WATERLOO (CUP)The baby boom generation of Canadiansthose born between 1951 and 1966 make up a large demographic of Canada’s workforce. The clock on their working lives, however, seems to be ticking louder than ever before.
With lots of noise being made in the media and by the government about the immanent retirement of so many people from the labour market, and the associated costs of government benefit programs and health care, the aging population is getting lots of attention.
The question for students looking to enter the working world is this: what does this shift mean for their future?
The More Things Change
According to now-retired University of Waterloo professor of Statistics and Actuarial Science Robert L. Brown, it is encouraging to know that the topic of what happens when boomers stop working is nothing new. “It’s going to be a challenge, but it’s not a crisis and it’s been known for years,” he says. “There’s probably been more research [in this] than any other Canadian topic, going back 25 years.”
A key component of this discussion is Old Age Security (OAS), the government program that provides a monthly contribution to those 65 years of age and older.
A recent study by Sun Life Financial lends to the idea that working life doesn’t just end at 65; more than two-thirds of Canadians polled are expecting to not be fully retired by 66. With the average life expectancy far greater than it was when the age threshold of 65 was brought in, an extension to 67 to be brought in by 2020 is being considered by the federal government.
“I’m not sure that it’s inevitable,” says Brian Lee Crowley, managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a nonpartisan think-tank in Ottawa. “But I think it’s prudent to do it.”
The idea has drawn fire from some organizations including the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP), who say that such a move would push some seniors below the poverty line.
“You can accommodate almost any kind of program as long as you’re willing to give up other things,” Crowley continues, noting that OAS and its sister service, the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), will rise from 15 percent to a full quarter of federal government spending in the coming decades. “Is that sustainable?” he asks. “Sure, you’ve just got to get people to agree to stop spending 10 percent on something else.”
The legacy of such a large cohort of people in the workforce is that perceptions of what working life and retirement should be like are maintained by younger generations as well.
“Part of the problem in people understanding this is that we’re all stuck with the image of the last 50 years,” Crowley says. “Everyone, including older workers, will have a very strong interest in keeping older workers in the workforce as long as we can.”
He notes that much of what has underpinned Canada’s economic growth and stability for the past few decades can be attributed to that generation making Canada’s labour force the largest relative to the number of dependentschildren and the retiredamong large industrialized nations. The costs associated with an aging population can be mitigated by creating conditions that don’t encourage people to retire early simply because they have reached a certain age, he says.
“I personally think that extending the working life of Canadians is very much going to be in the interests of young people as well as older people,” Crowley says, adding that if most of the population plans on working longer anyway, the benefits for both Canada’s production of wealth and the public costs of supporting those that are ready to retire would be substantial.
Can I Have a Job ?
Whether the OAS age is raised to 67 or not, baby boomers will continue to retire, progressively more so as we near the next decade.
“The hope is, with the retirements among the [baby boomer] population, that will open up job opportunities,” says Morley Gunderson, the CIBC chair of youth employment at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources. “Not that someone at 65 retiring will have someone fill that exact slot, but other people will.”
It seems inevitable that because of retirements and the requisite cut cakes and gifted watches, recent graduates should be in higher demand as more slots open up. Crowley says that while there is some uncertainty as to how all this will play out, signs will start to emerge in the short term.
“The impact of the population aging on the workforce and number of people available to work has not really started to hit home yet because there is a five-year period where we make the transition from the baby boom generation in the workforce,” he says, adding that once this transition period is over, things will have changed considerably.
“Over the next 50 years, the workforce will barely growI think it’s supposed to grow 11 percent over those 50 years, whereas it grew 200 percent over the previous 50 years,” he explains.
“One of the consequences, in my view, is clearly going to be that the value of workers is going to go up, the wages are going to rise and employers are going to try and do everything they can to keep people in the workforce rather than see them retire.” Whether this means more job opportunities for young people is not assured, but it certainly cannot hurt.
Gunderson left some question as to whether or not labour shortages will be as endemic in the market as some have forecast, but there will be challenges. “It’s not clear that young people can expect the kinds of jobs their parents had,” he says. “Almost invariably now people will start out with a limited term contract or contract job if they get one at allthat’s in a sense the new probationary period. Some of those will turn into permanent jobs and some will be something to work while you look for a more permanent job.”
Recent graduates who either moved back in with their parents or struggled to find secure jobs can certainly attest to this realitybut will things change? Gunderson says that there has been a paradigm shift from working a secure job from graduation until retirement, the way previous generations often did.
“The jobs their parents had were often blue-collar manufacturing, well-paying blue collar jobsnow it is more extreme,” he says. “Some jobs are high-paying that people can move into, but the big issue is the middle where the job distribution has kind of fallen off and hollowed out.
“If you start off at the bottom end, working in a service job or flipping burgers, things like that, it’s possible you could be stuck there for a while. Those middle jobs aren’t there as much right now.”
Fortunately, and perhaps annoyingly so, the old adage that “education is the best investment one can make” seems to still apply, and is also encouraging some students to remain in school longer or until the job market stabilizes.
“In general, getting more education still seems to keep paying offperhaps somewhat surprisingly, given the large numbers entering higher education such as universities,” Gunderson continues. “Yet, those returns seem pretty high, though they vary considerably by field of study.” Return on investment can vary, he says, from a five percent dividend made up in increased salary for each dollar spent on education to more than 15 percent in some professional programs like engineering.
There is a legacy impact on when graduates enter the labour market to consider as well, he adds, as shown in a study by his colleague Philip Oreopoulos at the University of Toronto. The study shows that when people enter a job market in a recession or find work that is lower-paying, the impact on their earnings over time lags behind those who began during a boom.
“We have moved to a knowledge economy and even people in fine arts and things like that get a reasonable return [on investment in education],” he says. “It’s much lower, but that’s a love of labourit’s what they want to do.”
So, the short answer is not unexpected. Things will improve and there very well might be more jobs available for graduates once the baby boom cohort retires, but there is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding the situation.
Whatat About When I Want to Retire?
With longer working lives seen even among the baby boomers, by the time current twenty-somethings decide to stop the 9-to-5 and enjoy their golden years, the situation will have likely changed again. In 40 years, when a current student would be in their late 50s or early 60s, demographic studies lead Brown to believe that the situation will have normalized.
“If you’re retiring after 2050, you’d be coming back into a period of stability,” he says. “Students now will be retiring just on the cusp of the end of the bad times and the beginning of the next demographic dividend-paying period.”
“The baby boomers will just about be gone by 2050,” he explains. “The baby boom created its own cycle and was followed by the baby bust. There’s a tidal wave of shifts in dependency ratios and producers and retirees. It’s been fairly constant for the past 25 years, so the period from 2050 to 2075 should be pretty predictable and it will be an easier time than from 2030 to 2050.”
Nevertheless, with possibilities for both private and public sector pensions and benefits not as assured as they once were, adjustments will need to be made to prepare for when the next generation looks to retire.
Prognosis
Brown chose to explain the situation on a very basic level. “It doesn’t matter how much money a person has, what the legislation says, it doesn’t matter how you label different generations: the point is that people need to produce goods and services in order to be consumed,” he says. “Someone is out there so I can go golfing and go to a movie and have a steak for dinner, and so you [students] can eat Kraft Dinner. Those things need to continue to be produced.”
He says that while the system may take some time to right itself, things should balance out when considering factors like women in the workforcewhich wasn’t always the case to the degree it is nowas well as skilled immigration and people working longer.
“The point is that we have to produce goods and services before they can be consumed, that’s the bottom line. You can play games with everything else; pensions, money supply, it doesn’t matter.”
So there you have it, kids. There is no doubt that the baby boomers’ gradual aging will impact Canada and younger Canadians.
Thankfully, the signs point to more possibilities for younger people in the labour marketeven if it means they will be saddled with some of the burden of caring for baby boomers as they age.