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Changing Retirement Patterns: The Experience of a Cohort of Parisian Salaried Workers*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2008

Françoise Cribier
Françoise Cribier
Affiliation:
Centre nationale de la Recherche scientifique, University of Paris VII, 191 rue Saint Jacques, 75005 Paris, France.
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Abstract

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The first part of this article summarises some results of a recent retirement study of newly retired people conducted in the Paris area in 1975. It examines the conditions under which a sample of salaried workers stopped working and compares their original anticipation with their reactions after two years.

The second part analyses the rapid changes in French retirement patterns over the past decade. Throughout, the author exemplifies and argues for an approach which views retirement within a wider politico-economic framework.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , January 1981 , pp. 51 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

References

NOTES

1 Cribier, Françoise, Une génération de Parisiens arrive à la retraite, Paris, CNRS, 1978, 468 pages.Google Scholar The population studied will be described in the following pages.

2 In the comparison between the father's generation and the children's (i.e. men and women retiring around 1972) one must take into account two important factors: first, it refers only to those children still alive at 67 and, by definition, to those receiving a pension as salaried workers; second, the sisters and brothers of this generation, who remained as farmers or small shopkeepers, may finish their lives not much differently from the preceding generation, many of them remaining active right up to the end of their lives.

3 Most of the fathers of these Parisian retirees were born between 1865 and 1885. Those who reached the age of 60 did so between 1920 and 1950. In this period, older industrial workers used to go on working which often meant that they had to accept jobs of lower qualification, greater instability and frequent periods of unemployment. This pattern was described for France at the turn of the century by Stearns, Peter, in Old Age in European Society, the Case of France, New York, Holme and Meyer, 1977.Google Scholar

4 Phillipson, C. R., The Emergence of Retirement, Working Papers in Sociology No. 14, University of Durham 1978, 58 pages.Google Scholar

5 Our study examined the difficulties encountered by retirees in the last years of their working life (study cited, pp. 232–9). It also showed that 17 per cent had changed their occupation during the five-year period preceding retirement; many of these people had to accept a drop in status in order to remain in the job market. The nineteenth-century pattern, described in many European and American historical studies, still lingers today. At the beginning of this century, the majority of American industrial workers had to change their occupation as early as the age 40 or 45 (Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1977: Hareven, Tamara, The last age: historical adulthood and old age).Google Scholar

6 Before the age of 60, disabled wage-earners are eligible for the Sickness Fund, after 60 they are eligible for the Pension Fund. Thus, on their 60th birthday, they move from a state of ‘invalidité’ to a state of ‘inaptitude’.

7 Calculated from data of Caisse Nationale d'Assurance – vieillesse des travailleurs salariés de l'industrie et du commerce. Statistiques annuelles, 1976.

8 There is no originality in this finding. Numerous American studies conducted over the last 25 years have arrived at the same conclusion, e.g., Friedman, E. and Orbach, H., ‘Adjustment to Retirement’ in American Handbook of Psychiatry, New York, 1974.Google Scholar

9 Twenty per cent of men and 7 per cent of women in our sample died in the first 4 years of retirement and 23 per cent of wives were widowed during the same period.

10 Many studies of attitudes toward retirement are unsatisfactory because they are directed at retirees of all ages who stopped working at very different times, and because they tend either to ignore or to accept a simplistic approach to interaction between attitudes and social status. In our study we interviewed salaried workers who retired at the same time and whose work history and life history were known to us; and as already explained, we took the whole interview into account in our analysis.

11 Treánton, J. R., ‘Les réactions à la retraite, une étude psychosociologique’, Revue française du travail, 1958.Google Scholar

12 From visits made in 1980 to a subsample of surviving retirees we tend to think that the proportion highly satisfied decreases with advancing years, although many people, thankfully, remain happy and satisfied.

13 By contrast, single women were among the least bored and most resourceful. This result was confirmed by a recent thesis in psychology presented to the University of Paris V. by Mayrat, Antoinette, who studied the sense of solitude among older single women: ‘Le sentiment de solitude chez les femmes âgées vivant seules ou en institution’, Paris, 1980.Google Scholar

14 I strongly agree with Irving Rosow's statement that very different types of social integration can lead to satisfaction upon retirement (Rosow, I., Social Integration of the Aged, 1967)Google Scholar. But social assurance and a network of social relations, much more developed in the upper and middle middle-class, can be very useful!

15 The number of industrial jobs in France has decreased by 100,000 a year from 1974 to 1979.

16 As Anne-Marie Guillemard shows, private employers favour early retirement of older workers, considered as under-productive, and think that the active population must be renewed with younger workers in order to increase productivity. La Vieillesse et l'Etat, Paris, P.U.F., 1980, 238 pages.Google Scholar

17 Gaullier, Xavier, Politiques de l'emploi, modes de vie et vieillissement, Paris, Fondation des villes, 1979, 185 pages.Google Scholar

18 The women, once widowed, who must live on about half of their husband's pension, are never questioned in these surveys on retirement, although they represent a substantial part of the retired population – the oldest and the poorest. The situation of widows is particularly poor in France.

19 Desabie, Jaques, ‘Facteurs économiques: l'exemple Francais’, Environnement et vieillissement, Conference de gerontologie sociale, 1978.Google Scholar

20 Minnier, Alain, ‘Les limites de la vie active et de la retraite: I. L'âge au départ en retraite’, Population, 1979, 4–5, pp. 801–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘II. Les conditions du passage a la retraite’, Population, 1980–1981, pp. 109–36.Google Scholar

21 Dumazedier, J., Vers une civilisation du loisir, Paris, 1962.Google Scholar

22 Guillemard, Anne-Marie, ‘A propos de la représentation activise de la vieillesse’, Gérontologie No. 28, pp. 43–8, 10 1978.Google Scholar

23 Guillemard, A.-M., op. cit., 1980.Google Scholar

24 Phillipson, C., op. cit.Google Scholar, analyses the reversal in older worker's employment practised in Great Britain during World War II.