Can We Really Call It Retirement When It’s Forced?

The pandemic has impacted so many different things. One of them being the forced retirement for many older workers.

According to the AARP, in one year the pandemic forced millions to retire and two million older workers have just stopped looking for work.

I couldn’t help but wonder, can we really consider this retirement when it’s forced?

Retirement is supposed to be the time in someone’s life when they decide to leave the work that they are doing to pursue something else. Whether it be leisure activities, another type of job, volunteer work or whatever – it’s hopefully by choice and at the time when they want to.

When someone is forced out the door of where they work, no matter at what age, isn’t this really being fired or laid off?

I can’t help but wonder if given someone’s age, organizations may be pushing them into a retirement age box and then concealing the layoff as retirement so that it has a softer blow. But this thinking is not only ageist – it also has some major implications.

We know that working beyond the traditional age of retirement is a necessity for many people as they have not saved nearly enough for their retirement. Plus for those that do happen to find work, often it is at a much lower salary then their previous position which leaves their future financial security very exposed.

So in a forced retirement situation, are we just masking a problem by calling it something it’s not?

Do organizations need to pull away from using the possibly easy out of forcing older workers into retirement and have them report them as layoffs and firings of individuals based on criteria that does not include age?

If companies were to offer an early retirement option and people selected it that would be fine. This would then be retirement by choice. But to call something retirement that is actually forced I think is an ageist response to a much larger problem.