Shades of Grey: Negotiating Age Norms, Class and Gender in the time of Pension Reform

The Norwegian pension reform has given older employees much stronger incentives to remain in employment for longer, but paradoxically, it made it less beneficial for employers to retain them. This is because the pre-reform early retirement scheme AFP made employers partly financially responsible for employees’ early retirement, while the new private sector AFP scheme contains no such mechanisms. In addition, since 2018 the tripartite Agreement for Inclusive Working Life (IA-avtalen) has no longer highlighted extending working careers as a priority. This is the starting point for GREYSHADES. We wish to study how employers and employees adapt to these new circumstances. We assume that adaptations vary by both gender and education and aim to capture such variation in our analyses. The project is organised in three work packages (WPs). WP 1 is a qualitative study of work organisations and enterprises. We have interviewed HR-managers, line managers and senior employees in three large private sector enterprises with different gender and education profiles. Key topics in the interviews with managers have been how they perceive the competence and qualifications of older workers compared to younger, whether older/younger employees experience certain opportunities/challenges the other group does not face, how they understood the enterprises’ senior policies, and which signals they received from top management relating to retaining (or not) older workers. Employees were also asked about their own experiences and reflections on workplace policies, how they perceived their status as older workers in their workplace, and what plans and aspirations they had for the future. One of the targeted companies had a very high percentage of employees with immigrant backgrounds. This provided an opportunity for a unique analysis of the specific challenges that workers with immigrant backgrounds may face in their late careers. We also examined seniors' experiences of their own situations through the analytical lenses of psychological contracts and reciprocity in the leader-employee relationship. A key finding is that many seniors with long tenure feel that the loyalty they have shown to the company and the significant effort they have invested over time are not appreciated as they approach retirement age. We are also working to disentangle the multipole meanings of age in the workplace by distinguishing between biological age, generation, tenure, and professional experience. In WP 2, we analyse quantitative, longitudinal data from the NorLAG study. Three key issues are central: (1) how do older workers perceive their psychosocial work environment? (2) how have retirement plans changed over time? (3) What is the relationship between perceived work environment and planned workforce exit? Overall, most older workers perceive the psychosocial work environment as good, and there also appears to have been a positive change over time. Several indicators of the psychosocial work environment are associated both with retirement wishes/plans and actual behaviour. In an analysis of digitization and retirement intentions, we found clear signs that older workers who do not find computer systems difficult to learn wish to stay in the workforce longer than those who experience difficulties in this regard. Analyses of retirement behaviour suggest that results vary depending on how "retirement" is operationalised. For this reason, we have compared different operationalizations and developed an approach to measure retirement that takes the flexibility of the current Norwegian pension system into account, and that can be used in analyses of registry data. This foundational work will be useful in further analyses and in other projects. In WP 3, we examine managers' attitudes toward older employees as reflected in the Norwegian Senior Policy Barometer, a survey conducted annually since 2003 by the Center for Senior Policy. We have analysed the material with the aim of highlighting variation and ambiguity in managers' attitudes. We have investigated the implications of many leaders refusing to answer the question about at what age a job applicant is perceived as "too old" to be called in for a job interview and outlined how non-responding managers differ from those who have answered the question. Furthermore, we have explored the connections between stereotypical perceptions of older workers—whether positive or negative—and when respondents believe applicants are too old to be called in for a job interview. We also examine how different types of attitudes toward older employees vary with the age of the managers themselves. GREYSHADES is a cooperation between the Institute for Social Research (ISF) and Norwegian Social Research (NOVA) at Oslo Metropolitan University, with contributions from the Centre for Senior Policy, the University of Canterbury, and the University of Lausanne. The project funds a PhD who works on the qualitative interviews in WP1.

The overall research question in the GREYSHADES project is; how do age norms change in the light of population ageing and changing incentive structures? Age norms are defined as widely shared beliefs about what individuals ought to do at different ages, including - but not limited to - beliefs about the proper work exit age. The background is the pension reform, effective from 2011, which gives employees strong incentives to work longer while reducing incentives for employers to retain them. Based on existing literature, we hypothesise that age norms vary by gender and social class, and that they are social in nature and influenced by social interaction as well as by societal and political change. We intend to study norms that managers and employees hold, as well as norms that employees feel exposed to, and how these translate into behaviours, practices and, ultimately, seniors´ desire to remain employed. We will utilise a mixed-methods approach, combining repeated cross-sectional surveys among managers and panel surveys among employees with a case study in workplaces. This set-up allows us to examine how managers´ approach to senior workers has changed over time, and how senior workers´ experiences in the workplace and retirement intentions change. The case study will allow for more in-depth analyses of workplaces with varying gender balance and skills requirements. We will approach 5-6 workplaces with different compositions of high-skilled / low-skilled workers, and with different gender balances. We have established contact with the Centre for Senior Policy, to maintain contact with stakeholders throughout the project, and with the Norface-funded DAISIE-project, to ensure high quality and the potential for international comparisons.