By Danilo P. Padua, PhD
To continue or not to continue. That is the question. This does not refer to the continuing employment of senior citizens in other countries, but right here in the Philippines.
This is in relation to the filing of House Bill 3220 in the lower house by SC Party-List representative Rodolfo Ordanes Jr., last Aug, 2022. The Bill calls for SCs to continue being employed after the compulsory retirement age of 65 if they do desire, provided they qualify under the bonafide occupational qualifications of the job.
I definitely agree to the intent of the Bill which I hope will become a law in the immediate future. Of course, this is diametrically opposed to the idea espoused by others that the compulsory retirement age should instead be lowered to 60 or even lower.
Their reason? To allow retirees to enjoy their retirement while they are still physically strong. This is an assumed reality. Many employees as a matter of fact retire not solely to enjoy what they worked for in a number of years. They retire because that is what the law requires. They actually yearn to continue to work after they reach the age of 65. A formal survey should bear this out.
How can you enjoy when your pension is that low! We should remember that a Filipino family is described as a nuclear one; that is, extended. The retiree’s pension is shared with the children and grand children.
A friend of mine who retired at 65 as a professor in a state university in Region 2, found himself penniless less than 2 years after retirement. He took out a five-year lump sum from GSIS but he used the amount to build his dream house. It was not good planning and projection on his part, but it happened. His lump sum was already exhausted yet his house was still unfinished. He begged his university president to allow him back to work, even as a janitor in the school. He was still strong; tucked under his belt is a good technical expertise. He could have continued to work even as part time professor, without begging for a highly degraded position (compared to his professor rank).
It is also argued that earlier retirement would result in lessening the number of unemployed. It therefore addresses somehow the unemployment problem in the country which is about 4.3% of the work force as of May, 2023, which runs into about 2.2 million.
Earlier retirement requires earlier payment of pensions. Ergo, this will have a bearing on the financial resources of the government. That is, there is a greater pressure to have a bigger budget to be available at a given time-which would means more loans for the Philippine government.
The above backdrop is reason enough to highly consider the approval of H.B. 3220. It’s good that we have at the moment the National Commission of Senior Citizens, created into law last July, 2019 to take care of this matter. Atty Franklin M. Quijano, the chairman and CEO of this commission, is now actively promoting this. Among others he is saying that, “SCs are still very productive members of society.”
The employment of senior citizens in the country is not actually new; they are mostly self-employed though. This stemmed from the Anti-Aging Discrimination Law enacted much earlier. Only a handful of locally-operating companies though are allocating positions for SCs. More companies should be encouraged to do the same.
Why should SCs still to be employed? According to a number of concerned local officials, “many SCs above 65 y.o. are still in good health with a sound mind and body. They have a broad-based career background”. A lot of us will agree with this. I myself belongs to that age group. In many countries, the political, economic and social leaders are well past their retirement age of 65. We can not argue about this fact.
So, we consider a life without retirement if the body and mind are still sound!
Even in the military, the retirement age of 57 is too young. They are in their prime. Their end of service should also be increased to at least 60. I can not fathom the reason why they are already done in the active service at 57 y.o.
Let us se a glimpse of employment of SCs in Japan and in Europe. Retirement age in that country is the same as ours. Last year in Japan, there were 6.39M SCs employed (aged 65 y.o. and above) accounting for 10.6% of their total labor force. Many companies are into the loop. Forty per cent of Jap companies hire people 70 y.o. and above.
To the Japanese, to retire is not to relax or to enjoy. While many also seek financial help, most of them consider an extra income as not the main motivation. They are more into mental and physical fitness so they want to keep on working; they want to keep themselves busy and giving back to the society to have a meaningful life. It’s vital to them to impart their skills and experience to others.
We might be surprised to know that after retirement, they work in supermarkets as cleaners, gardeners, receptionists, carpenters. They become child care assistants, helping to look after other elderly people, employ know-how in computer-aided design, help pick-up litters in city streets, and serve as foreign language instructors among others.
Most of them work for just 20 hours per week, spread in about 3 days.
Just as what our H.B. 3220 aims, Japan is seriously thinking of lifting the mandatory retirement age of 65.
In many European countries, they are also employing SCs aged 65 and above and even older than 75 on part time basis. The largest employers are in agriculture, fisheries, and forestry sectors. A large proportion are into distributive trade, while others are into education, health and social work, retail trade, public administration and defence, compulsory social security, and wholesale trade.
There is an increasing trend of more seniors being employed in Europe starting in 2009 up to the present..
Many are already receiving their pensions, but they continue to work due to non-financial considerations, such as maintenance of healthy conditions.
Job satisfaction for SC 65-74 y.o. is about 93%, higher than those for younger people. As in the Philippines, Young people have a tendency to hop from one job to another, leaving a vacuum in the workplace from time to time. Certainly, this does not bode well for continuity purposes. This is another reason why retiring employees should have extended years of service if still able and willing.
One good example why SCs should have extended years of service is in the International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid tropics (ICRISAT) based in Andhra Pradesh, India, and one of the 15 or so members of the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Centers. The employees of CGIAR members (IRRI is one of them) have a compulsory retirement age of 60.When I was there as a visiting scientist 15 years ago, I found most of the senior scientists still working. Dr. William Dar, our former DA Sec, who was then the Director General of the Center explained to me that he extended their tenure because at 60, they have acquired a network of friends and acquaintances from various parts of the world, their accomplishments are just peaking, and their expertise had become well-polished. The result was that the accomplishments of ICRISAT itself boomed.
That is something that should be looked into for the approval of H.B. 3220. Also, in Europe, employment of SC is important to moderate the burden of state pensions by extending the working years of SCs.
I know of a number of employees who had very enviable professional credentials and were in tip top physical conditions when they retired. But because of lack of activities, their health conditions deteriorated faster than expected making them a liability to our health system.
We are for the approval of H.B. 3220 at the soonest time possible. Many senior citizens, retired and soon to retire, are just waiting to get involved. **
