Working late in Holland

Holland's liberal attitudes have not extended to age, but this may now be changing

John Thynne reports on Holland's response to the ageing 'crisis'

We live in changing times. Never has this truism seemed more apt than today. Digital and Genetic revolutions in our midst mean that we can have little conception of the state of the world in 50 years time.

But what no technological advance can hide is the major shifts taking place in the demographics of Western Europe.

We are living longer and we are not replacing ourselves. Europe is an ageing and dying continent.

At present, the over-60s make up 21% of the population of Europe. There are 3.5 workers for every pensioner. But as the baby boomers approach retirement, these ratios are set to change dramatically. By 2020, the number of people of pensionable age will be close to 30%. And by 2050, people aged over 60 will make up 40% of our population.

Europe's demographic 'timebomb'

This change will have a huge economic impact for all of us. In crude terms, the shift in ratio of workers to non-workers will alter so dramatically that a point will come when the burden on the productive sector of the economy will become untenable. This is Europe's pensions timebomb.

All of this has long been known by western governments. But the political action needed to deal with it is so unpalatable that most have avoided the issue. Either you increase the taxation on the workers to pay for the increase in pensions, or you increase the workforce by encouraging immigration.

Neither of these policies is a vote-winner. But there is a third option, which may very soon become a reality. Even raising its possibility has been enough to have people on the streets of Paris demonstrating, and union chiefs across the continent shaking their heads in denial. States may soon start to redefine what we mean by "elderly".

The sacred cow of the retirement age may soon be slaughtered. In Holland, the process is already under way. Decades of unemployment had led to a culture in which early retirement was seen as the right thing to do, both by employer and by employee.

Holland's solution to an age-old problem

In order to give the country's youth an opportunity, workers were eased out of their jobs around the age of 55. To make this financially attractive for the newly retired, they were given tax breaks, but heavily penalised if they chose to take another job.

The last two years before my retirement I felt like a prisoner condemned to death

Professor Bob Smalhout

Today, there is virtually no unemployment in Holland. Moreover, there is a shortage of labour, and businesses are looking increasingly toward the retired as the solution. Their benefits are considerable; they have experience, they tend to be motivated (they could live off their pension, so they are coming to work for another reason) and they are flexible enough to work part-time to fit in with the company's requirements.

Retired workers are also cheaper by up to 25% as their employers do not have to pay social contributions for them. Not surprisingly, agencies specialising in the older worker are springing up all over the Netherlands.

70 year-old Jos Veenhuis is typical of the new breed of retitred worker. After 40 years working for the Dutch railways, he was encouraged to take early retirement. (One in three Dutch workers over 55 does the same.) But once he had taken a few foreign trips, he found that he was missing the world of work.

Jos Veenhuis shows Anna Raeburn around the Rembrandt gallery

He had run out of things to say to his wife and missed the jokes and banter of the workplace. He also discovered that despite a generous pension, free time costs money. With seven days a week to spend money, his pension wasn't spreading far enough. Once he turned 65, he found work through the agency 65+, and started working 2 days a week as a clerk at a wine importers in Amsterdam.

Since then, he has added to his portfolio of jobs with a post as a guard at the Rembrandt House. "The extra money comes in very handy, but that wasn't the main reason why I took the job. It was mostly to keep me busy and to be around people again".

People want the right to work past 65

But why should we be forced to retire in the first place? Not everyone is happy to re-invent themselves in retirement. Professor Bob Smalhout was a leading expert on anaesthetics and a lecturer at the University of Utrecht. He was forced to retire, as all state employees are, at 65.

Although he has found a number of other jobs, he resents the fact that a job he loved, and was perfectly capable of performing, was taken away from him on the arbitrary basis of reaching the age of 65. What angers him most about the situation is the way that in Holland there is such a rage against discrimination in all forms, except it seems, against the elderly.

Forced retired is, in his eyes, a violation of human rights. "They talk about the right to retirement , but it is not a right, it is mandatory, you have to do it, they force you to do it. It is not like the right to vote - you can vote for a politician but it is your own free will. Nobody is coming in the morning of the day you have to vote with a pistol in your neck taking you to the office to bring out your vote. It is completely your own will, but not in the case of retirement, you have to be retired."

Professor Bob Smalhout fights age discrimination

But age discrimination does not start at 65. We are surrounded by arbitrary age limits that take little account of the individual. Jaap Uilenberg, Holland's most famous referee, was told to retire when he got to 47, because the Dutch Football Association decreed that at that age a man was no longer physically fit enough to lead professional football games.

He challenged the decision and in a landmark ruling this year, the Dutch court ruled that he had been discriminated against and forced the Dutch football authorities to reinstate him.

His lawyer was the former international player, Keje Molenaar, whose own football career ended at 31 with injury. Now in his second career as an age discrimination lawyer, Molenaar was angry with the treatment that his client received. "The football association has just established an age limit, if you are 47 that's it, no matter how good you are, how fit you are, and in the case of Mr Uilenberg who was very fit, he was very popular, he was the best referee that we had , but the association said you're 47 that's it."

Jaap Uilenberg fought against age discrimination, and won

Whilst it may be unusual for a player to come out in support of a referee, Molenaar is reverting to type with his next case, fighting for the rights of Dutch airline pilots to carry on flying past the retirement age of 56. A case of "Carry on flying Dutchmen?" Molenaar explained : "These pilots have to quit when they are 56 years old, when some of them at that age are still running the marathon in New York, that's how fit they are [...] that compulsory age limit is also very arbitrary, because other countries use entirely different age limits."

We live in age when boundaries are constantly being pushed back. A 65 year-old today is clearly much fitter, and more capable of carrying on working than a 65 year-old at the start of the last century. With demographic trends leading to an increasingly "grey" population, and with fewer workers to support the retired, surely it is about time that the right to carry on working was placed alongside the right to retire? Failing that, governments may soon have to revisit the question of the age of retirement. After all, it is only 20 years since the Dutch government reduced the age of retirement from 70 to 65.

Producer: John Thynne

Reporter: Anna Raeburn

This story is part of Correspondent, 'Our Aged', shown on BBC2 at 18:00 on Saturday 10th June