RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: The young are supposed to pay tax to support the old. Now, women over 65 are slaving away to pay for workshy youths
Women over 65 made up nearly a quarter of new hires in Britain over the past year. I’m sorry, I’ll just read that again.
Surely that should be: a quarter of women over 65 gave up work last year and are looking forward to a long, healthy and comfortable retirement.
Nope. I was right first time. According to a new report, the number of older women going back to work or prolonging their careers has hit record levels.
The state pension kicks in at 66 these days, but almost half of those women say they either can’t afford to, or don’t want to retire and many expect to carry on working until they are at least 71.
The latest Labour Market Report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that 686,000 women over 65 have taken on a new job in the past 12 months, an annual increase of 135,000.
The number of women around retirement age or older and still in employment has now risen to 10 per cent, for the first time on record. Twenty years ago, it was just four per cent.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this is a cause for celebration or despair. On the bright side, it’s a reflection of the way in which the health and lifestyle choices of both women and men have improved immeasurably. It’s also testament to the immense contribution older people still have to make to society.
Frankly, whether shopping or negotiating the minefield of modern bureaucracy, I’d much rather deal with a knowledgeable lady of a certain age than a spotty youth who can’t see beyond ‘Computer Says No’.
A new report shows that women aged over 65 made up nearly a quarter of new hires in Britain over the past year
Happily, gone are the days when middle-aged women were expected to become invisible after they turned 60. My much-loved maternal grandmother was an old lady. She dressed like one, in twinset and sensible skirt and shoes, had an old lady perm and died of a stroke at just 65.
Today, she’d probably be dressing like a woman half her age, have a fashionable hair-do, be planning her next cruise and her heart condition would have been caught early by advanced medical screening, despite the state of the NHS.
If The Beatles were writing When I’m Sixty-Four today, they’d have to revise the age upwards to at least 75, especially when the Americans have just elected a 78-year-old president who delights in dancing to the Village People in public.
The good news is that women in particular are not condemned to the scrapheap after 60. In my North London neck of the woods the pubs, restaurants and coffee bars are full of ladies of a certain age laughing and having a good time. They are, of course, the lucky ones.
The bad news is that many older women have no option other than to keep on working because they are widowed or divorced, and their pensions are horribly inadequate. The upside is that gainful employment is generally good for mind, body and soul.
Anyway, that’s one side of the coin. The other is deeply depressing, however you read it.
While the Golden Girls are working longer than ever, increasing numbers of younger people are dropping out of employment. Already, nine million people of working age are ‘economically inactive’, not even looking for a job.
As Sam Merriman and John-Paul Ford Rojas reported in the Mail this week, one in four under-25s are considering quitting the workforce for good, some of them never having held down a job and moving straight from school on to benefits.
Gen Z has been brought up to believe that they are entitled to something for nothing, RICHARD LITTLEJOHN writes
Many of them put their idleness down to Mental Elf Ishoos. Even Labour now admits that mental health problems are over-diagnosed and there has been an explosion in the number of ‘therapists’ who are free to set up shop without any qualifications.
No wonder we’ve got a Mental Elf epidemic. These quacks have to justify their existence somehow, so they are hardly going to tell someone who claims to be suffering from anxiety to go home, pull themselves together and get a job.
The Mail’s front page headline Death of the Work Ethic summed it up perfectly. Gen Z has been brought up to believe that they are entitled to something for nothing.
My generation learned that if you wanted anything out of life you had to earn it. I started work delivering newspapers when I was 11. Boys of my age had milk and grocery rounds. The girls worked in shops or swept the floors in hairdressers’ on Saturdays. School holidays were spent delivering leaflets, picking fruit or, in my case, working in the car park at the East of England Showground.
At 15, I was a DJ in a soul club behind a pub. One of the records I used to play regularly was Big Time Operator by Zoot Money: Started off a newsboy on the paper...
A year later, I left school and got a job as a cub reporter on a local rag. Since then, I’ve not stopped working, sometimes doing three jobs simultaneously. OK, so I’ve been lucky, getting paid for doing stuff I enjoy.
It’s been therapeutic, too. I said years ago that being able to vent my frustrations in this column was all that stopped me roaming the streets with a Kalashnikov firing at random – like Michael Douglas in the movie Falling Down.
But I’ve also had the odd rough patch, made redundant shortly after my daughter was born. I took a job painting pallets in a factory. That lasted about a week, when there was more green paint on me and the factory floor than on the pallets. They made me a gofer for a few days, making the tea and fetching the lunchtime fish and chips before we both realised my future wasn’t in the manufacturing industry.
I’m 71 now, and have no immediate intention of retiring, unless the Mail decides to have me shot. As I said, I’ve been lucky, but I never for a moment considered chucking in the towel and scrounging off the state.
The fact that women of my generation now think they will have to work until they are 71 is a shocking indictment of the way in which the social contract has been turned on its head.
The deal always was that you’d work until you hit your mid-60s and the younger generation would then generate the wealth and taxes to pay you a decent pension so you could enjoy a happy retirement.
Now, older women are having to work longer than ever to pay the taxes to keep bone-idle 25-year-olds in the manner to which they believe they are entitled. This is madness and Labour’s welfare ‘cuts’ this week won’t even scratch the surface. The benefits bill for the Mental Elf brigade is set to almost double to £100 billion by 2030. This ain’t no generational breakdown, this is the road to hell.
Ladies, I know you expected to be kicking back by now, but try to look on the bright side. You may not be in the job of your dreams, but gainful employment keeps you active and young at heart. You can always dance away your heartaches.
Listen to the singer Cyndi Lauper, the same age as me, who I interviewed on the wireless 30-odd years ago. She’s on the road again, with what she says will be her retirement tour. Believe that when you see it.
After all, girls just wanna have fun.
Republicans reveal plot to stop 'insurrectionist' democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani being sworn in as NYC mayor using Civil War-era clause