Finding the right time for retiring

Ground Floor: The EU's Directive 2000/78/EC outlaws discrimination in employment on the grounds of religion or belief, disability, age and sexual orientation, writes Sheila O'Flanagan

Currently in Ireland, there is no single fixed retirement age, although most employers have set a retirement date in the contract of employment. Statutory retirement ages existed in jobs which were established by law but these are now minimum retirement ages and employees can continue working until they drop if that's what they want to do.

The issue of retirement is one of those double-headed coins since, on the one hand, there are more and more people opting to take early retirement and spend their children's inheritance while they're still young enough to enjoy it; while, on the other, there is a group of people who can't bear the idea of giving up work and think that they have lots more years of productivity ahead of them.

Many of the water-cooler discussions that I had in my outside-the-home office working life were of the "this is no job for a grown woman" variety, as dealing was considered to be a young person's job.

And it was, in many respects, since when you've seen one bond auction you've seen them all (well, almost). But most of the conclusions we came to were that perhaps we could substitute extra time off for a cut in pay and get some of that quality of life stuff that so many people talked about.

Many of my colleagues were very keen on the idea of trading pay for time but that might have been because we tended to work long hours.

It isn't only employees who have been mulling over the balance between pay and holidays. Some of Britain's biggest companies are now offering extra time off instead of pay and apparently there are a growing number of workers deciding that cash-rich and time-poor does not provide the quality of life that they want.

The annual Sunday Times "Best Companies to Work For" survey this year showed that 36 per cent of staff were now choosing time off rather than more pay. At the same time, however, the Times recently carried out a poll which revealed that most people wouldn't agree to work fewer hours per week for less pay!

Employees might choose to take more time off in the form of holidays but they don't seem to want a shorter working week. Only 22 per cent of respondents said that they'd work fewer hours and take a pay cut for the privilege.

Maybe it's all in the way the question is phrased - if you're offered holidays instead of a pay increase, you might opt to take it; if your employer suggests a pay cut and fewer hours you won't.

Actually, 52 per cent said that they couldn't afford to take a pay cut and 14 per cent said they didn't want to cut back on things they enjoyed which, presumably, they would have had to do with less disposable income. Twenty-nine per cent said they found their job rewarding and didn't want to work any less - I guess these are the people who wouldn't want to be stuck with a compulsory retirement age.

Whether you stay on or whether you retire from your job will depend on both your own personality and the enjoyment that you get from working for the company concerned. And teleworking might be the means for an older workforce to continue in employment without having to do the morning commuter battle five days a week.

For years, employers asked for employees to be flexible, now it's the turn of the employees to ask for innovative terms and conditions of employment.

I don't know whether I'm the retiring type or not. I guess many people would suggest that writing books is a leisurely enough activity anyway and that they've been waiting for their retirement years to find the time to pen the megaseller. But the key question is when can you actually afford to stop working.

Given the pensions crisis due to the fact that the value of Irish pension funds has dropped dramatically in the last few years - and that some pension lump sums may be worth only a quarter of what potential retirees would have hoped - that day could be further away than many of us originally planned.

I'm not good at sitting around doing nothing, although I have certainly improved at it (on the basis that I can be "thinking" about my next opus). But if the day of actual retirement for so many of us ends up being a lot later than we expected, then the least our employers can do is make our working lives a bit more flexible.

Still, I do have a project on hand for the retirement date. I recently retired the video machine (never quite managing to grasp all of its myriad features and so never working it at full productivity).

Apparently, I'm not the only one to have given it the boot - some stores won't be stocking video recorders after the end of the year. Like me, they're replacing them with recordable DVDs.

It took two hours to connect the damn thing to the TV (then bring it back to the shop because there was a real problem and not one caused by sticking the wrong coloured pin into the wrong coloured socket); another two hours to set it up again; a further two hours to manually tune in the stations since it decided to be patriotic and ignore the BBC; and a still undetermined amount of time to figure out how to actually record anything - especially since it still refuses to acknowledge BBC2.

If I was retired, these two-hour stints with the remote in one hand and the manual in the other might be fun. As it is, I guess I need a two year old to help me.

www.sheilaoflanagan.net