Problems of the aged Mandatory （强制性的) Retirement By late middle age many workers are l

Problems of the aged

Mandatory (强制性的) Retirement

By late middle age many workers are looking forward to retirement, and millions of those who have retired are only too glad to exchange the routines of work for the satisfaction that a more leisured life may bring. Many other workers, however, are reluctant to give up their jobs. A 1974 Harris poll found that nearly a third of retired people aged sixty-five or over would prefer to work. The desire to continue working often stems from harsh economic reality, for retirement usually brings a sharp drop in income. Some workers fear the loss of social identity that can result from not having a job. They may be left with "nothing to do", and may find that their lives are robbed of significant meaning and fulfillment. Those old people who would like to continue working are all too often the victims of what is perhaps the most striking example of age discrimination (歧视): the practice of mandatory retirement, under which people are forced to give up their jobs once they reach a certain age. Until recently the precise age for mandatory retirement varied from job to job--fifty-six for air-traffic controllers, fifty-five for New York City fire fighters, seventy for Harvard professors. The usual mandatory retirement age, however, was sixty-five. In 1978 Congress passed new legislation that raised the legal mandatory retirement age to seventy for most employees. Under the new law, employers cannot require a worker to retire 15efore the age of seventy, although workers of course may still retire before that age if they wish.

The objection to mandatory retirement is that it throws people out of their jobs at a purely arbitrary age, without regard for their individual abilities. There is no evidence to suggest that most people over the age of sixty-five or seventy are incapable of working; at the turn of the century, in fact, 70 percent of men over sixty-five were active in the labor force. Mandatory retirement absurdly implies that people are capable of productive labor until the day before their seventieth birthday, then abruptly become physically or mentally incapable of performing their jobs. It also implies that we treat all members of the same age group as though they had identical competence or incompetence at their jobs--when, in fact, the mental and physical abilities of any group of people born at the same time become more dissimilar, not more similar, as they grow older.

Why does enforced retirement exist, and why do employers try to persuade their employees to retire at the age of sixty-five？ The reason is that mandatory retirement is an administrative convenience for the employers. In the past, when most workers produced their own goods or were their own bosses, they worked until they either died or chose to stop work. This is still the case today with self-employed workers, such as artists, owners of businesses, or lawyers. But fully 80 percent of Americans today are employed by other people or organizations--primarily large corporations and federal, state, or local government agencies. These organizations face the problem of finding some orderly way of phasing out (淘汰) their older employees who might have become unproductive. It is far more convenient for the employers to achieve this by an arbitrary age rather than by the fairer but more cumbersome (笨拙的)alternative of periodically reviewing the productivity of each individual worker.

Economic Problems

One of the most common and serious problems faced by the aged is that of making ends meet from one day to the next. In 1977 the aged had a median family income of around $6,292, compared with ＄12,702 for those aged eighteen to sixty-four. This figure is even lower than that for blacks and other racial minorities. As recently as 1970 some 25 percent of the aged were living below the poverty line. Many other aged people live just above the pov

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C．NG