What Retirement? Singapore Recruits Older Workers to Stay

Jakarta Globe, Rina Chandran,  Jan 07, 2015

Customers dine at a food court during lunch hour in the central business
district of Singapore. (Bloomberg Photo/Nicky Loh)

Everyone calls her Auntie Helen. At 69, she’s one of the oldest employees at the food court at Raffles Place in Singapore, where office workers grab sandwiches and bowls of soba noodles in the lunchtime rush.

As she cleans and stacks cutlery, Helen Wong might seem to represent the workforce of the city’s past. For a government grappling with an aging population, rising costs and curbs on immigration, her generation is the future.

“Food, transport, medicine are all more expensive now,” said Wong, who works seven hours a day, five days a week in the canteen-like basement, where diners can choose dishes from more than a dozen different vendors. “If I’m healthy and my body allows it, I’d like to work for as long as I’m able.”

In a culture that traditionally expects children to look after elderly parents, Singapore’s employment rate for those between ages 55 and 64 is now 66 percent, among the highest of the 34 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The government has made it mandatory for companies to offer three more years of work to those turning 62, the official retirement age, and plans to extend that to five years by 2017.

“The earlier mindset that having elderly people working indicates a lack of respect by younger people has changed,” said Theresa Devasahayam, editor of “Gender and Ageing: Southeast Asian Perspectives” and a visiting senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. “There are fewer children to take care of the elderly.”

Global trend

The trend in Singapore is a microcosm of what’s happening across much of the developed world as families shrink and people live longer, increasing the strain on government pension systems.

South Korea, with the fastest-aging population in the OECD, told employers to provide retirement plans for staff starting in 2016 after realizing that its state pension fund may go broke by 2060, when its population over 65 is set to triple.

Germany and the UK plan to raise their retirement ages to 67 from 65, while Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey wants to increase the threshold to 70, the highest in the world.

Singapore has gone a step further. Rather than simply extending the working age, the government is encouraging companies to bring retirees back into the workforce. New registrations by those over 60 at state-run career centers, which help find jobs and retrain workers, almost doubled to 4,799 in 2013, from 2,494 in 2008.

“This is a huge change that has enormous social consequences that we haven’t fully grasped yet,” said Randolph Tan, an associate professor at SIM University in Singapore and a nominated member of parliament. “I’m not sure there’s much benefit to be had from raising the age any further.”

Better society

The push to hire older workers follows an attempt to increase the population by as much as 25 percent by 2030 through immigration, a policy that prompted a public backlash as the arrival of migrants pushed up property prices and strained public transport. More than 40 percent of the country’s population was born abroad.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong responded by tightening rules for foreign workers, warning that the cost may be higher taxes over the next two decades. In his New Year statement on Dec. 31, Lee said weak productivity gains for three straight years amid a labor crunch was “disappointing.”

“We need to employ all facets of labor of our very small workforce,” said Wai Ho Leong, a Singapore-based senior economist at Barclays, who was previously head of the trade and industry ministry’s microeconomics unit. “Society is better off when older people are active.”

Salmon filleter

To help address the labor shortfall, a committee for the employability of older workers unveiled an advertising campaign last year showcasing a 65-year-old lifeguard, a 76-year-old assistant inventory manager and a 60-year-old salmon filleter.

“Tap Into a Wealth of Experience,” exhorted an ad plastered across the side of a bus driving through the central shopping district, featuring a 58-year-old assistant front office manager at Raffles Hotel.

“Given the tight labor market situation, you actually would find many employers coming forward to say they’re willing to hire older workers,” Senior Minister of State for Manpower Amy Khor said in parliament in September.

Older workers have found jobs in companies including Hotel Royal Plaza on Scotts, Singapore General Hospital and ComfortDelGro, which runs the island’s biggest taxi service, according to the committee. The government in 2012 raised the age limit for taxi drivers to 75 from 73.

Low pay

Singapore offsets part of the costs of hiring elderly workers and companies can tap government funds to redesign jobs and human resource systems for them. Older employees are especially useful for lower-skilled positions that otherwise might not be filled, said Leong at Barclays.

Cleaners, laborers and production and transport operators accounted for the highest numbers of older workers, according to a survey last year by Singapore-based DBS Bank. A majority of the elderly who were employed drew gross monthly incomes of less than S$1,500 ($1,124), it showed.

“When you see elderly people cleaning the pavement in the middle of the day, you have to wonder if this is sustainable,” Devasahayam said. “It’s not practical to expect them to keep doing it; it’s cruel, there’s a moral dimension to it.”

Singapore has pledged to spend S$9 billion on health care and other benefits for the elderly in a so-called Pioneer Generation Package for about 450,000 citizens who were at least 16 years old in 1965, when the country gained independence.

Part time

About one-fifth of Singapore’s employees over 55 work part time, such as Margaret Lee, who retrained after retiring from a childcare center to work two days a week at a school cafeteria.

“It gives me something useful to do, and some extra money to spend,” said Lee, 62, whose husband is retired. Working part time allows her to help look after her grandchildren while their parents are at work.

By 2020, more than a third of Singapore’s population will be over 50, and by 2050 the nation’s median age will be 54, according to the committee on older workers, which includes representatives from government, business and trade unions.

“It has become essential to hire older workers because of the aging population,” said Angelina Toh, co-founder of AJA Enterprises, which adapts buildings to withstand bomb blasts. She said her company employs them in supervisory and marketing roles where they adjust better than foreign workers. “They’re more mature emotionally, more independent,” Toh said.

Longest retirement

Singaporean men live more than 20 years beyond the official retirement age on average and women 25 years, the longest out of the 68 countries in the Global Sunset Index released by Bloomberg Rankings in 2013. While retirees can draw from their pension savings at 55, at least S$155,000 must be kept in the account to provide a steady income stream.

Only one in five Singapore investors is confident their pension accounts will meet their retirement needs, with 47 percent indicating the savings will be insufficient, according to a survey released in August by Toronto-based insurer Manulife Financial.

Auntie Helen says the money from her job in the food court covers her daily expenses and she enjoys chatting with her younger colleagues.

“What else is there for me to do, watch TV?” she said. “I was getting bored at home.”

Bloomberg

Related Articles:

Singapore Population Growth Hits 10-Year Low

Fewer parents in China want a second child than expected
German birth rate hits new low

Dutch Birth rate drops again, economic crisis gets the blame
Seven billion people and climbing, but not everywhere

Dutch centenarians double in 14 years to 2,200

Japan’s Centenarian Population Swells to Record, at Almost 59,000


"Recalibration of Free Choice"–  Mar 3, 2012 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll) - (Subjects: (Old) Souls, Midpoint on 21-12-2012, Shift of Human Consciousness, Black & White vs. Color, 1 - Spirituality (Religions) shifting, Loose a Pope “soon”, 2 - Humans will change react to drama, 3 - Civilizations/Population on Earth,  4 - Alternate energy sources (Geothermal, Tidal (Paddle wheels), Wind), 5 – Financials Institutes/concepts will change (Integrity – Ethical) , 6 - News/Media/TV to change, 7 – Big Pharmaceutical company will collapse “soon”, (Keep people sick), (Integrity – Ethical)  8 – Wars will be over on Earth, Global Unity, … etc.) - (Text version)

“…  3 - Longer Life is Going to Happen, But…

Here is one that is a review. We keep bringing it up because Humans don't believe it. If you're going to start living longer, there are those who are frightened that there will be overpopulation. You've seen the way it is so far, and the geometric progression of mathematics is absolute and you cannot change it. So if you look at the population of the earth and how much it has shifted in the last two decades, it's frightening to you. What would change that progression?

The answer is simple, but requires a change in thinking. The answer is a civilization on the planet who understands a new survival scenario. Instead of a basic population who has been told to have a lot of children to enhance the race [old survival], they begin to understand the logic of a new scenario. The Akashic wisdom of the ages will start to creep in with a basic survival scenario shift. Not every single woman will look at herself and say, "The clock is ticking," but instead can say, "I have been a mother 14 times in a row. I'm going to sit this one out." It's a woman who understands that there is no loss or guilt in this, and actually feels that the new survival attribute is to keep the family small or not at all! Also, as we have said before, even those who are currently ignorant of population control will figure out what is causing babies to be born [Kryon joke].

Part of the new Africa will be education and healing, and eventually a zero population growth, just like some of the first-world nations currently have. Those who are currently tied to a spiritual doctrine will actually have that doctrine changed (watch for it) regarding Human birth. Then they will be able to make free choice that is appropriate even within the establishment of organized religion. You see, things are going to change where common sense will say, "Perhaps it would help the planet if I didn't have children or perhaps just one child." Then the obvious, "Perhaps I can exist economically better and be wiser with just one. It will help the one!" Watch for these changes. For those of you who are steeped in the tradition of the doctrines and would say that sounds outrageously impossible, I give you the new coming pope [Kryon smile]. For those of you who feel that uncontrolled procreation is inevitable, I encourage you to see statistics you haven't seen or didn't care to look at yet about what first-world countries have already accomplished on their own, without any mandates. It's already happening. That was number three.….”