Helping Elderly People to Find and Stay in Work

Helping Elderly People to Find and Stay in Work

As the living standard has improved over the past century due to the better economic prospects, the life expectancy of people worldwide has increased dramatically. Currently, Japan is the country with the highest figure of average life expectancy, exceeding 83 years (Jenkin, 2013). In some other countries like Switzerland, Italy and Singapore, the life expectancy could also be as high as about 81 years old (World Health Organization, 2011). However, the increase in life expectancy and the decrease in birth rate have resulted in an aging society, bringing more problems and challenges. In an aging society, the elders are having more problem than the younger people to find a job or to stay in a job for a long period of time. Consequently, the elder people without work are bringing more challenges to the social care system of the local government (Gavrilov & Heuveline). In light of this condition, the government should help and encourage the older people to find and stay in work because the working elder people could help lower the burden of the social care system of the local government and make contributions to the aging society and because it will be good to help the elder people to support themselves and live a rich life.

To begin with, it should be acknowledged that encouraging the elder people to work could help lower the social care system of countries challenged by the problem of aging and could encourage the elder people make contributions to society. Currently, the average retirement age for many European countries is about 65 and actually many elder people are unemployed due to some reasons even before the age of 50 (Eurostat, 2013). Those elder people who are either unemployed or retired have thus become the burden of the social care system of the local government without continuing to contribute to the economic growth of government. However, as many European and Asian countries are challenged with the problem of aging, many governments like Greece are considering putting the elder people to work and prolong their retirement age because those governments are overburdened by the social care system(BBC News, 2013). Take Switzerland as an example, it ranks second on the life expectancy list, just behind Japan. Because of the aging problem brought by the high number of life expectancy, Switzerland is suffering huge economic burden in terms of the social care system (Gunhild, 2012). By encouraging the elder people to work, they could contribute more money to the social care system for a longer period of time and lower the burden for the government. Apart from the benefits of lowering the burden of social care system, encouraging the elder people to find and stay in work could also give them a chance to contribute to the economic prospects of the government. Like the youngsters, the elder people could also become the driving forces