Calls for age pension to start sooner for physically struggling manual labourers

ABC NEWS (Australia)

There are calls for the age pension to kick in sooner for manual labourers who are physically struggling to work until retirement age. Australia lifted its pension age from 65 to 67 in 2023. John Buchanan is the network leader for the University of Sydney's Health and Work Research Network.

Transcript

00:00Well, it's been long recognised that blue-collar workers are hit far harder in terms of wear

00:08and tear on their body than white-collar workers and the argument now is that as we become

00:14more prosperous, as the economy has greater capacity to share wealth, maybe we should

00:20be thinking about those who've had a harder time in how their bodies have been worn down

00:25should get access to this kind of retirement income earlier.

00:29It accessed the income earlier, but there are other things that people have been talking

00:33about that could help, retraining programs.

00:38Yes and no.

00:39I mean, fatigue can have lasting effects, so yes, you could redeploy people a bit, but there

00:46are limits and if you've lost functions with your capacity to move your arms or whatever

00:53in the way that you had, I think there's a good case to be made that if you've lost function

00:58you should get this entitlement.

01:01So, but what happens to people like we're looking at on screen, they get to 55 and they

01:07just physically can't do it anymore.

01:09What happens?

01:10Well, Australia actually has very high levels of what's called people dropping out of the

01:17workforce.

01:18They don't become unemployed, they just want to be known as discouraged workers and this

01:23is particularly the case for older males and so in that way they end up more often than

01:29not on things like disability support as a bridge to getting them to the old age pension anyway.

01:35So, in this sense, I think your first question was a good one.

01:40In another way of looking at this is, should we be thinking about getting employers to create

01:46jobs which are able to use the ability that workers have?

01:51And that's not a big debate we're having.

01:52You're having it in the workers' comp area where it's debated in terms of return to work,

01:57but that's very...

01:58Give me an example of how that works.

02:00Well, if you've got, say, a teacher who was, say, a phys ed teacher and they've lost function

02:09in their ability to teach phys ed, you might be able to train them, say, as a primary school

02:13teacher.

02:14They might not run around the paddock but they might still have a good rapport with children

02:18or they might be able to do lower level exercise with infants that they couldn't do at high

02:23school.

02:24So, it's that kind of working with what you've got, not simply defining people by what they

02:30don't have.

02:31Right.

02:32And do you find, and I'm sure you've done much research on this, that come 55 or 60 or

02:37however old you are and you can't carry on in your manual job, that people do want to

02:43work, but that actually the workplace far more readily takes on younger people?

02:49Absolutely.

02:50Look, what I've been looking at labour market now for 35 years and what we've noticed over

02:56that time is employers do what I call labour market filleting, right, so they get the best

03:02bits of labour.

03:03So, they don't like taking on young people and they don't like having older people.

03:07They're like prime age people 25 to 45 and if you look at the hours of work they are heaviest

03:14for that kind of prime quality labour and that's not good because younger workers need access

03:21to jobs early on and people don't necessarily want to stop working when they turn 45 or 50

03:26but employers are always trying to get that prime labour and I think this is where it's

03:31not just the pension we've got to look at, we've got to look at putting more obligations

03:35on employers to help carry the capacity of our workforce into productive effort.

03:41At the moment they just pick and choose.

03:44And presumably, I mean we're talking as you say about blue collar workers, they are generally

03:49less well paid than white collar workers and therefore they're potentially going into poverty

03:55in the later stages of their life.

03:58There's a lot of low paid white collar jobs too, okay, and if you look at the minimum wage

04:02a lot of that is around retail, hospitality, lower end community services.

04:10The problem there is the low paid limits their capacity to save for an effective retirement,

04:17so being able to give them work for as long as possible is important for maintaining their

04:20living standards.

04:21Yeah.

04:23I mean the quality of your power, but is always good to save for the number of you.

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