that there are a number of losses in psychomotor function. There is evidence that older workers have difficulty processing complex and confusing stimuli and allocating attention to task-relevant information. Some studies show that older workers have a slower response time in the laboratory but that this may be matched with a greater proportion of correct responses. There is also evidence that cognitive performance measures deteriorate with age, however, these measures have not been shown to correlate well with measures of actual on-the-job performance. Factors other than traditional psychometric cognitive abilities are primarily responsible for one’s level of functioning in most occupational settings. Older workers may take longer to retrieve information from their memories but appear to perform equally as well as younger workers in retrieving familiar information. One mistake often made is to think that older workers cannot learn anymore and so they are not invited to training programs to learn new skills or update older ones. While overall learning rate may slow, the evidence shows that learning is still successful and especially if programs are designed in an age appropriate manner.

Job performance: Do these changes have measurable effects on actual job performance? Here the evidence is very weak. Observations in work settings suggest that decrements in actual performance are relatively small and generally limited to physically demanding work. One area 7 that appears to be subject to loss is the ability to carry out very rapidly paced work combined with mentally difficult tasks. But there are at least two important caveats to note. The first is that most work does not require maximum physical or mental capacity. Thus an older worker may need to work closer to maximum than a younger one, but that worker may still be quite capable of fulfilling all job responsibilities. The second caveat relates to how rarely there are explicit performance standards for a job. If there were, then the capacity of an older worker (or a smaller worker, or a female worker) could be measured against specific performance factors and to determine whether or not he or she were able to perform the job. The absence of performance factors leads too often to discrimination against a worker because of the expectation rather than proof that capacity is insufficient.

Experience: One feature of the older worker that deserves attention is the fact that with age comes experience. Experience or "wisdom" is often thought to be an important factor in any work setting, yet there is little methodology with which to evaluate "experience." There is some good evidence from many different nations showing that accident frequency is negatively correlated with age throughout the working ages. It appears that experienced workers gain respect for risks and, while possibly working slower are also working "safer".

Another feature of experience is sufficient knowledge to perform a job. There is an interesting case of a large airplane manufacturing company which "downsized" by pre-retiring a relatively large number of older engineers and then experienced the unfortunate impact of the loss of the knowledge pool represented by these engineers.

It might be generally concluded that the decrements in capacity that come with age are often offset by the benefits of experience. For example, slower speed in work may be offset by better anticipation of variations in work features that comes with experience. With respect to decrements in short-term memory, demands for such memory are relatively few while structuring information for more effective use comes with experience. Even the slower rate of learning observed in older workers can be offset by the higher degree of understanding that can come from experience.

Peter Warr, a British psychologist has examined the interrelationship of the changes in capacity and experience in jobs. He proposes that it is most useful to imagine that jobs can be considered to fit into a matrix that considers the relative balance between demands on capacities and the value of experience. The matrix (Figure 1) illustrates the fact that many jobs are more complex in their needs and their impacts than first imagined. While the relative distribution of jobs will vary by company, economic sector, or even country, the important conceptual observation is that in only one of the four types of jobs does aging appear to impair the effectiveness of the worker.

 Figure 1

yes

Task category	Basic capacities more exceeded with increasing age	Performance enhanced by experience	Expected age relationship	Illustrative job content
Age enhanced	no	yes	positive	knowledged-based judgements without time pressure
Age neutral	no	no	zero	relatively undemanding activities
Age counteracted	yes	yes	zero	skilled manual work
Age impaired	yes	no	negative	continuous paced data processing