Older workers and older worker policies in Germany

Retirement Expectations in Germany—Towards Rising Social Inequality?

“…Especially large companies in the production sector pushed blue-collar workers and white-collar employees holding lower positions in the hierarchy into retirement in order to lower labor costs [21]. Older workers willingly used the opportunity to retire early with only small financial penalties and retirement before 65 was seen as the standard, while retirement at age 65, or even later, was the exception [25]. Consequently, the employment rate of older workers declined drastically [12,26], falling from 50 to 35 percent for the age group of 50 to 65 between 1970 and 1990 [27].…”

Late working life, exclusion and inequality: National policies and political-economic context in Germany

“…Today, two main policy streams can be distinguished when explaining the change of paradigm towards EWL: (1) financial considerations in connection with pensions and other retirement benefits and increasing labour costs, and (2) labour market policy threat scenarios about an impending ageing and shrinking of the labour force both outside and inside of companies. However, these two key streams have to be seen in a broader context of different influencing factors, which can be summarised as follows (Naegele 2013b;Bauknecht & Naegele 2015;Naegele & Bauknecht 2017):…”

“…Many, if not most of the measures mentioned in this section have a promotional nature to aid the quest to reach EWL, but are not explicitly related to the political shift of paradigm. Historically, it was the state that first tried to reverse the trend in the hitherto dominant 'devocation of old age' ("Entberuflichung des Alters") through implementing policies and measures aimed at EWL (Frerichs & Taylor 2009;BMFSFJ 2010;Dietz & Walwei 2011;Naegele 2013b;Brussig 2018; see also section 2.1). Through its various measures, the paradigm shift was and is primarily focussing on pension reforms on the one side and labour market policies on the other side.…”