six - Extended working life, gender and precarious work in Ireland

Summary

Introduction

Policies designed to extend working life have been introduced relatively recently in Ireland, but the pension age has been increased more quickly and steeply compared to other countries such as Germany, the UK, France or Poland (OECD, 2015a). This chapter considers the likely gender impacts of these policies. As is true for several other countries, the extended working life agenda has been ushered in and accompanied by alarmist headlines in the media warning against the prospect of unsustainable pension systems, which are argued to be the inevitable result of demographic ageing.

However, there has been little explicit discussion by policymakers of the gender implications of extended working life policies (OECD, 2015a). There is a limited number of reports and articles in the academic literature raising the issue of gender equity and pensions, and/or extended working life, but, for the most part, there has been little debate about whether these policies are the only or best possible solution to demographic ageing and whether they should be applied indiscriminately to all workers (Murphy and McCashin, 2008; Duvvury et al, 2012; Ní Léime et al, 2015). Organisations such as the National Women's Council of Ireland (NWCI) have raised the issue of women's unequal access to pensions in various pre-Budget submissions and in the consultation on the Green Paper on pensions (Cousins and Associates, 2008). However, concerns raised by the NWCI and others in relation to women affected by previous discriminatory legislation (discussed later) appear not to have been addressed in introducing extended working life policies. Public debate from 2008 onwards has been dominated by the public debt crisis and only recently have opposition politicians raised the issue of the possible adverse effects for women of pension reforms in the Dail – the Irish Parliament (Dail Debates, 2014). In a neoliberal environment, trades unions, as happened in other countries, have been forced to choose between protecting rights for their existing members and accepting deteriorating working conditions and pensions for future members (Russell, 2014). When recent pension reforms were introduced in 2012, the recession was at its most severe and there was little overt protest (although the Irish Congress of Trade Unions held a conference on the issue entitled ‘Wake up to state pension reform’ in 2012).