Thursday, May 15, 2008

The Retirement Age

Wikipedia Encyclopedia is defining retirement as the point where a person stops employment completely. At this point (certain age), man is a pensioner and will stop working gradually and decrease his weary activity. Their income from their job before will be decrease gradually until finally stop. To support their life, pensioners may provided through the family and use their saving or pension from government or the company they worked for before which is in poor countries this is rarely happen. In some countries, retirement age is different for male and females and sometimes for certain jobs. The most dangerous or fatiguing ones in particular, have an earlier retirement age than others. For example, many politicians, scientists, lawyers, television anchors, and professors still work well into their 70s. Nevertheless, general retirement age is between 55 and 70. I think there are two main reasons for the difference: from the country condition and then employee necessity. They are easily looked different if we compare poor or developed countries with progressive countries.

In some developed and poor countries, sometimes there isn’t certain age for retirement. This is because to sponsoring pensioners, government must have budget, big budget actually, which is they haven’t. This big budget rises from pensioner necessity for health and good living. In the other hand, there are so many new and young ones which are ready to change the old generation. If they were not employed, unemployed problem would be raised and make other problems like criminal, social depressed, and social flaming, come together. So, many countries prefer to give small and inadequate pension in early retirement age. For example, the retirement age in India for public sector employees is enhanced from 58-60 years in July 2007 and in Malaysia the retirement age has just recently been raised from 55 years to 56 years. So to fulfill their need, a pensioner which is hasn’t sufficient savings also semi retires and keeps some sort of retirement job with their physical boundary which is out of choice. This condition will be more serious when inflation has reduced the value of available which is happen in many industrialized countries. Pension income below that required to maintain a reasonable standard of living. This condition is different in progressive countries in Europe and America.

In progressive countries the worker population is lower. They open recruitment widely for the best and selective workers from all countries included developed and poor countries. Even, to fulfill the employee necessity there are many corporations which still recruit old/retired workers because they still need them for experience, attitude, and loyalty. They prefer professional as the old than the young. For example, in the United States normal retirement age is 65 and the Old Age Survivors Insurance or OASI, better known as the social security system has age 62 as the earliest retirement age. In this country, pensioner is maintained well and they are supported with adequate pension because the government still have budget for it and they concern about this problem.

So, I think for retirement age there is no special and certain age. It is depended to the country condition, employee necessity, and off course the job. Each country has its judgment for retirement age and sometimes we don’t know why because for this problem there are so many factors and political business included.

Reference :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement#Retirement_age

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