The Great Unretirement is coming
Growing up, I knew that falling out of work was the worst thing that could possibly happen. My mother lied about her age to keep paying the mortgage until she was 74. My father dictated his last magazine article to me from his death bed. Their jobs brought money, pride and meaning. So my reaction to the fact that 9mn Britons are neither working nor looking for work — some of them retiring at 50 — is emotional as well as practical.
Has the pandemic flipped some kind of unique psychological switch in Britain? I’m starting to think so. As the Bank of England warns that our shrinking workforce could stoke inflation even in recession, the UK is looking ever more like an outlier. We were not the only country to emerge from the pandemic with lower employment rates than before — so did Iceland, Switzerland, Latvia and the US. But those four are bouncing back; we are not. By March, the Institute for Employment Studies predicts that we may be the only developed country with an employment rate lower than it was before Covid-19.
I’ve previously written about the increasing numbers citing long-term illness as a reason for stopping work, together with the NHS backlog. But that’s not the whole story. Fifty-five per cent of the increase in “missing” workers has come from those aged 50 to 64. Many are retiring early not because they are too sick to work but because they are sick of working. New polling finds this group expresses a greater dislike of their jobs than their German and US counterparts, and are more likely to say the pandemic has made them rethink. Moreover, they believe they can afford it. In the UK, 18 per cent of economically inactive 50- to 64-year-olds report having become better off as a result of the pandemic, compared with 8 per cent in the US and 4 per cent in Germany.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Camilla Cavendish
