Earlier this week, Fairfax featured a report on how older Australians are feeling the pinch, with new research from the Brotherhood of St Laurence revealing that 40% of recipients of employment services last year were mature age Australians who spent more than a year on income support. It also found that those that do find jobs are increasingly working in low-paid and low-skilled areas like supermarket packing and traffic controlling:
…people over the age of 45 are increasingly caught between work and retirement – too old for ageist employers to hire and too young to retire. It reveals mature age people are increasingly dependent on employment services and welfare and at risk of living in poverty…
More than one in five people on the NewStart allowance for more than a year were over the age of 50, according to the researchers citing Department of Social Services labour market figures for March this year.
Now today, KPMG’s Bernard Salt has published a piece on how baby boomers are ‘redefining retirement’, with over-55s taking a larger proportion of the jobs:
Across the first 16 years of the 21st century the Australian workforce increased by three million jobs to 12 million. About 800,000 net extra jobs were added in the young age group of 15 to 34. A further 800,000 jobs were added across the middle of the working life between the years 35 and 54. The rest, a whopping 1.3 million jobs, have been added in net terms to the 55-plus age group. Net growth in older workers has outpaced net growth in younger workers so far this century.
…thus far this century… the number of Australians aged 60 to 64 with a job has increased from 263,000 to 697,000, which represents net growth of 434,000 or 27,000 a year…
Boomers aged 60-something are reimagining how this decade may be lived and thus far it seems that they imagine a continuation of work and, for some, further work in a self-employed mode…
What’s not to be excited about as the boomer generation shifts into their 60s and changes the way retirement, work and small business are imagined?
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness.
Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.
