I got a call from a friend recently. He said we ought to get together to catch up. Since we hadn’t seen each other in a while, I agreed. It wasn’t until an afternoon this past week, however, when I called him back to suggest it was time. I had managed to save a few dollars and I wondered if he could advise me what to do. My friend, you see, is also a financial advisor. We got together to talk about the “R” word.
“Retirement is not in my vocabulary,” I protested.
“Frankly, it’s not in mine either,” he agreed. “But it’s still worth considering for whenever it comes.”
I’m one of those people, no matter how old, who refuses to accept the inevitability that age can and will catch up. The time to “hang ’em up,” as they say, will one day arrive. But I insist on fighting it. Thankfully, my friend the financial advisor came along and offered some creative solutions for the eventuality. What I didn’t realize, however, is that whenever I do “hang ’em up,” I will join the most dramatic retirement trend the planet has ever experienced. A study put the phenomenon into focus about two weeks ago:
“Looming labour void ‘will hit like a tsunami,’” the headline read.
The newspaper story about the study, by the Conference Board of Canada, announced a fairly obvious fact. People born in the baby boom right after the Second World War are moving into their retirement years. As they do – just as they have in every other phase of their lives – they will deliver a heck of a blow to the economy. Boomers’ retirements, along with generally slowing population growth and a resulting high demand for workers in all occupations, will trigger the worst labour shortfall since the industrial revolution in the late 19th century, the study says.
In numeric terms, by the year 2020 Ontario will experience 190,000 fewer people in the workplace than are required. Five years after that, the shortfall will be 364,000 workers. And by 2030 there will be more than half a million jobs that need to be filled, but because of the void left by retiring baby boomers, there won’t be the man- or woman-power to keep up. What does something like this cost? Well, the study says not replacing exiting workers could set the Ontario economy back $43 billion by 2020.
“The potential gap,” the study says, “will not be addressed by natural population growth alone.”
The study points to a few potential remedies. It suggests that Ontario needs to begin improving the employment of those previously marginalized by the traditional workplace. First Nations people, citizens with disabilities, qualified immigrants, women who have not traditionally participated in the workplace and high school dropouts all need to be welcomed into a shrinking workforce. As I sat with my friend the financial advisor the other day, I realized I am part of the problem.
I come by it honestly, I have to say. At age 65, my father acknowledged that he had become a senior citizen, that he could start drawing his pension and that he ought to slow down a bit. But he didn’t. Oh, he took advantage of seniors’ rates at the movies. He even slowed down at his computer keyboard. Instead of writing for the major newspapers and their relentless daily deadlines, he wrote for periodicals and seniors’ publications where the deadlines were monthly. He still ground out a half dozen books in his last 15 years. Indeed, when a catastrophic stroke cut him down in 2003, he was at the keyboard of his computer half way through a new manuscript.
But as much as I expect I’ll react to age 65 like my father did, there may be some value in that. You see, the same Conference Board study suggests that accelerated college programs and older workers who stay on in the workplace may train more qualified professionals faster, thus alleviating the “tsunami” it predicts if nothing is done. And that’s where my work-a-holism might just pay off and become part of the solution. Because I have turned to college teaching in recent years, I may be filling some of the gap I might otherwise create if I just retired cold turkey.
Like my father, I prefer to go with a bang, not a whimper (but maybe mentor a few young writers in the process).
